Review

Is Pressure a True Story? The D-Day Forecast, and What the Film Changes

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 Yes, Pressure is a true story, and the real part is exactly as it sounds: the date of D-Day came down to a weather forecast. In June 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy was set for June 5, and a Scottish meteorologist named James Stagg (Andrew Scott) warned that a storm would turn that day … Read more

Mother Mary — the Flop That Became an HBO Max Hit, and the Real Movie Under the Pretension

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  Mother Mary made about three million dollars in theaters on a twenty million dollar budget, which in studio math is a quiet disaster. Critics were not kind either. Variety called it the most pretentious pop star movie since Vox Lux, and it is not hard to see why. Lowery’s film wraps a small story … Read more

The Gates — James Van Der Beek’s Final Role Outshines the Film Around It

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  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

Reacher Season 4 — the Show That Never Asks You to Remember

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  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

Lanterns — HBO’s Green Lantern Show Is at War With Itself

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  Lanterns opens the way a prestige crime drama opens: on the aftermath of a shooting in Rushville, a small farm town in Nebraska, the kind of place where nothing is supposed to happen. Two investigators walk the scene. Then one of them, Hal Jordan, a Green Lantern, says the killer was probably not human. … Read more

Camp Rock 3 — The Jonas Brothers Return to Pass the Mic

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  Camp Rock 3 opens on a problem most bands would kill for. Connect 3, the Jonas Brothers back in character as Shane, Nate, and Jason Gray, are about to launch a reunion tour, and they have no one to open for them. So they do the only sensible thing three pop stars would do: … Read more

Normal — Bob Odenkirk’s Sheriff Was Written Before Nobody Made Him a Star

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  A worn-out sheriff takes a quiet posting in a small Minnesota town called Normal, hoping to put some distance between himself and his own wreckage. The place is prosperous, polite, and far too calm. Then a bank robbery goes wrong, his own deputies open fire on civilians, and Sheriff Ulysses, played by Bob Odenkirk, … Read more

The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story — What’s Real, and Where the Killer Is Now

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  Yes, The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is based on real events, and the woman in the title lived through them. Monica White is a real person. In late 2020 she matched with a man named Anthony Robinson on a dating app, dated him for a few months, and ended it in … Read more

Don’t Say Good Luck — Sunny Sandler and the Borrowed Song That Carries It All

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  Near the end of Don’t Say Good Luck, Sophie Birenbaum walks to the front of her school stage and sings “She Used to Be Mine.” She is sixteen, cast almost by accident in the lead of a student production of Waitress. In the musical, that song belongs to a grown woman looking back at … Read more

The Strangers: Chapter 2 Feels Unfinished, and the Reason Is How It Was Made

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  Somewhere in the last stretch of The Strangers: Chapter 2, you start to notice the movie is not going to end. Not really. It just stops, mid-chase, with the door left open for another film. If that feels like a pause instead of an ending, there is a concrete reason, and it has nothing … Read more