Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
By its last stretch, The Whisper Man has two questions left to answer, and it closes them almost back to back. The person taking children this time is not Frank Carter, the original Whisper Man, who is still behind bars. It is Frank’s grown son, Francis Jr., who has spent the whole film in … Read more
Somewhere around the midnight-margaritas scene, Practical Magic stops pretending to be about its plot. Two sisters and their aunts turn a kitchen into a small hurricane of blender noise and Stevie Nicks, and for a few minutes the 1998 movie forgets it has a curse to break and a body in the garden. That … Read more
Mica Miller, the 30-year-old wife of a South Carolina pastor, was found dead at a North Carolina state park on April 27, 2024. Authorities ruled it a suicide, and the documentary does not dispute that. So if you came looking for a hidden killer, Death of the Pastor’s Wife is not that kind of … Read more
For almost its entire runtime, The Last Sunrise looks like a dying-girl romance. A sick young woman, a gorgeous island, a summer love with a countdown attached. But the trailer keeps one thing to itself: Ry (Maia Reficco) does not die. She survives her worst crisis, and she and Julian (Fernando Lindez) are still … Read more
Icefall opened in November 2025 to almost no notice and a 5.1 on IMDb, the score a film gets when critics call it competent and move on. Ten months later it is the No. 1 movie on Prime Video in the United States, ahead of titles with ten times its budget and marketing. The … Read more
When Jon Favreau finished the 2019 Lion King, the photoreal remake that rebuilt Simba out of pure computer animation, he came away wanting the opposite of what he had just made. He wanted a real lion. Lion, the four-part National Geographic series he executive produced, is that wish carried out over four years in … Read more
Talamasca: The Secret Order spent late August near the top of Netflix’s TV chart, which is a strange fate for a show its own network had already given up on. AMC aired the six-episode gothic thriller last fall, canceled it in March, and moved on. The odd part is what the Netflix numbers prove. The … Read more
For one night in January 2006, Vince Young was the best football player alive. Texas trailed USC by five in the Rose Bowl with the national title on the line, and with nineteen seconds left Young ran it in himself, eight yards, nobody able to lay a hand on him. He finished that night with … Read more
Keanu Reeves spends most of Good Fortune wearing the blank, patient look of a man who has read the instructions and understood none of them. He plays Gabriel, a low-ranking guardian angel who sets out to fix one struggling life and manages to break several. It is the loosest, funniest thing he has done in … Read more
In Blood Sacrifice, the Swedish thriller that reached number one on Netflix, someone is killing police officers. The deaths always come at 1:15 in the morning, always after a call to 112, the emergency line. For most of the five episodes it plays like a hunt for a faceless serial killer. It is not. … Read more