Shirley Li | The Atlantic

Why Can’t Euphoria Grow Up?

2026-04-12T21:00:00-04:00

Early in Euphoria’s newest season, a whisper of a young woman walks down a crowded street in Mexico. She has swallowed several tiny bags of powdered fentanyl, each so-called balloon ingested painfully with the help of a bottle of cheap lubricant. As Rue (played by Zendaya) narrates that these balloons need to stay intact, the woman collapses. The next scene finds her dead, a mess of balloons piled next to her.

Welcome back to TV’s most disturbing show—sort of. The HBO drama about disaffected Gen Zers has never been an easy watch, but its latest season is working overtime to provoke viewers. Set five years after the events of the Season 2 finale, Season 3 of Euphoria has brought back the bulk of its cast, whose characters are now in their 20s and in various states of torment. Rue, who began the series as an addict returning from rehab, is now forced to work for a local drug queenpin. Nate (Jacob Elordi) has taken over the family construction business and is in dangerous financial trouble; Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), his aimless stay-at-home wife-to-be, finds work humiliating herself on OnlyFans; and both Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Lexi (Maude Apatow) are toiling away as Hollywood assistants. Adulthood, according to Euphoria, is a miserable exercise in futility—a bleak experience in which nobody actually grows up.

[Read: Maybe you’ll never really know who you’re marrying]

That nihilism proves to be a weak foundation for a show otherwise well positioned to reinvent itself after more than four years off the air. Unlike other teen dramas, Euphoria was never concerned with the traditional growing pains of young adulthood. Instead, its first two seasons depicted extremely mature, often distressing moments—a high schooler having sex with an older man, a shoot-out that ends in the death of a child, a flashback to Rue overdosing. Its hypnotic cinematography added a surreal sheen, heightening its examination of kids inundated with hypersexualized social media and constant anxiety-inducing news. But Euphoria also provided glimmers of real hope for their future. Its ensemble’s turbulent inner lives shifted through their relationships: Rue’s budding romance with her classmate Jules (Hunter Schafer) in particular anchored the story, keeping it from devolving into a seductive collage without substance.

But Season 3, of which I’ve seen the first three episodes, is mostly just well-shot pictures. The camerawork is still beautiful: As Rue makes her way across the border after a drug run, the screen fills with breathtaking images of desert sunsets and wide-open spaces. Otherwise, the series comes off as a shadow of its former self, unable to justify following each protagonist on their wildly different post-high-school journeys. Scenes of Rue being mentored by Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a ruthless strip-club owner, seem disconnected from those of Nate arguing with Cassie about why she’s dressing up as a sexy puppy, which in turn feel irrelevant to a sequence of Lexi driving her boss around a studio lot. Rue’s ever-present voice-over, in which she muses about faith, the directionlessness of her peers, and the difficulty of striking it rich, does little to hold the story together. Everyone on Euphoria may be struggling, but none of them seems to need anyone else for help.

[Read: What porn taught a generation of women]

The constant gestures toward issues plaguing Gen Zers also feel empty. Early episodes incorporate footage from the coronavirus pandemic; Jules declares that she rejects monogamy while on a date; Maddy monologues about how she’s nothing like the rest of her age group because, she says, “I believe in capitalism.” These moments appear designed to be clipped for social media, turning the cast members into mouthpieces for snappy quips mocking their generation. And as other parts of Euphoria descend into crime-novel clichés, the show muddies what always seemed to be its central conceit: using its provocations to examine how these traumatized young people make sense of the world around them.

Then again, Euphoria’s creator, Sam Levinson, who based some of the ensemble’s turmoil on his own teenage experiences, has said that his approach isn’t “anthropological.” His interest, he told The Hollywood Reporter last month, was in portraying “individuals,” not an entire demographic, and he was looking forward to the “very exciting” ways the characters could mature out of high school. The third season certainly offers thrills, mostly in the form of a parade of celebrities: Guest actors include Rosalía, Sharon Stone, and Marshawn Lynch. But their collective star power can’t mask how little insight Euphoria’s storytelling offers into the way its characters are processing their 20s.

As I watched, I often thought of Industry, another scandalous HBO drama that evolved significantly in its latest outing. On that show, the major investment bank the young protagonists worked for closes, leaving the tight-knit group scattered and prompting a major cast member to exit the series. Industry has thrived in its reinvention, however, in large part because it expanded its scope beyond the trading floor and challenged its characters’ beliefs about wealth and power. Euphoria doesn’t interrogate how the passage of time has affected its ensemble—why and how they’ve changed, beyond the job titles and social status they’ve acquired. If anything, the ensemble now resembles caricatures of scandalous 20-somethings. The fragile world that Euphoria built—a world that improbably balanced the shocking with the heartfelt—has collapsed.

Maybe You’ll Never Really Know Who You’re Marrying

2026-04-08T15:48:05-04:00

The following contains spoilers for the film The Drama.

The Drama features the kind of unforgettable first-kiss story that would belong in the First Kiss Hall of Fame, if such a thing existed. Late one night, Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) tries to sneak Emma (Zendaya) into the museum at which he works, but his ID clears only the first of multiple doors. The alarms go off, the two get locked in the entry hall, and as Emma panics, Charlie rushes over to kiss her, quieting her fear.

It’s swoon-worthy—or is it? The Drama follows Charlie and Emma in the days leading up to their wedding, during which the rose-colored glasses each of them wore slip off. One evening, Emma makes a dark confession that casts her in a completely different light; Charlie’s reaction, in turn, shakes her trust. Moments that had seemed cute take on a sinister bent. Maybe their first kiss wasn’t a spontaneous expression of care, but a deliberate attempt to startle Emma. Maybe it was a bad omen. Maybe, Charlie and Emma wonder, they shouldn’t get married.

Pop culture has been preoccupied with commitment angst lately. The hit Ryan Murphy–produced limited series Love Story, which just concluded, dramatized the real-life courtship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in the 1990s, exploring whether Bessette was ever truly ready to join the Kennedy family. The steamy romance Heated Rivalry saw two gay men spend nearly a decade trying to define their relationship; although being closeted played a major role in their hesitation, the show also mined tension from the characters’ doubts about having an exclusive partnership. Strangers, the writer Belle Burden’s best-selling memoir published in January, examines why her husband suddenly wanted a divorce after 20 years together. And reality TV series capitalize on how entertaining it can be to see others deal with questions of settling down. Shows such as Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On treat marriage as both a reward and a threat: Contestants who get engaged receive more screen time. Failing to partner up means going home.

