Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
There is a line from the novel this movie is built on that readers tend to remember. If you leave a door half-open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken. The Whisper Man, arriving on Netflix on August 28, takes its name from a killer who lured children by standing outside their windows at night … Read more
Television keeps a short list of shows that ended exactly where they should have and then had the grace to stay gone. Ted Lasso sat near the top of it. Season three sent Ted home to Kansas, married off Coach Beard, handed Roy the team, and rolled credits on a story its makers had … Read more
Three Hunger Games movies are sitting in the American Netflix Top 10 this week, and the newest of them is three years old. There is no mystery behind the surge. The whole franchise arrived on Netflix on July 14, its first day ever on the service, and America is doing its homework before a … Read more
I have a soft spot for the kind of show that trusts small moments to carry the weight. Heartstopper built four years of television out of them: a hand held on a school bus, the particular terror of sending a first text, animated leaves drifting into the corner of the frame every time two … Read more
Moana arrives in theaters on July 10, a decade after the animated film that made her one of Disney’s most beloved heroines. The reviews are already out, and they are split down the middle: one outlet calls it a low point in Disney’s relentless remake run, another calls it one of the studio’s better live-action … Read more
Christopher Nolan has spent his career making movies about time, and about people straining to get back to where they started. His next one goes all the way back to the source. The Odyssey, in theaters July 17, is Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s three-thousand-year-old poem, the original story of a man taking the long … 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
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
Sugar returns to Apple TV+ on June 19, two years after it pulled off one of the stranger sleights of hand in recent television, and the thing worth saying up front is that its detective story was never really about the case. It was about the man working it. Colin Farrell’s John Sugar spends his … Read more
Toy Story 4 ended with a decision that felt, at the time, like a conclusion. Woody chose to stay behind with Bo Peep, giving up his place with Bonnie and the other toys to live as a lost toy — free, unclaimed, no longer defined by a child’s need for him. It was a … Read more