Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In 2019, Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live and fired four days later, before he taped a single episode, over old podcast clips that resurfaced the same week he got the job. That is usually where a comedy career stalls out, or at least detours into a long apology tour. Gillis skipped … Read more
The Devil’s Mouth ends with a single survivor. Sara (Kathryn Newton) is the only one of the group who climbs out of the flooded cave alive, and she does it by turning the cave itself into a weapon. Her best friend Max (Lana Condor) does not make it, and neither do the others on the … Read more
Yes, Pressure is a true story, and the real part is exactly as it sounds: the date of D-Day came down to a weather forecast. In June 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy was set for June 5, and a Scottish meteorologist named James Stagg (Andrew Scott) warned that a storm would turn that day … Read more
Mother Mary made about three million dollars in theaters on a twenty million dollar budget, which in studio math is a quiet disaster. Critics were not kind either. Variety called it the most pretentious pop star movie since Vox Lux, and it is not hard to see why. Lowery’s film wraps a small story … Read more
Facing El Chapo opens with a title that promises a cartel legend, then spends most of its ninety-one minutes somewhere much smaller: a roadside motel, two tired federal cops, and the most wanted man in the hemisphere sitting on a bed, waiting for backup that might not come. So the question most viewers bring … Read more
There is a line from the novel this movie is built on that readers tend to remember. If you leave a door half-open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken. The Whisper Man, arriving on Netflix on August 28, takes its name from a killer who lured children by standing outside their windows at night … Read more
On the third day of giving sworn testimony against Boeing, John Barnett was found dead in his parked truck in Charleston. He had left a note that ended, “I hope Boeing pays.” Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, now on Netflix and already one of the platform’s most watched films, builds itself around that morning. … Read more
Yes. A Child of My Own, currently the fourth most watched film on Netflix in the United States, is built on a real case, and the true story is colder than the soft one the movie opens with. For its first stretch, the film plays like a warm melodrama about a woman aching to … Read more
For a generation, James Van Der Beek had one face. He was Dawson Leery, the earnest teenager at the center of Dawson’s Creek, forehead always creased with feeling, forever a beat away from a heartfelt speech. That image trailed him for twenty-five years, even through a knowing stretch where he played a spoiled version … Read more
Season 4 gives a newcomer a workable place to start Reacher. Its mystery begins with a stranger on a Philadelphia subway, and the season adapts Lee Child’s Gone Tomorrow rather than continuing the previous season’s case. The useful background is straightforward: Jack Reacher, played by Alan Ritchson, is a former military police investigator who travels … Read more