Films have only recently begun to catch up with this trend, in part because of the decline in the number of romantic comedies being made. Most of the love stories that do make it to the big screen still generally follow broad, conventional strokes, capturing the bliss of coupling up or the blues of falling apart. Last year’s Materialists was the rare movie tackling whether finding The One matters in an era when people seek to optimize their dating life. The Drama, though, understands today’s particular anxiety about saying yes to someone forever: It rejects the impulse to deliver a happy ending or breakup saga. Instead, it teeters between those extremes and illustrates how getting married can be alternately romantic and terrifying, fulfilling and draining.

[Read: What we lost when we lost rom-coms]

The Drama unfolds over the course of the stressful week leading up to the central couple’s wedding. The turbulence begins with a secret Emma has been keeping for more than a decade: that as a teen, she had almost carried out a mass school shooting. She’d planned it thoroughly, even going so far as to choose her first targets and record a confession video. When a gun-related tragedy happened near her town, however, she saw the devastation and decided against completing her mission.

But Emma’s past matters less to how The Drama unfolds than to the aftermath of her confession. Emma and Charlie desperately try to move forward, but Charlie can’t stop thinking that his wife-to-be no longer resembles the person he thought he knew. Emma, meanwhile, grows anxious over how poorly Charlie communicates his fears. Love in the time of easy outrage—of shallow social-media interactions, of relentless headline-driven anxiety, of brain rot—is terribly risky, The Drama posits, and maybe even dangerous: Dating amounts to placing trust in total strangers. Falling for someone involves revealing yourself in ways your partner may never understand. And publicly vowing to be together ’til death can turn out to be nothing more than an arduous performance.

Watching The Drama made me think of the essayist Lindy West, whose memoir Adult Braces turned the internet into a fountain of opinions upon its release last month. In the book, West reveals that shortly after her wedding, her husband told her that he had a girlfriend and wanted to be in a nonmonogamous marriage. Despite West’s initial resistance, she eventually agreed to the arrangement after taking a solo cross-country road trip to think it over. Much of Adult Braces involves West justifying her decision; as a result, readers have questioned whether she stayed in her marriage out of love or out of fear—fear of being alone, yes, but also of being perceived as intolerant of modern mores, of being selfish, of being inflexible when things got tricky.

This is the kind of mental gymnastics about romance that fuels The Drama. The commitment angst plaguing Charlie and Emma over Emma’s secret seems to have a lot to do with several contemporary concerns—mixed messaging about gender roles, confusion over what constitutes a moral failing—that yield knee-jerk responses. After Emma is coaxed into sharing her secret during a misguided bonding exercise with her wedding party, her maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), takes the revelation personally. Emma’s intentions are unforgivable, says Rachel, whose cousin was injured in a shooting. When Rachel threatens to drop out of the wedding, Charlie tries to appease her by piling on what he believes are palatable lies: He makes up a story about Emma going through a significant childhood trauma, as if to explain why she’d ever consider doing such a terrible thing.

Yet Charlie is much less capable of soothing his own nerves, and he fixates on whether Emma harbors violent tendencies. At one point, he receives a coffee-table book featuring scantily clad women posing with firearms; he begins imagining Emma as one of the models, suggestively holding assault rifles on their bed. Paranoid, he looks to his co-worker for validation of his choice to go through with the wedding. But when she tells him that, under the same (and, to her mind, hypothetical) circumstances, she wouldn’t stay with her partner, he snaps and responds in a reckless manner: by kissing her aggressively in his office. It’s as if doing something bad himself might help him understand Emma—or damn them both.

[Read: Why marriage survives]

By the movie’s end, the charming love story has devolved into a disorienting series of mind games. Maybe Charlie doesn’t want to be seen by anyone as doing the wrong thing—whatever that even means. Yet some of his actions, like his spontaneous decision to cheat on his fiancée, come off as empty provocations. Instead, The Drama is most successful when it plays with conventional romance tropes to capture how off-putting modern courtship has become. During Charlie and Emma’s meet-cute at a coffee shop, Charlie dashes over to Emma’s seat when she steps away, snaps a quick photo of the book she’s reading, then skims a summary so he can pretend he’s read it. The scene wittily evokes app-driven dating: Here are two strangers, one of whom is wooing the other based on the shallow information he’s acquired through clumsy sleuthing. Later, the couple has to pause their discussion of Emma’s past to meet with their wedding photographer, Frances (Zoë Winters). Sensing the couple’s unease, Frances turns their meeting into a practice shoot. What should be a chance for the two to loosen up, however, results only in forced smiles and awkward silences.

Watching Emma and Charlie’s plans collapse into chaos, I was struck by how well their journey to their wedding day conjured the violence built into today’s language of love and commitment. No one is merely “going steady” anymore; now it’s about “matching each other’s freak,” as well as “ghosting” and “zombieing,” “cuffing” and “love bombing.” As tongue-in-cheek as these terms may be, they still sound somewhat alarming out of context—a dissonance The Drama captures through absurd, dreamlike flourishes. Charlie and Emma’s growing fears about their impending ceremony start to overwhelm their thoughts: Emma pictures Charlie concocting an over-the-top plan to leave her. Charlie has a nightmare in which he finds the guests at his wedding reception dead.

