It’s been nearly 50 years since Charles Bronson first mowed down New York muggers in Death Wish. But defenses of the recent killing of Jordan Neely suggest that the film’s reactionary, Wild West–style vigilante violence still holds the imagination of many.
The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of the successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres — from the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter Very Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost.
The highly hyped new crime series The Crowded Room could’ve been an unsparing take on extreme mental illness in a society that’s never been equipped to deal with it. Instead, it gives away its only source of suspense far too early.
In films like Annihilation and Ex Machina, director Alex Garland knows how to make the end of the world look majestic. But his new show, Devs, gives a grace and dignity to the apocalypse that you won’t find in our own world.
Asteroid City dials up the “Wes Anderson” to 11, leaving an emotional void in its wake.
Jennifer Lawrence is a fantastic comic actor. So it’s too bad that No Hard Feelings trades in the raunchy laughs for feel-good sentimental dramedy.
The once great animation studio continues its fall with Elemental, another clumsy Pixar parable about the joy of finding a career.
The second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud follows Truman Capote’s infamous breakup with the East Coast socialites he called “the Swans,” showing how his charm and talent as a raconteur couldn’t save him from being banished by wealthy elites.
I’m a Virgo is a superhero satire about a 13-foot-tall black teenager making his way in Oakland. It’s far more wild and surprising than almost anything we normally see on TV.
Actor, director, musician, and certified New York “red diaper baby” Alan Arkin (1934–2023) was the rare Hollywood talent whose onscreen genius grew out of his own innate warmth and kindness.
With a clever opening sequence and an excellent cast, Barbie manages to overcome cumbersome plotting and feminist pieties to provide a delightful spectacle of funny moments that add up to something pretty good.
FX’s second season of The Bear gives both dignity and drama to the realities of work.
The new neo-noir series Full Circle, directed by Steven Soderbergh, has big ideas to share about class, race, nationality, and crime. But so far it’s a slog to watch.
Oppenheimer ignores the darker sides of the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer in order to deliver a crowd-pleasing, blockbuster spectacle.
Zach Cregger has never seen a Resident Evil movie, and that’s definitely for the better. His reboot is a fast, funny, scary blast of pure genre filmmaking and a darkly comic portrait of a society past collapse.
Paul Reubens and his brilliant character Pee-wee Herman offered viewers a kind of weird, joyful, hilarious television and film that we aren’t lucky enough to get very often.
In Maestro, Bradley Cooper plays famed conductor Leonard Bernstein, but the film leaves out the complicating — and fascinating — real-life details for a more streamlined, tear-jerking product. It will doubtless do well at the Oscars.
Making the leap from four-paneled comic to animated series, Nathan W. Pyle’s Apple TV+ show Strange Planet drowns its unique and subtle charms with far too much plot, character, and story. It’s unfortunately boring as hell.
In Wonka, Timothée Chalamet dons the eccentric chocolatier’s purple jacket in yet another film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This one is playful and harmless, but it can’t touch the 1971 original movie.
The new HBO docuseries Telemarketers is a wonderfully weird trip through a scammer call center that swindled money for police and lined the pockets of a clutch of entrepreneurial creeps. You should watch it right away.