Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Frances Neagley offers Jack Reacher her hand at her father’s funeral because she trusts him enough to try a form of closeness she usually avoids. His arrival gives that trust a familiar basis: he has come to support her when she needs him. In the finale of Neagley, Prime Video’s Reacher spinoff, the private investigator … Read more
The Runner cheats, and I think the cheat is the best argument the movie has. Here is the short answer. Maia Marten never kills the witness she is sent to kill. The gun she fires on the 53rd floor of the Excelsus Hotel holds blanks, the blood is a rig the police set up in … Read more
Yes, Stolen Girl is based on a true story, though you would never guess the real one from the trailer. The film hands Kate Beckinsale a gun, a stack of wigs, and a way into a CIA espionage web to pull her abducted daughter out of Beirut. The woman it is actually based on, … Read more
For almost its entire runtime, The Last Sunrise looks like a dying-girl romance. A sick young woman, a gorgeous island, a summer love with a countdown attached. But the trailer keeps one thing to itself: Ry (Maia Reficco) does not die. She survives her worst crisis, and she and Julian (Fernando Lindez) are still … Read more
Icefall opened in November 2025 to almost no notice and a 5.1 on IMDb, the score a film gets when critics call it competent and move on. Ten months later it is the No. 1 movie on Prime Video in the United States, ahead of titles with ten times its budget and marketing. The … Read more
Keanu Reeves spends most of Good Fortune wearing the blank, patient look of a man who has read the instructions and understood none of them. He plays Gabriel, a low-ranking guardian angel who sets out to fix one struggling life and manages to break several. It is the loosest, funniest thing he has done in … Read more
The Devil’s Mouth ends with a single survivor. Sara (Kathryn Newton) is the only one of the group who climbs out of the flooded cave alive, and she does it by turning the cave itself into a weapon. Her best friend Max (Lana Condor) does not make it, and neither do the others on the … Read more
For a generation, James Van Der Beek had one face. He was Dawson Leery, the earnest teenager at the center of Dawson’s Creek, forehead always creased with feeling, forever a beat away from a heartfelt speech. That image trailed him for twenty-five years, even through a knowing stretch where he played a spoiled version … Read more
I finish a lot of prestige dramas, and I could not tell you, under oath, how most of them ended. Modern streaming runs on debt. Season two hands you a cliffhanger and expects you to still be holding it a year later, when season three finally turns up. Reacher owes you nothing. You can … Read more
If you just finished Sterling Point on Prime Video and went looking for what actually happened, here is the short version. Annie, the New York teenager who inherits a remote Canadian island from a grandfather she never knew, doesn’t only find a summer and a crush out there. She finds a sister, Ramona, and … Read more