I’m not convinced The Drama needed sequences like these, especially not when the film skims over Charlie’s own history and speeds through its final act. But the overarching result is a movie that depicts love as an unsettling force and commitment as an eternal mystery. The climactic wedding, after all, is more distressing than celebratory: The DJ they’d hired at the last minute accidentally blares ear-splitting feedback noise. Charlie’s new dress shoes leave his toes a bloodied mess. And worse, he gives a postnuptial speech that exposes his lingering uncertainty about Emma, horrifying everyone in the room. Even its closing scene toys with doubt: Charlie and Emma are shown reuniting after their disastrous reception, pretending to be strangers so that they can start over. Their reconciliation is sweet, but it also lays a trap. As viewers, we’ve spent too long watching them question each other to believe that playing a little pretend will fix everything between them. Yes, the couple is married, the drama is over, the credits have begun to roll. And yet.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

TV’s Failing Cure for Middle-Aged Malaise

2026-04-01T15:18:59-04:00

If the new Apple TV show Imperfect Women had premiered in the 2010s, it would probably have commanded the zeitgeist. The thriller, about a group of old friends whose cushy suburban lives unravel after one of them is murdered, has all the makings of an addictive watch. The whodunit comes riddled with beguiling red herrings and sordid twists. The cast is stacked with Emmy winners and hey-it’s-that-guy! actors. It’s the kind of glossy, elevated soap opera that would have fit neatly alongside Scandal and the rest of ABC’s melodrama-heavy programming a decade ago—and not just because Kerry Washington is one of the show’s stars. Middle-aged women caught up in wildly dramatic and morally gray predicaments once spelled easy success in ratings and critical acclaim. Just look at Desperate Housewives. Or How to Get Away With Murder. Or Big Little Lies.

As it stands, Imperfect Women isn’t likely to join their ranks in popularity. Although the series has risen to second place on Apple TV’s viewership charts, it hasn’t cracked the top-10 most-watched streaming titles overall in the United States. The overcrowded television landscape makes it harder than ever for any program to stand out, but other shows that mash up the character of the typically wealthy, often bored housewife with the intrigue of a crime thriller haven’t been clicking with viewers either: NBC canceled Grosse Pointe Garden Society, a drama about gardening-club members trying to cover up a murder, after a single season last summer. Prime Video’s The Better Sister, which follows estranged siblings who reconcile after one of them finds her husband dead, also came and went with little fanfare. Recent multi-season series about middle-aged women getting their hands dirty amid their seemingly mundane lives—Yellowjackets, Palm Royale—have ended or will end this year, further thinning out the genre.

Imperfect Women, then, is the latest evidence of the slow decline of what could be called “the messy-mom thriller”—in which violence and mystery pierce the suburban ennui felt by female protagonists of a certain age. Viewers who also belong to that demographic may find these stories more than just entertaining; they’re provocative, told with a level of gravitas rarely afforded to mature experiences of marriage, motherhood, and female friendships. After so many seasons of the troubled likes of Good Girls and Bad Sisters, however, the conceit has begun to feel stale. Many tales of fictional women getting caught up in crime pale in comparison with the real-life scandals that now flood social-media feeds, podcasts, and what feels like every piece of unscripted media. (Even in the already dramatic realm of reality TV, headlines can be too overwhelming for fans and creators alike to ignore.) Watching female characters break free of their perceived status quo by indulging in chaos used to be a guilty pleasure. These days, it’s just noise.

[Read: The slow death of the prestige thriller]

One recent exception cuts through the banality by going beyond showing women break bad. How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, a Netflix series that began streaming in February, follows the broad strokes of the messy-mom thriller: Three dissatisfied women find their routines upended when they become entangled in a suspicious situation. Their journey isn’t exclusively about the mystery, however; the show places equal importance on observing how these former best girlfriends navigate their adult relationship, perhaps grasping that its viewers have had more than their fair share of whodunits. When what was once novel and shocking has become ordinary, familiar comforts offer a more surprising place to find actual thrills.

Shows about crime-solving older women tend to be more concerned with the crimes than with the women themselves. But How to Get to Heaven From Belfast is created by the Derry Girls showrunner Lisa McGee, which explains the show’s exuberant Irish-isms, rat-a-tat dialogue, and characters whose friendship is instantly believable. The three central characters resemble the genre’s typical protagonists—and likely viewers—in that each one is somewhat worn down from the compromises that come with aging. Saoirse (played by Roisin Gallagher), a onetime aspiring playwright, oversees a hit police-procedural series but questions whether she’s wasting her time. Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), the group’s nervous Nellie and de facto rule follower, is trapped at home taking care of her nightmarish mother and pining for the girlfriend who got away. Robyn (Sinéad Keenan), the chattiest of the bunch, has been run ragged trying to mother her three children, all of whom seem intent on splitting her eardrums and driving her mad.

The three reunite under bleak circumstances: Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe), their childhood friend, has died. At the funeral, Saoirse, Dara, and Robyn discover that the body in the casket belongs to a different woman, yet the show rejects the impulse to let the mystery drive the plot. Instead, the group’s evolving dynamics—the way the women absorb, bicker over, and make peace with how they have and haven’t changed—become as important to their story as the conspiracy they’re trying to unravel.

Take, for instance, a moment in an early episode when Dara’s ex-girlfriend spots them planning a boneheaded mission to retrieve the body in Greta’s casket. The interaction leaves Dara deflated, so Robyn and Saoirse immediately work to boost their friend’s confidence, coordinating their barrage of compliments with incredible precision. It’s a heartwarming beat despite not advancing their amateur sleuthing, one that treats the women’s intimacy with the same seriousness afforded to Greta’s disappearance.

[Read: The invisibility of older women]

Belfast, in this way, doubles as a poignant portrait of how women build and maintain their bonds. The show’s flashbacks fill in background details explaining why Greta vanished, while also exploring why Saoirse, Dara, and Robyn can still rely on one another after years of drifting apart. The characters are motivated to continue spending time away from their usual obligations not just because the investigation shakes them loose of their doldrums but also because they enjoy one another’s company. Having a friend go missing isn’t a typical midlife crisis. Feeling like your social life has become nonexistent is.

That resonance has been missing from the wider realm of messy-mom thrillers lately. Friendships are often treated as convenient opportunities for protagonists to deliver exposition dumps. Aging tends to play like a grim impediment to joy that can be dispelled only via lawlessness, extramarital affairs, and, in some cases, death.

Imperfect Women may be the most egregious entry yet: By my count, the show packs in three infidelity subplots, two instances of domestic violence, and one viral video that nearly derails a character’s career—all in the span of eight episodes. It also turns its heroines into wine-guzzling loners, rarely allowing the solid lead cast (Washington, Elisabeth Moss, and Kate Mara) to share the screen. That’s by design; the series shifts among their perspectives every few episodes, generating intrigue out of having multiple unreliable narrators divulge their secrets. As a result, though, the women’s connection ends up ill-defined, robbing the audience of the chance to empathize with them. If anything, I found it hard to buy that these characters ever truly liked one another.

