Nosferatu and the horror of enlightenment
Robert Eggers’s film reminds us that much of what presents itself as common sense is just a contingent arrangement, one form of folklore instead of another.
Competing masculinities in the dojo
As Cobra Kai’s final season is about to air, we are living in the aftermath of the political backlash to The Karate Kid’s softer kind of power.
Who needs Roman imperial fantasies?
After watching Gladiator II, I turned elsewhere for a more joyful model of masculinity.
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.