Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix this week, and it comes with a strange scorecard. Audiences adore it, giving it a 97 percent rating that runs even higher than the first film. Critics were noticeably cooler, landing it at 71 percent after the near-universal praise that greeted part one. That is a wide gap … Read more
Clark dies in Backrooms. Mary survives the creature pursuing her and reaches Async, the organization investigating the strange space. The final image shows a distorted copy of Mary, but that does not establish that the woman speaking to Async has been replaced. Her immediate problem is already frightening enough: the people who rescued her may … Read more
Lonnie Hawkins lives in a tour bus. He was the number one golfer in the world in 2004, and then he stood over the kind of putt he had been making his whole life and did not make it, and the twenty-two years since have been a long argument with that afternoon. When we … 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
For twenty years, fans have wanted Matt Damon and Doug Liman working together again. The Bourne Identity launched both of their careers in 2002, and The Instigators, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is their reunion: a Boston heist comedy that Damon’s own production company handed to Liman as a script. What … Read more
Every Scream movie holds up a mirror to the horror of its moment. The 1996 original mocked the rules of the slasher while obeying every one of them. The recent requels went after legacy sequels and the possessive fans who guard them. Scream 7 reaches for the sharpest idea the series has had in … 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