Not every messy-mom thriller can avoid the genre’s overreliance on long-buried secrets and seemingly uncharacteristic rebellions to suggest depth. Even Belfast, in its later episodes, spends too much time untangling what’s going on with Greta, pushing the show into formulaic territory. Yet what keeps it from veering into blandness is its refusal to depend on the kinds of outrageous stakes that play like echoes of news stories. The show understands that older women at home may so badly need a break that they’ll fantasize about appalling impulses (that fictional characters can actually act on). But Belfast also grasps that the greatest pleasure—guilty or otherwise, on-screen and off—may be as simple as finding quality time with a couple of best friends.

Why Does Watching TV Feel Like Homework? (Just Me?)

2026-03-24T18:48:32-04:00

With apologies to baseball, I believe that binge-watching television may have become America’s true pastime. TV sets have ruled living rooms for decades, but gone are the days of viewers exclusively following broadcast schedules. Netflix and its peers have rendered entertainment addictively customizable and hyper-accessible, making entire seasons of shows available at once and commissioning original series of their own. Viewers with a handful of subscriptions can enjoy a staggering array of options to indulge in whenever they want: series old and new, high-brow and low-brow, scripted and unscripted. There’s seemingly no limit to the number of shows you can watch, for hours on end.

Yet an end might be nice. The very term binge-watch implies that the act is a vice, and the bulk of the (still-emerging) research about television habits has found that nonstop watching tends to be associated with negative psychological outcomes; these can include sleep deprivation, a sense of losing control, and melancholy upon finishing a particularly lengthy series. In 2015, a University of Toledo study found that people who spent two to five unbroken hours consuming television exhibited greater anxiety, depression, and stress levels compared with those who didn’t.

I can certainly attest to these effects, even as a person whose job involves keeping up with a lot of television. With the amount of programming available before me, the mere act of watching TV recently began to feel impossible. Just looking at my queue was exhausting, and I imagine that I’m not alone in feeling this way—as in, burned-out from the decision fatigue caused by scrolling through ever-expanding libraries, and from spending too many hours trying to make headway on what I’d fallen behind on, only to forget plot points the next day. Guilt crept in whenever I fell down low-stakes YouTube rabbit holes instead of using that time to catch up on a show; panic rose when I realized that my habits were likely encouraging the reported practice of rewriting scripts to accommodate people’s shortened attention spans.

[Read: The year of ambitious TV watching]

At the risk of cueing the world’s tiniest violin, I felt like my social life was taking a hit too. I couldn’t keep up with TV talk: I kept promising to start series that my friends recommended, even though I still needed to finish, let’s see, Industry and The Traitors and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The Diplomat and Love Story and Wonder Man and Bridgerton and—hang on. How is it possible that the new season of The Pitt is already almost over?

Eventually, I hit pause altogether on watching TV in my free time. (A dire call, considering my job involves keeping up with shows.) Maybe, I thought, I could approach my bloated queue differently. Instead of sporadically choosing a title and plowing through several episodes to determine whether I even enjoyed it, could I somehow make watching TV feel less taxing and more mentally invigorating? Possibly, according to a study published in Acta Psychologica last year. The researchers found that stories that linger in people’s memories can make individuals feel more fulfilled because they’re using what they watched to contextualize the world around them. That tends to happen when the person has a goal in mind for engaging with TV in the first place: perhaps to disengage after a long day, feel reenergized amid a dull one, or spend comforting time with familiar characters.

Unfortunately, those positive outcomes also tend to happen after spending hours continuously immersed in a series—a finding that clashed with the goal that I had settled on: to keep up with television without feeling like I was scaling a monumental pile of homework. Faced with this conundrum, I decided to experiment with the study’s parameters. To make my climb up Mount Watch List as easy as possible, I chose to attempt the two shortest shows in my queue: Netflix’s four-hour limited series Adolescence and the Apple TV drama Pluribus, which comprises nine episodes in its first season. The entirety of Adolescence dropped at the same time upon release, and Pluribus aired weekly, but I set my own schedule, opting to view one episode of Adolescence and two of Pluribus each week over the course of a month. Perhaps the operation—neither bingeing nor avoiding TV, and instead watching at a steady pace—would fix my neuro-technical difficulties.

The “Next Episode” button immediately posed a problem for my success. Despite my aversion to speeding through several episodes at once, suddenly it was all I wanted to do. Adolescence’s sprawling ensemble cast, intense dissection of a murderer’s mind, and ambitious visual style made me wish I could watch the rest in a single sitting. As for Pluribus, its glacial pace actually made it hard for me to stop watching as well. Halting my viewing every two chapters left me impatient—and prone to encountering spoilers if I poked around online for more context.

[Read: When did TV watching peak?]

The more I slowed down, however, the more attention I paid to the storytelling. Knowing that I wouldn’t get more Pluribus for the day made me want more out of the show: I replayed scenes I liked, scrutinized Rhea Seehorn’s performance as the reluctant heroine, and paused on a shot of a character’s notebook to scan for clues. I didn’t seek to linger in the world of Adolescence in the same way; it’s too bleak for a rewatch of any length. But I found that I absorbed everything much more carefully, just so I could retain the facts during my wait for the next installment.

As the weeks went on, it occurred to me that my TV-watching stress hadn’t been about the quantity or quality of the shows I took in, but about how I thought of them. Before this thoroughly unscientific endeavor, I had felt like I was always playing catch-up. Making my way through Adolescence and Pluribus didn’t evoke that sensation, perhaps because I didn’t feel pressured to finish them quickly. I’d made watching TV an active undertaking, rather than an exhausting interruption in my routine. In the moments after I finished both shows, I felt strangely accomplished—and a little surprised at how much I looked forward to beginning another.

That said, in the weeks since, I haven’t miraculously become capable of fatigue-free viewing. My minimal efforts—following the classic method of setting a schedule and giving real thought into what to put on—haven’t turned everything around, and I’m not surprised. Maybe the right show will do the trick, but to get there, I’ll need to push the experiment further by testing different genres, run times, and streaming platforms. It’s helpful, then, that I’ve managed to return to TV in my idle hours; I’m thrilled for the winning snake-charmer traitor on The Traitors, and I’m looking forward to the rest of The Pitt. In other words, I’m just enjoying television the way the medium was meant to be enjoyed: in moderation.

