Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Frances Neagley offers Jack Reacher her hand at her father’s funeral because she trusts him enough to try a form of closeness she usually avoids. His arrival gives that trust a familiar basis: he has come to support her when she needs him. In the finale of Neagley, Prime Video’s Reacher spinoff, the private investigator … Read more
In Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, Charlie reunites the veteran magicians known as the Horsemen to take revenge on Veronika Vanderberg, the diamond heiress responsible for his mother’s death. He is Veronika’s half-brother, and he has concealed that connection while appearing to be one of the young magicians recruited for a heist. The … Read more
The Seemingly Perfect Family arrives on Netflix with an irresistible label: “inspired by true events.” It also reached No. 1 on Netflix’s US movie chart on September 20. But the label answers less than it appears to. Lifetime’s official page does not name a case, a victim, or even the event that supposedly inspired the … Read more
I keep going back to one number on this movie. Not the Netflix chart, where Those Who Wish Me Dead has now spent sixteen days and sits at number two on the American film side. The other one. When Warner Bros. put it in 3,188 theaters in May 2021, it took $880,000 on its … Read more
So does anybody actually get an answer at the end of The Perfect Lie? No. The seventh episode stops in the middle of the thing you most want explained, and if you went in expecting a tidy Dutch murder mystery, that is going to sting. Netflix has not announced a second season. The show … Read more
The Runner cheats, and I think the cheat is the best argument the movie has. Here is the short answer. Maia Marten never kills the witness she is sent to kill. The gun she fires on the 53rd floor of the Excelsus Hotel holds blanks, the blood is a rig the police set up in … Read more
By its last stretch, The Whisper Man has two questions left to answer, and it closes them almost back to back. The person taking children this time is not Frank Carter, the original Whisper Man, who is still behind bars. It is Frank’s grown son, Francis Jr., who has spent the whole film in … Read more
Icefall opened in November 2025 to almost no notice and a 5.1 on IMDb, the score a film gets when critics call it competent and move on. Ten months later it is the No. 1 movie on Prime Video in the United States, ahead of titles with ten times its budget and marketing. The … Read more
There is a line from the novel this movie is built on that readers tend to remember. If you leave a door half-open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken. The Whisper Man, arriving on Netflix on August 28, takes its name from a killer who lured children by standing outside their windows at night … Read more
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