Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
A police officer stops a woman on a Texas road for speeding and driving like something is very wrong. She tells him she has just given birth. There is a newborn in the car, and the baby is real. Almost nothing else she says that day turns out to be. That traffic stop is where … Read more
Most movies have a shelf life you can feel. They arrive, everyone talks about them for a week or two, and then they slide quietly down the list while the next thing takes their spot. KPop Demon Hunters never did that. As of this week, the animated film has done something no title in Netflix … Read more
Some movies are content to tell you a story. In the Hand of Dante wants to grab you by the collar and drag you across seven centuries. Julian Schnabel’s new film, which played at Venice last fall and arrived on Netflix on June 24 after a brief run in theaters, is a literary heist, … Read more
There is one shot in the Season 2 trailer I keep returning to. Toph Beifong, the blind earthbending prodigy fans have waited two years to meet, stands clean and composed, not a hair out of place. Something in me hesitated. The Toph I grew up watching was never composed. She was dirt under the fingernails … Read more
I Will Find You, Harlan Coben’s latest Netflix thriller, raced to the top of the charts after its June 18 release, and it ends the way his best stories do, with a long-buried lie blowing a family apart. The eight-episode mystery turns on three questions: is David’s son really alive, who took him, and who … Read more
Voicemails for Isabelle arrived on Netflix on June 19 and shot straight to the top of the movie chart, which is the kind of thing that happens when a rom-com has a hook this clean. A grieving woman keeps leaving voicemails for her dead sister, not knowing the number has been reassigned to a stranger … Read more
Netflix just dropped all 22 episodes of The Polygamist, its biggest South African telenovela to date, and it has spent the days since burning up social media. The title puts a man at the center, a self-made CEO juggling a wife and several other women. But the smartest thing about the show is that it … Read more
Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Last House this week, and the premise alone is the kind that lodges in your head and stays there: a family of four wakes up sealed inside their own home, unable to get out, while the entire world outside falls under the same mysterious lockdown. A day … Read more
Colors of Evil: Black, the Polish thriller that climbed into Netflix’s Top 10 within days of its June 10 release, is built like a missing-child mystery and ends as something much darker: a portrait of an entire town that chose to look away. If you have finished it and want the knots untangled, here is … Read more
On paper, Song Sung Blue sounds like a punchline. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, two of the most charismatic movie stars alive, playing a married couple who spent their lives in a Neil Diamond tribute band in Milwaukee. You can already hear the sequins rustling. But the film, which landed on Netflix on June 13 … Read more