This article has been updated to clarify that research shows that negative psychological outcomes are associated with, but not necessarily caused by, binge-watching.

A Hilarious—And Poignant—Oscars Moment

2026-03-15T22:38:36-04:00

It was one of the funniest lines of the night: “This is freaking insane, and I have one before you, which is also crazy.” Toward the end of her acceptance speech, Cassandra Kulukundis, onstage as the winner of the Oscars’ first casting award ever for her work on One Battle After Another, shouted out the movie’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson. Her tongue-in-cheek jab spoke to their history as creative partners, and to the fact that Anderson had been nominated 14 times for an Academy Award heading into Sunday night. Those 14 nominations might as well have been shared between them: The two have been working together since Anderson’s first feature, 1996’s Hard Eight. (Anderson would end up winning his first Oscar later that evening, for Best Adapted Screenplay.)

Even the most casual moviegoer can understand the importance of casting directors. The job requires working closely with a film’s director to select the actors who eventually appear on-screen. That means choosing the right performers for the right parts, searching for the kind of chemistry that will enliven a film while sifting through scores of fresh, unheralded talent. Casting directors can make or break an actor’s career—or the success of a film itself.

Yet for much of their history, the Oscars overlooked the profession. Casting directors finally got their own branch within the Academy (the voting body behind the awards) in 2013, but it took until 2024 for the organization to announce a trophy recognizing the job itself. Kulukundis was a worthy recipient among a stacked field of nominees. For One Battle After Another, she built a wide-ranging group of performers, including movie stars playing against type (Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up revolutionary), character actors chewing scenery (Benicio del Toro as a conscientious mentor figure), and relatively green newcomers tasked with carrying the story (the first-time film actor Chase Infiniti, as a teenager caught up in the violence her parents started).

[Read: The misunderstanding of Perfidia]

But Kulukundis’s moment onstage wasn’t memorable just for being the first time the Academy has celebrated casting directors. Her speech was remarkably refreshing for its candor: She expressed the frustrations she and her cohorts have felt in being overlooked for years, and hinted at just how much someone like her does in the role—all while winning over the room by acknowledging the sheer thrill of taking home an Oscar.

Like many others who won tonight, Kulukundis began by thanking the Academy. As she did, however, she pointed out not only how long it took for her job to receive an award, but how long it took to be credited at all. “I have to obviously thank the Academy for even adding this category, and for the casting directors that fought tirelessly to make it happen despite everything in their way,” she said. “I dedicate this to you and to the casting directors who never got a chance to get up here, who didn’t even get a chance to get their name on the movie.”

At the same time, she used the spotlight to slyly acknowledge several other behind-the-scenes roles, noting that she knows she’s not everyone’s favorite colleague. “I’m in all of your departments, whether you like me or not,” she said, “whether it’s locations, who really hates me; stunts, production design; art directors—yeah, everyone.” Without going into specifics, Kulukundis made clear that casting directors, along with their teams, can be quietly involved in every step of a film’s making. Their choices affect members of every department, not just those the actors they bring on board.

The Oscars, to their credit, did well by the casting directors they finally honored. The ceremony repurposed a format used in the past for rolling out awards, by having five presenters—each an actor from a film nominated for Best Casting—onstage at once. Infiniti introduced the audience to Kulukundis, pointing out that she owes her career to Kulukundis’s work. “Great casting directors,” Infiniti said, “know how to bring together actors we love with new faces, and make a film feel unexpected and completely original.” That’s true of One Battle After Another—and, as it turned out, of Kulukundis’s personality-packed speech, too.

Cinema’s Newest, Grimmest Trend

2026-03-12T07:00:00-04:00

This article contains spoilers for the films Sirāt, Hamnet, Train Dreams, The Voice of Hind Rajab, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Frankenstein, and One Battle After Another.

For months, I could not stop talking about the film Sirāt—or rather, the experience of watching it. I peppered my praise with vague disclaimers, in an effort to avoid spoilers: “You have to see it,” I told friends, “but you’ll probably find it upsetting.” I know I did: The thriller, about a man named Luis (played by Sergi López) searching for his missing daughter among LSD-addled ravers in the southern Moroccan desert, is packed with transfixing but brutal moments. One scene midway through startled me so much that I yelped. Luis is helping other travelers move their vehicle while his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), plays with his dog, Pipa, by a cliff. Worried about Esteban’s safety, Luis instructs the boy to go sit inside the family van, and he obeys. Then the van rolls backwards, Esteban screams for help, and both he and his beloved pet plummet to their deaths.

A long list of children have perished on the big screen; blockbusters have been claiming kids’ lives since poor little Alex Kintner spent a few too many minutes playing in the water in Jaws. But of late, this plot point is omnipresent—particularly among the nominees for this weekend’s Oscars. The 11-year-old titular character in Hamnet, up for Best Picture, succumbs to the plague. In Train Dreams, another Best Picture contender, the protagonist’s toddler and wife vanish in a fire. And The Voice of Hind Rajab, which is competing against Sirāt for Best International Feature, dramatizes the real-life killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl caught in the cross fire of the Gaza war in 2024. Academy voters, it seems, were irresistibly drawn this year to movies featuring children in jeopardy.

These stories go beyond supplying shock value. Despite their obvious differences in setting and premise, each one conveys the difficulty of imagining a future amid an apprehensive present. The bulk of Hamnet, for instance, explores how the boy’s parents fail to process their grief and drift apart after his death. Train Dreams, too, largely observes how the disappearance of his child leaves the bereft father rooted to the stretch of land on which he’d last seen her, convinced that she and her mother will come back. The recent cinematic landscape has been marked by films like these, which rely on provocative scenes of children being tormented by man-made conflicts, natural disasters, and horrible accidents. These scenes complicate the emotional journeys of the adult characters while tapping into the dread that viewers themselves may feel about the world around them.

