Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The Handmaid’s Tale ended in 2025 after eight years, and rather than let Gilead fade, Hulu has handed the story to the next generation. The Testaments, based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel novel, finished its first season on May 27 and was renewed for a second before the finale even aired. It has already pulled … Read more
House of the Dragon returns for Season 3 on June 21, and it has been a while since Season 2 left the board mid-game. If you do not want to rewatch eight episodes before the war finally turns bloody, here is everything you need to remember. Full spoilers for Season 2 follow. Where We Left … Read more
Paul Thomas Anderson has spent thirty years making films that critics revere and casual audiences quietly avoid. One Battle After Another is the one that broke through. It swept the 2026 Academy Awards with six wins, including Best Picture and, at long last, a first Oscar for Anderson himself. Now that it has arrived on … Read more
Netflix just dropped all 22 episodes of The Polygamist, its biggest South African telenovela to date, and it has spent the days since burning up social media. The title puts a man at the center, a self-made CEO juggling a wife and several other women. But the smartest thing about the show is that it … Read more
Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Last House this week, and the premise alone is the kind that lodges in your head and stays there: a family of four wakes up sealed inside their own home, unable to get out, while the entire world outside falls under the same mysterious lockdown. A day … Read more
Colors of Evil: Black, the Polish thriller that climbed into Netflix’s Top 10 within days of its June 10 release, is built like a missing-child mystery and ends as something much darker: a portrait of an entire town that chose to look away. If you have finished it and want the knots untangled, here is … Read more
On paper, Song Sung Blue sounds like a punchline. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, two of the most charismatic movie stars alive, playing a married couple who spent their lives in a Neil Diamond tribute band in Milwaukee. You can already hear the sequins rustling. But the film, which landed on Netflix on June 13 … Read more
Sugar returns to Apple TV+ on June 19, two years after it pulled off one of the stranger sleights of hand in recent television, and the thing worth saying up front is that its detective story was never really about the case. It was about the man working it. Colin Farrell’s John Sugar spends his … Read more
All ten episodes of Sweet Magnolias Season 5 dropped on Netflix on June 11, and the show shot straight back into the Top 10, because this is the kind of series people do not just watch but check in on, like old friends. The finale gives the three Magnolias very different endings: one wedding, … Read more
The Marked Woman, Netflix’s Spanish original thriller that shot into the Top 10 within days of its June 5 release, runs on a single question: who is the woman found beaten half to death in a shipping container in Barcelona, with no memory of her own name? If you have reached the end and … Read more