Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
He-Man has been away from movie screens for forty years. Masters of the Universe, which opens in theaters today, brings him back — and the most interesting thing about the film is not the hero. It’s the villain. Jared Leto plays Skeletor with a commitment that is genuinely unexpected. The character is absurd by … Read more
Let me be honest about what Apex is before I tell you why I watched all 95 minutes of it without looking at my phone. Apex is a survival thriller in which a woman is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a psychopathic stranger. The script, written by Jeremy Robbins, is not doing anything … Read more
On May 13, 2026, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder convictions in a unanimous 5-0 ruling. On May 18, Netflix started filming a documentary about it. On May 30 — twelve days later — that documentary was streaming globally. That timeline is the story. Not just the Murdaugh story, though … Read more
Jennifer Lopez has made a lot of romantic comedies. Some of them were great. Some of them were not. Office Romance, which arrives on Netflix tomorrow, June 5, looks like it belongs in the first category — and the reason is standing next to her on every poster. Brett Goldstein, best known as Roy … Read more
The Bear returns for its fifth and final season on June 25, and the most revealing thing about it isn’t the premiere date or the episode count. It’s the premise. Carmy Berzatto, the character around whom four seasons of tension have been organized, has quit. He’s walked out of the restaurant he drove himself … Read more
There is a specific pleasure that Korean romantic comedies do better than almost anyone else: the slow, reluctant fall. Two people who should despise each other, trapped in circumstances that keep forcing them together, discovering — against their better judgment and everyone’s best interests — that they cannot stop thinking about the other person. My … Read more
There is a particular kind of dread that Cape Fear has always been about — not the fear of violence exactly, but the fear of someone who understands the system well enough to use it against you. The 1962 film had it. Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake had it. Apple TV+’s new ten-episode limited series … Read more
There is a version of this story that gets made as a procedural. The 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common — a young mother stabbed to death in daylight while walking with her two-year-old son — has most of the ingredients that true crime productions reach for: a shocking crime, a botched … Read more
House of the Dragon has spent two seasons doing something that takes considerable discipline: making you wait. The civil war at the heart of the story — the Targaryen succession crisis that will eventually tear the dynasty apart — has been building through political maneuvering, private grief, and the slow accumulation of grievances since … Read more
The Michael Jackson biopic that dominated box offices earlier this year made a choice that everyone noticed: it told the story of the music, the performances, the rise, and mostly stepped around the trial. That choice was a commercial calculation as much as a creative one, and it worked. But it left something unresolved, … Read more