Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
When the trailer dropped back in June, all we really had was a family sealed inside their own home and a title that sounded like a warning. Now the film is here, it’s the number one movie on Netflix worldwide, and the question everyone is searching is the same one the trailer left hanging: … Read more
Materialists was sold as the summer’s glossy love triangle: Dakota Johnson caught between Pedro Pascal’s money and Chris Evans’s charm, all of it wrapped in A24 sheen. That is the movie people bought a ticket for. It is not quite the movie Celine Song made. Before she wrote Past Lives, Song spent months working … Read more
If you just finished Sterling Point on Prime Video and went looking for what actually happened, here is the short version. Annie, the New York teenager who inherits a remote Canadian island from a grandfather she never knew, doesn’t only find a summer and a crush out there. She finds a sister, Ramona, and a … Read more
Liam Neeson has spent the last decade playing more or less the same man: a soft-spoken widower with a particular set of skills, dropped into an airport, a train, a snowplow, some interchangeable American city. The movies blur together, almost on purpose. In the Land of Saints and Sinners is the one that doesn’t … Read more
If you just finished My Life with the Walter Boys Season 3 and reached for your phone to find out whether Jackie and Cole are finally, officially together, here’s the short answer: they’re not. Not yet, and maybe not for a while. Cole ends things before the finale is over. Jackie, the Manhattan orphan who … Read more
Yellowstone ended, and every streaming service has spent the time since trying to build its own ranch to move into. Netflix’s version is Ransom Canyon, and its second season just rode in at number three on the platform worldwide. If you came to find out whether it is worth eight hours, the honest answer depends … Read more
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 arrived on Netflix this month carrying two numbers that do not belong together: 17 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and 82 percent from audiences. That gap is not a rounding error. It tells you how this franchise works. The basics first, since people come looking for them. It … Read more
You spend a good part of We Live in Time unsure of when you are. One scene has Almut and Tobias meeting for the first time. The next has them raising a young daughter. Another drops back to a hospital room that resets everything you have watched so far. The film never flags these … Read more
Charlie Heller is a CIA codebreaker who is brilliant with patterns and useless with a gun. When his wife is killed in a terrorist attack in London and his superiors decide the case isn’t worth chasing, he does the only thing a man like that can do. He blackmails the agency into training him, … Read more
I didn’t expect to have much to say about a Kevin Hart bachelor-party comedy, and the early reviews suggested I wouldn’t. 72 Hours landed on Netflix on July 24 with a 16% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that usually files a movie under “content” and moves on. Then it went to number … Read more