[Read: The long history of the Hamnet myth]

Call this unfortunate, emerging subgenre the anti-coming-of-age story. The plots tend to go something like this: Adults fail to protect a child—or sometimes a childlike adult—and as a result, the kid loses their innocence or their life punishingly early. These youthful characters are usually in supporting roles, and they’re born amid unresolved political conflicts (One Battle After Another, Avatar: Fire and Ash), left in the care of troubled guardians (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Die My Love), or are taken advantage of for their naivete (Bugonia, Frankenstein). In the movies Bring Her Back and Weapons, supernatural forces take over children’s minds. An adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk, perhaps his novel with the highest underage body count, hit theaters in September. Even the two biggest superhero hits of 2025—The Fantastic Four: First Steps and James Gunn’s take on Superman—featured set pieces in which the lives of literal babies were threatened.

The bulk of these anti-coming-of-age movies play like horror flicks even when they don’t explicitly fit the genre. The suffocating camerawork used throughout If I Had Legs I’d Kick You; the disorienting violence of Die My Love; the assaultive sound design of Sirāt—each evokes the anxiety and hopelessness its characters feel about improving their circumstances, for themselves and their offspring. Doubt courses through the films’ endings: The mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You promises to be a better parent, but that’s tough to believe after almost two hours of watching her reject the role. The mother in Die My Love adores her son, but she ultimately deserts her family and walks into a forest fire naked—a surreal visual, and a choice that leaves her and her family’s fate ambiguous. Sirāt, too, signals a deeply uncertain future for Luis; it concludes with him on a train, heading to an unknown destination.

Many of these films earn their ruthless plot points by rendering them plausible. Some deliberately echo reality, reminding audiences to take note of the pain that kids can experience every day. In Sirāt, snippets of radio broadcasts about an unspecified war play in the background, casting a bleak shadow over Luis’s search for his daughter. In Weapons, the father of one of the young victims has a nightmare of a giant assault rifle hovering in the sky. The children also run away from their homes, their arms outstretched behind them—a pose influenced by the infamous Napalm Girl photograph taken during the Vietnam War. “I think that image is so awful, and the way she’s holding her arms out just killed me,” the director Zach Cregger told Entertainment Weekly. “I think there’s something really upsetting about that posture.”

[Read: The bizarre tragedy of children’s movies]

Not every movie that portrays a child in trouble ends on a worrisome note. The characters in Hamnet and Train Dreams eventually come to terms with how every life—no matter how short or unremarkable—contains meaning. The action in One Battle After Another hinges on a teenager who was abandoned by her mother, raised by a less-than-responsible parent, and then kidnapped by her biological (and bigoted) father, yet she emerges as the rare child in peril who determines her own future. And Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein, which the writer-director reimagined into a tale about fathers and sons, also leads to a comforting, even cathartic denouement: In its final moments, the guileless, misunderstood Creature reconciles with his creator before walking off to feel the sun on his face.

“Life never calls to tell you, Next week, be careful,” the director Oliver Laxe told IndieWire, about his decision to kill off a child in Sirāt. “The film is about this, about how life doesn’t give you what you are looking for; life gives you what you need, and there is a difference.” That goes for this past year’s grimmest cinematic trend too. These movies reflect a poignant, urgent truth: If we’re not careful with their present, the youngest people won’t get to shape their own future. They’ll be the ones who get left behind.

10 Standout Indie Movies to Watch for This Year

2026-02-14T08:00:00-05:00

This year’s Sundance Film Festival was the last in its longtime home of Park City, Utah. But Sundance’s final hurrah there—it moves to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027—didn’t feel much like a finale; instead, it was a more muted affair than previous years, with few outright buzzy premieres. This is perhaps in part because the institution of Sundance is changing, as the potential for indie movies’ success seems less certain than ever. The slate did contain plenty of gems, however, many of which I couldn’t stop thinking about as I hopscotched across town. Below, based on nearly two weeks of screenings, are the most memorable, inventive films I saw; no release dates have been announced yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for them.

Greta Zozula / Sundance Institute

Josephine (seeking distribution)

This year’s festival darling—winning both of Sundance’s top honors, the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize—is a masterful drama about a harrowing event. Josephine, directed by Beth de Araújo, is named after its 8-year-old protagonist (played by Mason Reeves), who witnesses a violent assault. She unsurprisingly struggles to put what she saw into words, instead acting out in class and envisioning the perpetrator as an unnerving imaginary friend. But Josephine’s parents, Damien (Channing Tatum) and Claire (Gemma Chan), disagree over how to handle their daughter’s confusion; they don’t know how to articulate what happened, either. Such heavy developments could come off like the material of after-school specials, but de Araújo never loses sight of Josephine’s raw sensitivity. She captures the young girl’s delicate psyche while interrogating whether fully protecting a child’s innocence is ever possible.

William Greaves Productions / Sundance Institute

Once Upon a Time in Harlem (Neon, release date TBD)

In August 1972, the filmmaker William Greaves threw a party at Duke Ellington’s home in the titular New York neighborhood. He invited luminaries to discuss and debate the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, including the actor Leigh Whipper, the musicians Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and the librarian and playwright Regina Anderson. Over glasses of wine and champagne, they joked, bickered, and considered how the Black creative experience had evolved since they anchored the movement some 50 years prior. Footage of the evening taken by the late Greaves is already a priceless time capsule of a once-in-a-lifetime hangout session, but his son, David, has stitched the unvarnished conversations captured that day together with examples of their subjects’ many achievements—literary, artistic, and political. The result is an atmospheric, electrifying documentary and a moving testament to the importance of remembering.

The Invite / Sundance Institute

The Invite (A24, release date TBD)

Forget infidelity, money troubles, or miscommunication: Marriage, according to Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial effort, is at its messiest when a couple simply refuses to acknowledge that it’s over. But the tightly wound Angela (Wilde) thinks she has the solution. One night, she blindsides her husband, Joe (Seth Rogen), by throwing a dinner party for their enigmatic neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penélope Cruz)—who, judging by their constant, loud lovemaking, are absolutely thriving. Based on the Spanish film The People Upstairs, with a script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, The Invite begins as an anxiety-ridden relationship drama before turning into a riotous comedic showcase for its cast. Rogen is the ensemble’s MVP, finding an unexpected tenderness as a man trying to endure the night’s overwhelming discomfort without revealing any of his insecurities. As it turns out, the most chaotic dinner parties are the most fun—for us, anyway.

