Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Charlie Heller is a CIA codebreaker who is brilliant with patterns and useless with a gun. When his wife is killed in a terrorist attack in London and his superiors decide the case isn’t worth chasing, he does the only thing a man like that can do. He blackmails the agency into training him, … Read more
Judith and Debbie have been best friends for twenty years. They travel together, they haunt antique shops, they belong to the same book club. Debbie believes Judith is a forensic accountant. Judith is actually a contract killer who has spent those same twenty years billing millions to a shadow agency for the people she … Read more
If you have just finished Project Hail Mary and want the ending in plain terms: Ryland Grace saves both Earth and an alien world, and then he chooses not to go home. He spends the rest of his life twelve light-years away, on a planet whose air would kill him, teaching science to children … Read more
Paul Thomas Anderson has spent thirty years making films that critics revere and casual audiences quietly avoid. One Battle After Another is the one that broke through. It swept the 2026 Academy Awards with six wins, including Best Picture and, at long last, a first Oscar for Anderson himself. Now that it has arrived on … Read more