Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The most unbelievable part of Roofman is the part the filmmakers did not invent. A decorated Army veteran robbed dozens of McDonald’s by cutting holes in their roofs, escaped a forty-five-year prison sentence, and then hid for months inside a Toys R Us, living off the shelves and watching the employees on baby monitors. … Read more
Since 2023, no movie has been streamed in American homes more than the animated Moana. Nielsen clocked it above eleven billion minutes that year, then watched the number climb even higher in 2024, nearly a decade after the film left theaters. Those are the households Disney invited back this month, asking them to pay … Read more
On March 3 of this year, Netflix renewed Little House on the Prairie for a second season. The first season would not premiere for another four months, and nobody outside the building had seen a frame of it. Streamers almost never do that. The confidence tells you what Netflix believed it was buying: an … Read more
Somewhere in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly picks up her own September issue, the object the entire fashion calendar once bent itself around, and remarks that it has gotten thin enough to floss with. The line is played for a laugh. It is the truest sentence in the film. Twenty years ago … Read more
Here is the answer most people are searching for: no, F1 is not based on a true story. Sonny Hayes, the burned-out driver Brad Pitt plays, was never real, and neither was APXGP, the last-place team he comes back to rescue. There was no eleventh car on the 2024 grid, and no thirty-years-later comeback … Read more
The setup of Little Brother is older than most of the people streaming it: a man builds a perfect life, and someone from his past arrives to wreck it. What makes this particular version worth ninety minutes is the fine print, the reason these two men know each other at all. Decades ago, John Cena’s … Read more
There is a shot in the Enola Holmes 3 trailer of Millie Bobby Brown in a wedding dress, running. Not toward the altar. Away from it, toward a case. Three films in, that is still the only direction Enola knows how to run. A Wedding in Malta, Then a Kidnapping The setup reads almost like … Read more
For fifteen years, the person who understood Chris Evert most completely was the woman on the other side of the net trying to beat her. Netflix’s new documentary is about a tennis rivalry, but it is really about that stranger fact: how the opponent can end up being the witness. Chris & Martina: The Final … Read more
The Last Ship imagined a pandemic six years before we lived one. A virus wipes out eighty percent of the world. A single Navy destroyer, out at sea when it hit, comes home to a silent country carrying the one scientist who might build a cure. The show ran on TNT from 2014 to 2018, … Read more
Glen Powell smiles, and you forgive him almost anything. That is the entire engine of How to Make a Killing, and it is also the reason critics and audiences walked out of this movie into two completely different rooms. The film opened in theaters back in February and barely registered. Twenty million dollars, a number … Read more