Coming of age with girl detectives
Like her genre foremothers, the teen sleuth in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder isn’t just solving a crime, she’s figuring out her place in the world.
The Wild Robot asks what makes us human
We are animals that need to overcome our instincts, robots that need to overcome our rationality.
What the theater can do
It’s hard to talk about the transformative power of being onstage without sounding ridiculous. Sing Sing and Ghostlight show us instead.
Truth, lies, and video
Civil War and Fly Me to the Moon share an awareness of how malleable and fragile our sense of shared truth is in a world dominated by images.
Babes revives the adult comedy
It recalls the raunchy movies of the early 2000s—even as it offers a fresh vision of what it means to grow up.
Genius and virtue
Wildcat is less a biopic than a luminous exploration of the tension in Flannery O’Connor’s artistic and spiritual life.
Fargo and Wicked Little Letters take on the patriarchy
It’s hard to dramatize the evils of patriarchy without falling into melodrama or historical difference.
The buddy-cop feminist detective series I didn’t know I needed
Deadloch is one of the funniest, smartest, most unexpected delights I have watched in a long time.
The very real sham marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s remake is in some ways the inverse of the 2005 original.
American Fiction and The Holdovers find beauty in quiet, personal drama
This used to be the form of most movies, but now it feels rare and precious.
Is she bad?
Both May December and Eileen are meant to make us a little queasy as our moral judgments come up short.
The wedding may be the most important scene in Killers of the Flower Moon
In Martin Scorcese’s telling of the Osage Indian murders, all the violent contradictions of history unfold in domestic intimacy.
Teen comedies for a sex-positive generation
In the raunchy high school comedies of my youth, sex was a forbidden land. Not in Sex Education and Bottoms.
Reckoning with self-destruction
We all live in Oppenheimer’s world now, and it is one that constantly invents the Ethan Hunts and Indiana Joneses of our fantasies.
The Barbie conversation
What started as a summer feel-good movie has opened discussions about embodiment, death, feminist utopias, and whether change can come through consumer goods.
All in with Wes Anderson
Asteroid City might be the most Anderson of all his films, and I came to it like an acolyte who is doubting the mystery.