John Wilson / Sundance Institute

The History of Concrete (seeking distribution)

Don’t be fooled by the title: This latest project from John Wilson, who masterminded HBO’s idiosyncratic docuseries How to With John Wilson, isn’t really about the gray material that makes up much of our infrastructure. Rather, it’s a poignant exploration of society’s desire for what concrete symbolizes—order, uniformity, permanence—and how difficult it can be to defy that need. Like Wilson’s show, The History of Concrete is packed with gleeful detours that take him to, among many destinations, a wax museum in Italy and a bubble-gum-removal company in New York. Wilson is also drawn to creative types: He interviews an opera singer, shadows a short-film director, and even joins a room full of writers learning how to produce the perfect Hallmark-movie script. In his meandering, he gathers insights into what it’s like to make art—and how even the most unconventional work can last lifetimes.

Lol Crawley / Sundance Institute

Wicker (seeking distribution)

Something is wrong with Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman). Many things, actually: She reeks. She lives in a cottage on the outskirts of a medieval village. And weirdest of all, she’s acquired a husband made out of wicker (Alexander Skarsgård, in a terrific set of prosthetics). Based on Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story about a community unusually hung up on marrying off its women—brides are given collars, not rings, at their weddings—Wicker is a whimsical and romantic fable that critiques the limits of assigned social roles. Fisherwoman’s perfect, albeit woven, husband baffles her neighbors and the local queen bee (Elizabeth Debicki); her intention to continue working after her marriage only bewilders them further. The film’s eccentric flourishes may sound corny, but the writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer ground the premise in a deeply sincere sense of yearning. And Colman is, as always, superb.

Elia Saikaly / Sundance Institute

The Last First: Winter K2 (Apple, release date TBD)

Several documentaries at Sundance this year investigated the relationship between the world’s natural wonders and human interference. But whereas those films examined how people affect the environment, The Last First delves into the opposite. K2 is the second-highest peak in the world, and long offered a tantalizing challenge to climbers hoping to make history: The mountain had never been summited in the winter season, in part because of its extremely steep faces. Using footage captured by climbers from various expeditions, the director Amir Bar-Lev constructs a portrait of perseverance—and hubris. The Last First makes clear from the outset that it will end in tragedy, yet it’s easy to get swept up in the competitiveness of the mountaineers. The film offers a sharp study of what drives so many to attempt near-impossible ascents, and why audiences can’t stop watching them in turn.

Sundance Institute

The Friend’s House Is Here (seeking distribution)

Pari (Mahshad Bahram) and Hanna (Hana Mana), roommates living in Tehran, pursue creative passions that could get them in trouble with the Iranian government: The former is a theater director of immersive, underground shows, while the latter is a performer who has built an Instagram following by illegally dancing in front of historical landmarks. The Friend’s House Is Here is itself a piece of protest art; the film was smuggled out of Tehran to its Park City premiere. Yet the movie isn’t merely dissident cinema. Though neither Pari nor Hanna can escape the political reality of their home country, their story is infused with charm and anchored by their exuberant friendship. The directors Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz spotlight how Pari and Hanna have built their bond by expressing themselves freely; they dance in their living room, throw raucous dinner parties, and turn whatever they can into a stage.

Michael Latham / Sundance Institute

Silenced (seeking distribution)

In this chilling documentary, the director Selina Miles carefully recounts what happened to three very different women after they publicized allegations of sexual assault. Brittany Higgins, a former junior government staffer in Australia, and Amber Heard, the Hollywood actress, both made personal accusations against two powerful public figures; the Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, meanwhile, reported on an anonymous group of women’s claims about a well-known filmmaker. The men, who denied any wrongdoing, filed retaliatory defamation lawsuits—turning their accusers’ accounts over to the court of public opinion. Through archival footage and a variety of interviews, Silenced carefully tracks its subjects’ commonalities, in the process illustrating the steady complexities of #MeToo a decade after it entered the cultural conversation.

Daniel Satinoff / Sundance Institute

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (Sony Pictures Classics, release date TBD)

At first glance, the director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s third feature seems destined to make a misstep. Unusually ebullient title aside, the film is tonally and aesthetically ambitious: Set in Tokyo, the story follows Haru (Rinko Kikuchi), a young widow with a love for ballroom dancing, as she tries to overcome her grief while simultaneously falling for a new instructor at her local studio. Along the way, her flights of fancy manifest as fantastical dance sequences, and she has visions of her husband haunting their home while wearing, of all things, a giant raven costume. Like a stylishly choreographed number, the plot bobs, weaves, twists, and turns with dexterity. Its not-so-secret weapon is Kikuchi herself, who grounds the tale’s most over-the-top moments in a lovely, earnest warmth.

Sundance Institute

Everybody to Kenmure Street (seeking distribution)

In 2021, on the first day of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr, an immigration-enforcement van arrived in the Pollokshields district of Glasgow to carry out one of the United Kingdom Home Office’s dawn raids. Officers detained two men of Indian descent, but local residents stopped the van from leaving the neighborhood; one man even clung to the vehicle after sliding underneath. Other neighbors joined the barricade, and by the end of the day, the protesters numbered in the hundreds. In Everybody to Kenmure Street, participants reflect on what they did, and why: Many appear in talking-head interviews, but the director Felipe Bustos Sierra also recruited actors such as Emma Thompson (who serves as the executive producer) to play protesters who don’t. The documentary cleverly mixes theatrical elements with more conventional methods, such as archival footage showing the city’s rich history of civil disobedience, to emphasize a lineage of organized opposition and the vitality of everyday people acting together.

This article originally stated that K2 had never been summited. In fact, the mountain had been summited, but never during the winter season.

The Indie-Cinema Dilemma

2026-02-11T07:30:00-05:00

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris arrived at their first Sundance Film Festival feeling worn down. Making their debut feature, Little Miss Sunshine, had taken much longer than they’d anticipated; financing hiccups had forced the pair to spend years rescuing the film from development hell. But by the time Dayton and Faris left Park City, Utah, in January 2006, they were practically rock stars: Little Miss Sunshine, about a scrappy family trying to make it to a children’s beauty pageant, had become a festival darling, prompting an all-night bidding war among distribution companies. Fox Searchlight, the victor, bought the film for a then-record-setting $10.5 million and immediately sent the couple on a tour of more than 20 cities to drum up interest in the movie before its summer release.

