Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
You know the image even if you have never set foot in Pompeii. A body curled on its side in the ash, knees drawn up, caught in the instant the mountain took it. For the better part of three centuries those plaster casts have taught the world one lesson about the city: that death … 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
Here is the strange thing about Lucky, the seven-episode Apple TV+ thriller that started rolling out on July 15 with Anya Taylor-Joy as a con artist on the run. It is named after luck, and it took the luck out. The show is adapted from Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel, and the book had one … Read more
If you are here for the short answer, the biological father is Emilio Martinez, played by Erik Hayser, a man from a relationship Maca kept buried for twenty years. My Daughter’s Father, the Mexican drama that arrived on Netflix on July 22 under its original title El otro padre, does not hide this for long. … Read more
In the early hours of December 21, 2024, the palace burned down. A fire swept through a production facility in Yeoncheon County, South Korea, taking the main set buildings and a warehouse of lighting equipment with it. The set was empty and nobody was hurt. What burned was the home of The East Palace, … Read more
Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix this week, and it comes with a strange scorecard. Audiences adore it, giving it a 97 percent rating that runs even higher than the first film. Critics were noticeably cooler, landing it at 71 percent after the near-universal praise that greeted part one. That is a wide gap … Read more
Lonnie Hawkins lives in a tour bus. He was the number one golfer in the world in 2004, and then he stood over the kind of putt he had been making his whole life and did not make it, and the twenty-two years since have been a long argument with that afternoon. When we … Read more
For twenty years, fans have wanted Matt Damon and Doug Liman working together again. The Bourne Identity launched both of their careers in 2002, and The Instigators, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is their reunion: a Boston heist comedy that Damon’s own production company handed to Liman as a script. What … Read more
Emma Thompson has spent forty years playing the smartest and warmest person in the room: Sense and Sensibility, Howards End, the magical nanny who mends broken families. Casting her as the lead of a snowbound survival thriller sounds like a mismatch, and Dead of Winter knows it. The film hands her a role usually … Read more
Before Echo Valley, Brad Ingelsby wrote Mare of Easttown, the HBO series about a worn-down detective in working-class Pennsylvania carrying more grief than any case could hold. Echo Valley is that same world shrunk to two people and one farm. Julianne Moore plays Kate, a horse trainer in southern Pennsylvania still grieving the wife … Read more