Film: Asteroid City
The pandemic utterly destroyed moviegoing for me over the past few years, so Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (2023) is the first film I’ve seen on the big screen since Star …
TV: Bad Sisters (Season 1)
The depth and quality of Apple’s content library continues to impress with Bad Sisters, a time-jumping, seriocomic mystery about complicated, highly dysfunctional families. This Ireland-based series involves the tight-knit but sketchy …
TV: Ted Lasso (Season 3)
Ted Lasso arrived like a meteor, and it was the show the world needed right when it needed it most. It departs, almost four years later, an awkward shadow of …
TV: Barry (Season 4)
Certain shows demand a specific ending, and Barry is definitely a case in point. In its early seasons, this brilliant comedy spun comic gold out of a simple, high-concept premise: …
TV: Mrs. Davis
One has to admire the sheer chutzpah of Mrs. Davis, an unlikely contraption that one imagines might have just decided to be a limited series to forestall an inevitable early …
TV: The Big Door Prize (Season 1)
Panning for gold in the streams of streaming, one could be forgiven for overlooking The Big Door Prize, given its oblique, forgettable title. But the show—based on a book by …
Film: Flux Gourmet
Weirdness for the sake of weirdness can have its charms, and in its own perverse way, Flux Gourmet (2022) does have…some. But does it add up to anything? Perhaps not …
TV: American Auto (Season 2)
For all its considerable attributes, something about American Auto doesn’t entirely work. Justin Spitzer’s follow-up to the uneven but generally winning Superstore, American Auto takes us to the offices of …
TV: Beef
Road-rage thriller, dark comedy, empathetic drama, a tale of rival antiheroes—Netflix’s Beef ticks multiple boxes. While it doesn’t always seem to know what it wants to be, it still manages …
Film: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
On the spectrum of D&D fandom, I’m somewhere in the middle: enough history with the game to remember it fondly, but not so much that it’s baked into my DNA. …
TV: Extraordinary (Season 1)
The British live-action comedy-fantasy Extraordinary has an identical premise to the animated Disney film Encanto: what if everyone received a superpower as a coming-of-age rite? Poor Jen (Máiréad Tyers) finds herself …
TV: Moone Boy (Season 1)
Moone Boy (2012–2015) might be viewed as an ancestor of Derry Girls: a quirky, off-the-wall period sitcom set in Ireland. It’s about a young boy named Martin Moone (David Rawle) …
Film: How It Ends
Future media historians writing about film production from the COVID-19 pandemic will find a perfect case study in How It Ends (2021)—not just for its technical execution, but for its …
TV: Abbott Elementary (Season 2)
Abbott Elementary’s stock skyrocketed after a short inaugural year, including numerous awards, so it’s unsurprising it scored a twenty-two-episode renewal. While the extra time leads to a few weak plot …
Film: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Compared to many, I’ve been an infrequent passenger on the Nicholas Cage train, which should explain my initial indifference to The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)—a project engineered to …
TV: Party Down (Season 3)
The timing just wasn’t right for Party Down when it arrived in 2009, too early for the Peak TV boom that might have ensured its longevity. That actually suits the …