Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
You have seen this story. A small kid with a big dream, written off as too little to compete, gets one improbable shot at the big leagues and has to prove the doubters wrong. GOAT, the animated sports comedy now climbing the Netflix charts, does not pretend otherwise. Its plot is the underdog template in … Read more
The room at the Dolby Theatre in April was a who’s who of American comedy, and that was the point. Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan, Arsenio Hall, Kenan Thompson, Mike Myers, Spike Lee, Stevie Wonder — they came to hand Eddie Murphy the 51st AFI Life Achievement Award, and … Read more
Here is a true story that sounds invented. A man is born into slavery in Arkansas. His owner drags him into the Civil War to fight for the Confederacy, and somewhere in that nightmare he escapes — the legend says he beat the man over a card game and ran. He disappears into Indian … Read more
Colin is in his thirties. He lives with his parents outside London, works at a parking garage, and sings in a family barbershop quartet. That is the entire shape of his life when Pillion begins, and Harry Melling plays him with a stoop in his shoulders that tells you he has stopped expecting anything … Read more
There is a particular pleasure in watching an actor who has nothing left to prove simply enjoy himself. Pierce Brosnan has reached that stage, and Fast Charlie — a small, darkly funny hitman movie that almost nobody saw when it quietly appeared in late 2023 — is built entirely around that pleasure. Three years … Read more
The premise lands like a provocation, which is exactly what it is meant to do. In a near-future Korea where classroom violence has spiraled and teachers have lost all authority, the government creates a new agency: the Educational Rights Protection Bureau. Its inspectors are granted legal permission to use physical force against delinquent students. … Read more
A few days ago I wrote a preview of this docuseries, and I ended it with a question. Not whether Michael Jackson was guilty or innocent — a jury answered that in 2005 — but a harder one: how did a trial that ended in acquittal on every single count become culturally remembered as … Read more
The story of David and Goliath is approximately three thousand years old. Every person reading this already knows how it ends. The shepherd boy wins. The giant falls. And yet David, Angel Studios’ animated biblical epic, arrived on Netflix on June 3rd and is already the number one film in the United States. It spent … Read more
He-Man has been away from movie screens for forty years. Masters of the Universe, which opens in theaters today, brings him back — and the most interesting thing about the film is not the hero. It’s the villain. Jared Leto plays Skeletor with a commitment that is genuinely unexpected. The character is absurd by … Read more
Let me be honest about what Apex is before I tell you why I watched all 95 minutes of it without looking at my phone. Apex is a survival thriller in which a woman is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a psychopathic stranger. The script, written by Jeremy Robbins, is not doing anything … Read more