Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) plans the perfect Nantucket weekend to outrun her grief, and the weekend answers by handing her the one secret she was not braced for. The friend who arrived carrying the heaviest sorrow, Gigi (Gemma Chan), turns out to be the woman her late husband had been seeing. That is the … Read more
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy started streaming on HBO Max on July 3, and anyone pressing play expecting bandages and a cursed pharaoh is about to be thrown. There is no shambling corpse in wrappings here. Cronin, the director of Evil Dead Rise, has called his version “one part Poltergeist, one part Seven,” and that … Read more
Moana arrives in theaters on July 10, a decade after the animated film that made her one of Disney’s most beloved heroines. The reviews are already out, and they are split down the middle: one outlet calls it a low point in Disney’s relentless remake run, another calls it one of the studio’s better live-action … Read more
The villain of The Housemaid is Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar), the husband who confines and abuses his wife, Nina (Amanda Seyfried). Nina hires Millie (Sydney Sweeney) knowing about her criminal record and hoping she will fight back when Andrew turns on her. The apparent threat from an erratic employer conceals a different danger: the … Read more
If you came here straight from the last ten minutes of Old Henry, here is the short version. Yes, the quiet Oklahoma farmer is Billy the Kid. He did not die in 1881. The death was staged, with the help of the lawman who was supposed to have put him in the ground, and … Read more
Somewhere in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly picks up her own September issue, the object the entire fashion calendar once bent itself around, and remarks that it has gotten thin enough to floss with. The line is played for a laugh. It is the truest sentence in the film. Twenty years ago … Read more
Christopher Nolan has spent his career making movies about time, and about people straining to get back to where they started. His next one goes all the way back to the source. The Odyssey, in theaters July 17, is Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s three-thousand-year-old poem, the original story of a man taking the long … Read more
If you have just watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come on Hulu and want the ending laid out plainly: Grace survives again, and again she manages it without ever being the strongest person in the room. She wins by finding a loophole in the rules the rich people hunting her wrote for … Read more
If you have just finished Project Hail Mary and want the ending in plain terms: Ryland Grace saves both Earth and an alien world, and then he chooses not to go home. He spends the rest of his life twelve light-years away, on a planet whose air would kill him, teaching science to children … Read more
Bear gets exactly what he wishes for. The tragedy is that it works. He asks a cheap occult trinket to make the girl he loves want him more than anyone in the world, and it obeys him to the letter, which turns out to be a kind of murder. If you are here because … Read more