Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
I finish a lot of prestige dramas, and I could not tell you, under oath, how most of them ended. Modern streaming runs on debt. Season two hands you a cliffhanger and expects you to still be holding it a year later, when season three finally turns up. Reacher owes you nothing. You can … Read more
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
Liam Neeson has spent the last decade playing more or less the same man: a soft-spoken widower with a particular set of skills, dropped into an airport, a train, a snowplow, some interchangeable American city. The movies blur together, almost on purpose. In the Land of Saints and Sinners is the one that doesn’t … Read more
Charlie Heller is a CIA codebreaker who is brilliant with patterns and useless with a gun. When his wife is killed in a terrorist attack in London and his superiors decide the case isn’t worth chasing, he does the only thing a man like that can do. He blackmails the agency into training him, … Read more
Jodie Foster has spoken French since she was a child. She spent twelve years at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles, and for decades she has dubbed her own performances into French for the release prints, so audiences there have been hearing her, in her own voice, all along. The one thing she had … Read more
Matías takes a job coaching at a swimming club, and his employer offers him a second one on the side. Fernando will pay him to sleep with Fernando’s wife and send back video of it. Matías takes that job too. Desire, the Mexican thriller that landed on Netflix on July 17 and went straight … Read more
When Amy Robertson buries her father, she expects to inherit a charity and a family name worth being proud of. Instead she inherits a key to a storage locker she never knew he rented, and inside it, wrapped and hidden, is the decomposing body of a woman. The Body in the Locker, a 2025 … 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
Every part of Strung is right there in the title. Chloe Bailey plays Laila, a gifted violinist whose whole world is strings. She takes a live-in job tutoring a wealthy family’s young daughter, and she is slowly strung along by people who know exactly which of her wounds to pull on. When the movie … Read more