Quietly Watching

  In 2009 a law professor named Dan Markel published a book about families and criminal justice. Its argument was blunt. When the law gives someone special treatment because of who they are related to, the costs add up fast, and courts should grant far fewer of those exemptions. Five years later Markel was shot in his own garage in Tallahassee, and the people who paid for it were his ex-wife's mother and brother. Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel, four parts, streaming on Hulu since September 1, is the fullest account of that case anyone has put on screen. It is also a four-hour test of the argument he spent his career making. The series never mentions that he made it, and I think that gap is the one real hole in an otherwise thorough four hours. The Family the Series Puts on a Shelf It comes from ABC News Studios, directed by Sebastian Smith, and it has people nobody else got. Rob Adelson, the eldest of the Adelson children, sits for his first interview. So does June...

 Yes, it is a true story, and that is the first thing most people want confirmed. The woman at the center of Hulu's My Grandfather Charles Manson is Sophia Maddox, a real filmmaker and actress, and she really is the granddaughter of the man who orchestrated the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The documentary, number one on Hulu since it arrived on July 22, is her own investigation into that fact. What makes it more than a shock headline is how she found out: not through a family secret finally spoken aloud, but through a mail-order DNA kit that was looking for someone else entirely. The Question the Test Was Actually Asking The detail the whole film turns on is a quiet one. Maddox's father, Daniel Arguelles, did not send his saliva to Ancestry to go looking for Charles Manson. He sent it in 2015 for the most ordinary reason a person takes one of these tests: he had never known who his own biological father was, and he wanted an answer. For seven years the answer was silence. Then, ...

  Sam Raimi's Send Help looks like a two-person survival story: a plane goes down, an employee and her boss wash up on a deserted island, and they have to get along or die. About halfway through, it quietly stops being that movie. The island is not the trap. The office is, and Linda has been running the office the whole time. One warning before the rest: this walks straight through the twist and the final scene, so bail here if you have not watched. For everyone who finished it, the short answer: Linda survives, kills Bradley, and walks off the island into the corner office she was denied. The horror was never the wilderness. It was the promotion. The Setup: Two Survivors, One Grudge Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a downtrodden corporate strategist who has been promised a promotion for years. Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien) is the son of her old boss, freshly installed as CEO, and the man holding that promotion just out of reach. When their plane crashes and the two of them t...

  Somewhere in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly picks up her own September issue, the object the entire fashion calendar once bent itself around, and remarks that it has gotten thin enough to floss with. The line is played for a laugh. It is the truest sentence in the film. Twenty years ago that issue was a brick you could prop a door open with. Now it slides out of a mailbox and into the recycling, unread. I went in expecting the sequel nobody strictly asked for, and for long stretches that is what it is. What kept catching me off guard was how much the movie seems to understand that about itself. The reviews have called it listless, aimless, unsure of its own point. They are not wrong about the feeling in the room. I think they have the cause backwards. The Film the First One Could Never Have Made The original landed in 2006, at the last bright noon of glossy print. Runway was a fortress, Miranda was its unquestioned monarch, and the cruelty had a clean engine: a young w...

  If you have just watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come on Hulu and want the ending laid out plainly: Grace survives again, and again she manages it without ever being the strongest person in the room. She wins by finding a loophole in the rules the rich people hunting her wrote for themselves. This time the stakes are bigger, one murderous family has become a Council of four, and her estranged sister is on the table beside her. Here is how the sequel picks up, what the Council is fighting over, and exactly how Grace turns their own bylaws into a room full of exploding aristocrats. Where the First Movie Left Grace The 2019 original ended with Grace (Samara Weaving) as the lone survivor of her own wedding night. She had married into the Le Domas family, a gaming dynasty bound by an old pact with a benefactor named Le Bail, and the marriage came with a tradition: draw a card, and if it reads Hide and Seek, the family has to hunt and kill the new spouse before dawn or forfeit their own...

 For five seasons, The Bear kept asking the same question: does making something great have to cost you everything you have? Its series finale finally answers, and the answer is not the Michelin star the whole show had been chasing. All eight episodes of the fifth and final season landed at once on June 25, on Hulu and Disney+, with FX rolling them out weekly through August 6. After two seasons that left some viewers cold, the show came back to its old form, and critics put it at 97 percent, a rebound that sits just behind the untouchable first two years. It earns that goodwill by doing something a lesser finale would have been afraid to do. It gives the restaurant everything it ever wanted, and then it lets the man at the center of it walk out the door. The Star Was Never the Point On the night of the final service, the Michelin inspector everyone is braced for never appears. The real verdict had already been handed down months earlier, when a man named Peter Clark sat unnoticed i...

 Most TV revivals are a bad idea wearing a beloved name. They show up two decades late, trade on your affection, and leave the original looking a little worse for the visit. Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair is the rare exception. The four-episode revival landed on Hulu in April and immediately became the platform's biggest premiere of the year, and the surprise is not that people watched. It is that it is actually good. What Life's Still Unfair Is The revival runs just four half-hour episodes, originally conceived as a single movie and split for streaming. It picks up roughly twenty years after the original ended. Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) is now an adult with a daughter of his own and a girlfriend, and he has quietly put distance between himself and the chaotic family that raised him. The story pulls him back home for his parents' 40th wedding anniversary, which means the whole ensemble returns: Hal (Bryan Cranston), Lois (Jane Kaczmarek), and the brothers who ...

 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 more than 45 million streaming hours worldwide across Hulu and Disney+. If you loved the original and were not sure a continuation could justify itself, here is what it is, how it connects, and whether it works. Where The Testaments Picks Up This is a direct continuation, not a spinoff that stands apart. Gilead is still standing, and the series picks up a few years on, with the regime now focused on raising the children who will inherit and sustain it. Where the novel jumps fifteen years ahead, the show compresses that gap to roughly four, keeping it close enough to the world we knew to feel continuous. Familiar faces appear, but the center of gravity has moved. The B...

  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 nearly to destruction to build, and left it to the people around him. That decision reframes everything that comes next — and it might be exactly what the show needs. What The Bear Has Been, Season by Season When The Bear premiered on FX on Hulu in June 2022, it arrived with a rare kind of critical consensus. The first season ended at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The second season, which contained what many considered the finest single episode of television that year — a Christmas dinner that operates less like a TV episode than like a controlled detonation — landed at 99%. These are numbers that reflect something beyond quality. They reflect a show that felt genuinely ne...