Screen Time
Welcome to the commodity biopic
These movies about influential consumer objects aren’t really origin stories at all.
It’s me, Margaret’s mom
Judy Blume’s gift to the world is her insistence that young people can be trusted as capable moral agents.
The purifying anger of Beef
Hate, like love, it turns out, is a many-splendored thing.
In Broker, petty thieves teach us to forgive
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s characters find and create families in the margins of late-stage capitalism.
Philomena Cunk’s 21st-century expertise
Like Drunk History and History of the World Part II, Cunk on Earth is very funny. But the larger joke is that fake news is winning.
When women speak more than truth
She Said and Women Talking examine the collective power of women’s words for a MeToo era.
Glass Onion threads the Agatha Christie needle
A murder mystery can provide sharp social commentary—and great fun.
How real is Wakanda?
Speculative fiction, at its best, can inspire collaboration by artists and writers and ordinary fans.
Judging Lydia Tár
Todd Field’s movie about a megalomaniacal musician is, like his earlier films, interested in moral ambiguity.
Nope and Prey represent a new kind of alien invasion film
Both movies critique the assumption that survival requires dominance.
When work-life balance turns sinister
The fantasy of Severance is that we can avoid facing the moral peril of the structures we inhabit.
The adoration of the volcanologists
Fire of Love is an unusual science documentary.
Jurassic World and the scales of time
The latest film seems to have forgotten one of the delights of dinosaur nerdery: imagining the world without humans.
Pride and Prejudice in a Speedo
Mr. Malcolm’s List and Bridgerton offer flimsy historical fantasy. Fire Island goes deeper.
When I think of Downton Abbey, I think of the costumes
Beautiful objects in a sea of inequity and decadence
Evelyn Wang saves the multiverse
Everything Everywhere All At Once reveals that on the other side of finitude is chaos—and love.
Turning Red and the terror and joy of female adolescence
Watching the Pixar movie alongside Euphoria and Yellowjackets made me appreciate the exuberant intensity of Mei’s embodiment.
Robert Pattinson gives us the Batman we need
He carries the hesitant masculinity of Twilight’s Edward Cullen in his body.
The exuberant absurdity of Don’t Look Up and Moonfall
Watching the destruction of the world we were warned was coming is a staple of American entertainment.
Station Eleven and the purpose of art
With the world as they knew it gone, the characters remake the world from the resources they carry inside them.