The Drama on HBO Max — Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, and the Cringe Comedy Hiding Inside a Wedding Movie

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  For most of its first hour, The Drama behaves. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma Harwood and Charlie Thompson, a couple a week away from their wedding, and the film hands you the movie the trailer sold: two of the most photographed actors alive, a gorgeous engagement, the low comic hum of a big … Read more

Disclosure Day: Steven Spielberg’s First Alien Movie in Two Decades Undoes His Last One

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  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

Pompeii: Out of Time — Tom Hiddleston’s Documentary Says the People Had Time to Run

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  You know the image even if you have never set foot in Pompeii. A body curled on its side in the ash, knees drawn up, caught in the instant the mountain took it. For the better part of three centuries those plaster casts have taught the world one lesson about the city: that death … Read more

Mortal Kombat II Ending Explained: Who Dies, and the Hero the Sequel Had to Kill

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  The first Mortal Kombat movie, back in 2021, made one famously strange choice: it never held the tournament. Two hours of gathering fighters and training them, and the actual Mortal Kombat got pushed to a sequel that took five years to show up. Mortal Kombat II, on HBO Max since July 24 after a … Read more

Ride or Die on Prime Video: The Twenty-Year Friendship Was Played by Two Strangers

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  Judith and Debbie have been best friends for twenty years. They travel together, they haunt antique shops, they belong to the same book club. Debbie believes Judith is a forensic accountant. Judith is actually a contract killer who has spent those same twenty years billing millions to a shadow agency for the people she … Read more

Lucky on Apple TV+: The One Thing Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thriller Cut From the Book

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  Here is the strange thing about Lucky, the seven-episode Apple TV+ thriller that started rolling out on July 15 with Anya Taylor-Joy as a con artist on the run. It is named after luck, and it took the luck out. The show is adapted from Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel, and the book had one … Read more

My Daughter’s Father: Who Julieta’s Biological Father Is, and the Test That Exposed Him

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If you are here for the short answer, the biological father is Emilio Martinez, played by Erik Hayser, a man from a relationship Maca kept buried for twenty years. My Daughter’s Father, the Mexican drama that arrived on Netflix on July 22 under its original title El otro padre, does not hide this for long. … Read more

My Grandfather Charles Manson: Is It a True Story, and What the DNA Test Really Found

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 Yes, it is a true story, and that is the first thing most people want confirmed. The woman at the center of Hulu’s My Grandfather Charles Manson is Sophia Maddox, a real filmmaker and actress, and she really is the granddaughter of the man who orchestrated the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The documentary, number one on … Read more

Sunrise on the Reaping: Why the Next Hunger Games Belongs to Haymitch

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  Three Hunger Games movies are sitting in the American Netflix Top 10 this week, and the newest of them is three years old. There is no mystery behind the surge. The whole franchise arrived on Netflix on July 14, its first day ever on the service, and America is doing its homework before a … Read more

The East Palace Review: The Global Hit America Has Not Found Yet

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  In the early hours of December 21, 2024, the palace burned down. A fire swept through a production facility in Yeoncheon County, South Korea, taking the main set buildings and a warehouse of lighting equipment with it. The set was empty and nobody was hurt. What burned was the home of The East Palace, … Read more