Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In the summer of 2016, strangers started showing up at a condo in Anaheim, California, expecting sex. A Craigslist ad had invited them. A woman there, it said, wanted to act out a rape fantasy, and any resistance she put up was part of the game. The men were real. The ad was not. … Read more
Television keeps a short list of shows that ended exactly where they should have and then had the grace to stay gone. Ted Lasso sat near the top of it. Season three sent Ted home to Kansas, married off Coach Beard, handed Roy the team, and rolled credits on a story its makers had … Read more
On the night of 21 December 1988, a bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 270 people were killed in the air and on the ground. What followed became the largest criminal investigation in British history. The Bombing of Pan Am 103, … Read more
A small Lifetime movie is sitting at number two on Netflix right now, one slot behind a Kevin Hart comedy that cost many times its budget, and the reason has almost nothing to do with 2025. His, Hers & Ours works because of a bet Terry McMillan placed more than thirty years ago and … 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
Brigid does not know who she is nursing when she first takes Robin in. That matters to the ending of The Death of Robin Hood: her initial kindness is not an act of forgiveness toward the man responsible for her family’s deaths. Once she learns the truth, revenge becomes possible. She stops herself, then helps … Read more
Pickleball is the sport serious tennis players love to roll their eyes at: too easy, too social, played on a shrunken court with a wiffle ball and a paddle. The Dink, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is the film version of that eye-roll and its answer at the same time. It is … Read more
Most true crime hurries toward the person who did it, angling for the interrogation room, the profile, the scene where a detective finally explains the mind behind the knife. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, the three-part Netflix series that landed on July 29, walks the other way, and that decision is the most interesting thing … Read more
In June, Supergirl was a punchline. DC’s new film, only the second in a rebooted universe, opened to brutal reviews and worse math, one of the loudest box office misfires of the year. Six weeks later, the same movie is the number one title people are renting at home. It did not get recut. … Read more
Ordinary Angels opened quietly in early 2024, to modest business and politely mixed reviews, and then slipped off to streaming the way small faith-based dramas usually do. Two years later it sits in the Netflix top three, and plenty of people are meeting it for the first time. The strange part is that the … Read more