Reviews
Here are the best TV shows, movies, books, comics, and music to read, watch, and listen to right now.
Rian Johnson’s murder mystery follow-up takes on the self-styled founder class, with riotous results.
Netflix’s hit show had real romantic promise in the first season. Now, it’s sadistic.
James Gray dramatizes a key moment in his 1980s childhood without solving its problems.
A new Italian season of the hit HBO show is haunted by mortality.
The Passenger is out now, and Stella Maris is out in December. They’re McCarthy’s first new books since 2006.
House of the Dragon’s first season staved off war as long as it could.
Inconvenient history, long buried, finally gets the spotlight in Netflix’s Descendant.
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson re-team for Martin McDonagh’s riotous fable that’s about more than a friend breakup.
There are 3 things you need to be a great Fanny Brice. Lea Michele has 2 of them.
The knotty but triumphant role true crime played in the case of Adnan Syed, subject of the 2014 podcast Serial.
Prophecies and fatal misunderstandings abound.
Cate Blanchett stars in a tightly wound masterpiece that slices through class anxiety and power.
The author of Little Fires Everywhere’s new book, Our Missing Hearts, brings Cold War dystopia into the present.
Ruben Ostlund doesn’t think we’re hypocrites.
On the Endgamification of everything.
How the director of an astonishing new documentary used old government footage to shed light on the present.
If childbirth is a battle, then Targaryen mothers are war veterans.
From The Fabelmans to Bardo to Armageddon Time, the filmmakers are making their memoirs.
The Whale is more than the movie where Brendan Fraser wears a fat suit.
This graphic memoir delves into some of the world’s most plentiful — and destructive — oil mines.
The plot is based on a horrifying true story from 2011, but the resistance philosophy goes back to St. Augustine.
Tamsyn Muir’s latest sequel to Gideon the Ninth brings a vital new urgency to the Locked Tomb series.
The HBO show finally addresses its sticky sexual subtext.
Three Thousand Years of Longing caps an off-the-rails summer — one that might be the future.
Nathan Fielder, Leslie Jamison, Martin Buber, I, it, Thou, empathy, and, of course, television.
The Amazon Prime version cut out the protagonist of the 1992 original movie. It’s the best choice it could have made.
The MCU’s version of a legal procedural can be fun as hell.
Three new movies recall the 1930s gangster movie era, but with a twist.
Nathan Fielder’s wild HBO show is reality TV at its most bizarre. Or is it a documentary? Or memoir? Or something else?
Brad Pitt and a bunch of cameos still carry the movie.
Loneliness, longing, and love in the third pandemic summer.
How Thirteen Lives avoids the problems of other movies that are ripped from recent headlines.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got married, so I revisited their infamous 2003 flop.
Unpacking the spectacle at the heart of the movie’s mysteries.
The new adaptation of the Jane Austen classic, starring Dakota Johnson, swings wildly from dour to dull.
Director Sara Dosa explains why it’s a love triangle and a guide to life, all in one.
From great blockbusters to a mockumentary about a talking inch-high shell.
Baz Luhrmann’s movie about The King belly-flops, but in an interesting way.
Still sad, no longer young, kind of literary.
A new novel paints a portrait of a world ruled by almighty algorithm.