Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In 2009 a law professor named Dan Markel published a book about families and criminal justice. Its argument was blunt. When the law gives someone special treatment because of who they are related to, the costs add up fast, and courts should grant far fewer of those exemptions. Five years later Markel was shot … Read more
All ten episodes of Heartland season 19 arrived on Netflix in the United States on September 1, and the show is already back inside the Netflix top ten there. So the wait is over. The odd part is what American viewers are actually watching: a season that finished airing in Canada last year. They … Read more
Near the end of 9 to 5, the chairman of the board walks through an office that is running better than he has ever seen it. Productivity is up twenty percent. There is a daycare down the hall. People are on flexible hours, and two women are splitting one job so that both can … 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
Somewhere around the midnight-margaritas scene, Practical Magic stops pretending to be about its plot. Two sisters and their aunts turn a kitchen into a small hurricane of blender noise and Stevie Nicks, and for a few minutes the 1998 movie forgets it has a curse to break and a body in the garden. That … 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
When Jon Favreau finished the 2019 Lion King, the photoreal remake that rebuilt Simba out of pure computer animation, he came away wanting the opposite of what he had just made. He wanted a real lion. Lion, the four-part National Geographic series he executive produced, is that wish carried out over four years in … Read more
For one night in January 2006, Vince Young was the best football player alive. Texas trailed USC by five in the Rose Bowl with the national title on the line, and with nineteen seconds left Young ran it in himself, eight yards, nobody able to lay a hand on him. He finished that night with … 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
In 2019, Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live and fired four days later, before he taped a single episode, over old podcast clips that resurfaced the same week he got the job. That is usually where a comedy career stalls out, or at least detours into a long apology tour. Gillis skipped … Read more