Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS docuseries Hemingway sheds new light on writer Ernest Hemingway’s life. But it leaves out key details of his left-wing political convictions — including the FBI surveillance that haunted him until his suicide.
After a long internet campaign demanding its release, HBO Max has unleashed Zack Snyder’s Justice League on the world. But it’s four hours of tedious superhero melodrama you’ll never get back.
Jessica Walter thankfully found fame through roles like Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth late in her life. But she should’ve been a major star when she was a young woman. Hollywood’s misogyny in the 1960s and ’70s made that impossible.
Eddie Murphy is one of the most talented actors alive. Yet his brilliance is wasted in this sloppy sequel to the classic 1988 film Coming to America.
While Nomadland goes out of its way to avoid talking politics, its genius is in locating the emotional truth of what it’s like to be one of the many millions of Americans cast adrift by disaster.
The story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s assassination by Chicago Police and the FBI has finally been made into a movie. Judas and the Black Messiah is uneven as a film, but it’s a small step toward a serious reckoning with America’s past.
Dylan’s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, is a fitting capstone for our end times.
Chadwick Boseman’s final performance in playwright August Wilson’s new Netflix adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a haunting but appropriate farewell.
Disney Plus’s new Marvel show WandaVision promises a surreal spin on a 1960s sitcom reality. But so far, it’s delivered little more than winks and nods to Marvel Cinematic Universe loyalists.
The big-budget Wonder Woman sequel is an ugly, tedious, bloated, badly CGI-ed mess and a wretchedly directed film. And yet critics keep making excuses for it because of its supposed social relevance.
David Fincher’s ode to Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz revives an eighty-year-old debate over whether or not Orson Welles deserves a co-writing credit — and it’s exactly as entertaining as that sounds.
The first film in Steve McQueen’s new Amazon Prime anthology chronicles the struggle for racial justice in Britain with the 1970s Mangrove Nine trial. It’s a wonderful achievement and valuable popular education on the British struggles against racist policing.
A new Showtime docuseries reminds us of just how awful Ronald Reagan was and how his brand of demagogic racism became a model for Trump.
The only good thing we have to say about the reactionary film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy is that it’s so boringly told you’ll forget about it in an hour.
Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks is yet another meandering depiction of life as a bored and alienated celebrity.
John Carpenter’s movies provide visions of societies falling apart. No wonder his work is resonating now more than ever.
Amazon’s Borat sequel tries to replay the zany laughs of the original but picks easy, woke moralizing over funny social satire.
Netflix’s new Aaron Sorkin movie on the Chicago Seven tries — and fails — to turn a travesty of justice and an attack on the Left into a defense of American institutions.
The new season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo moves the action to 1950 Kansas City. It looks at Midwestern history and culture with raucous humor, wild plotting, and a rogues’ gallery of American oddballs in the best tradition of Mark Twain.
Get Out was a triumph. Antebellum tries to follow in its footsteps, but it completely fails at making a horror movie out of the experience of racism in America.