Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Jennifer Lopez has made a lot of romantic comedies. Some of them were great. Some of them were not. Office Romance, which arrives on Netflix tomorrow, June 5, looks like it belongs in the first category — and the reason is standing next to her on every poster. Brett Goldstein, best known as Roy … Read more
The Bear returns for its fifth and final season on June 25, and the most revealing thing about it isn’t the premiere date or the episode count. It’s the premise. Carmy Berzatto, the character around whom four seasons of tension have been organized, has quit. He’s walked out of the restaurant he drove himself … Read more
There is a particular kind of dread that Cape Fear has always been about — not the fear of violence exactly, but the fear of someone who understands the system well enough to use it against you. The 1962 film had it. Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake had it. Apple TV+’s new ten-episode limited series … Read more
There is a version of this story that gets made as a procedural. The 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common — a young mother stabbed to death in daylight while walking with her two-year-old son — has most of the ingredients that true crime productions reach for: a shocking crime, a botched … Read more
House of the Dragon has spent two seasons doing something that takes considerable discipline: making you wait. The civil war at the heart of the story — the Targaryen succession crisis that will eventually tear the dynasty apart — has been building through political maneuvering, private grief, and the slow accumulation of grievances since … Read more
The Michael Jackson biopic that dominated box offices earlier this year made a choice that everyone noticed: it told the story of the music, the performances, the rise, and mostly stepped around the trial. That choice was a commercial calculation as much as a creative one, and it worked. But it left something unresolved, … Read more
The teaser dropped today, and I’ve already watched it twice. Netflix released the first footage of Notes from the Last Row this morning, and it does exactly what a good teaser should do — it gives you just enough to understand what this show is going to be, and then it stops. What I … Read more