Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
When the trailer dropped back in June, all we really had was a family sealed inside their own home and a title that sounded like a warning. Now the film is here, it’s the number one movie on Netflix worldwide, and the question everyone is searching is the same one the trailer left hanging: … Read more
When Steven Spielberg made War of the Worlds in 2005, he said something revealing about it. For the first time in his life, he told Empire, he was making an alien picture with no love in it and no attempt at communication. It was his fourth story about visitors from elsewhere, and it was … Read more
If you have just finished Project Hail Mary and want the ending in plain terms: Ryland Grace saves both Earth and an alien world, and then he chooses not to go home. He spends the rest of his life twelve light-years away, on a planet whose air would kill him, teaching science to children … Read more
This week, two very different movies named Avatar landed on streaming, and the overlap is almost funny. One is the live-action remake of the cartoon, now into its second season. The other is the one that made close to a billion and a half dollars at the box office. Avatar: Fire and Ash, the … Read more
Sugar returns to Apple TV+ on June 19, two years after it pulled off one of the stranger sleights of hand in recent television, and the thing worth saying up front is that its detective story was never really about the case. It was about the man working it. Colin Farrell’s John Sugar spends his … Read more