In the months following the festival, Dayton and Faris went from theater to theater, watching audiences absorb their work. They participated in Q&A after Q&A. Eventually they wound up at the Oscars, where Little Miss Sunshine was nominated for Best Picture. “It changed our lives, coming here,” Dayton told me when we met at this year’s Sundance.

Faris, sitting next to him, noted that the two didn’t return to the festival in the 20 years since their film’s premiere for a reason. “That experience was so monumental,” she said, “that it was sort of hard to imagine coming back and not having that.”

Throughout its 40-plus years in Park City, Sundance has earned a reputation for offering new filmmakers an unbeatable time. The festival, which spotlights independent films, launched the careers of directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes, and Richard Linklater; more recent alumni include Chloé Zhao, Ryan Coogler, and Celine Song. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sundance was an offbeat destination for Hollywood’s creative talent, rejecting the glitz of European festivals and the solemnity of awards season in favor of strong movies that garnered word-of-mouth interest. (The Sundance Institute, the nonprofit organization behind the festival, also cultivates emerging artists through its series of labs and fellowships.) In 1999, the premiere of The Blair Witch Project ushered in the era of found-footage horror; five years later, Napoleon Dynamite won over festivalgoers, who later helped enter “Vote for Pedro” into the pop-culture lexicon. Sundance could anoint hits, dotting the industry’s creative landscape with unlikely blockbusters.

[Read: Ryan Coogler didn’t want to hide anymore]

Yet I had a hard time picturing that version of Sundance while at this year’s festival, which concluded earlier this month. Main Street, without any screenings at the picturesque Egyptian Theater, wasn’t particularly crowded. Nights were tame and quiet for the most part, other than the evening of the afterparty for The Moment (a mockumentary starring Charli XCX), which took place at a hilltop club. Plenty of showings around town were sold out, but few generated feverish headlines about bidding wars during the festival’s run—a worrying development for the filmmakers who come to Sundance in hopes of finding a distributor for their work. Even the weather seemed off: Park City, usually blanketed in snow this time of year, was warm enough for some locals to walk around in just long-sleeved shirts.

Part of the muted atmosphere probably had to do with the fact that this year’s Sundance was the final one held in Park City before the festival’s move to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027—as well as the fact that this was the first edition since the passing of Sundance’s founder, the actor Robert Redford, in September. But the downbeat mood also seemed to reflect the lackluster indie-film business that’s been dogging the festival for years. The box-office success stories of the ’90s and 2000s—The Blair Witch Project, Saw, Four Weddings and a Funeral, (500) Days of Summer—inspired distributors to pour tens of millions into acquiring projects at the festival over the following decade, in the hope of discovering a critical and cultural phenomenon that could also turn a profit. Yet only a few films ever offered a substantial return on the financial investment; the last major box-office hit to break out of Sundance was 2017’s Get Out, which earned nearly $260 million. Last year, only two out of the 10 U.S. competition entries—Sorry, Baby and Twinless—grossed more than $1 million worldwide.

Of course, Sundance has always operated as a microcosm of Hollywood’s wider shifts. This year’s final rodeo in Park City seemed marked by the uncertainty generated by ongoing industry woes—massive studio mergers, job insecurity, and the growing use of AI during production, among others. While at the festival, I spoke with many filmmakers who were bringing their directorial debuts to Sundance. Having their work selected remains an achievement, but traveling to a popular, pricey ski destination such as Park City, many of them told me, feels riskier than ever. The cost of bringing a small movie there hoping to lock down distribution may not pay off, given buyers’ dwindling interest. “Sundance was like that island on the horizon that I could never get to, that I applied to every year, to the labs, and never got in,” Vera Miao, the writer-director of the contemplative ghost story Rock Springs, said. But, she added, “it’s extremely expensive. You know, you want people here, and everyone wants to be here. It’s just an incredible moment of celebration and community, and the tension of that has been a hard one.”

Some films that played in Park City this year arrived with name recognition and instant buzz: a drama starring Channing Tatum, a black comedy from Olivia Wilde. The director John Wilson could also be considered something of a known quantity. As the creator of the irreverent HBO docuseries How to With John Wilson, he has gained a cult audience for his rollicking work built on seemingly prosaic subjects—including, in one notable short film, his own failed efforts to get his work accepted into Sundance. Almost 10 years later, Wilson’s feature directorial debut was selected as one of Sundance’s opening-night films. The History of Concrete, a documentary that captures the director’s attempts to finance a project ostensibly about, yes, concrete, has been well received: The morning of our interview, we had planned to meet at the theater in which the film was being screened, but then had to find another spot—there were too many attendees crowding the cinema.

Several quality documentaries have emerged from Sundance in recent years; all five of this year’s Oscar nominees debuted there. Yet as of this writing, The History of Concrete still hasn’t found a distributor. Wilson, for his part, didn’t seem to spend all of his time in Park City thinking about the film’s chances of landing a buyer. Certainly he’d like to find a distributor, he told me, so he can pay back his collaborators. But as “existentially terrifying” as it is to think about how much steeper the slope has become for indie filmmakers, he said, “doing your best to not consider the market in a certain way is the strongest kind of start you can have.” The movie’s aim, he added, is to remind viewers that “people shouldn’t be afraid to create.”

Wilson isn’t alone in shutting out the noise of the industry’s upheaval. Stephanie Ahn, the director of the tender romance Bedford Park, told me that her film had taken almost 10 years to make—years she spent searching for financing and readjusting her goals depending on the resources available to her. “On the other side of it, the world that your film might encounter might be very different than what you expected,” Ahn said, “and you just have to be okay with that.”

Before being accepted into Sundance with Bedford Park, Ahn said, she had submitted her work what felt like hundreds of times. At the start of her career, she imagined the kind of reception she might get if she made it to Park City, her reveries riffing on the success stories she kept hearing about. (Little Miss Sunshine’s trajectory—the word-of-mouth momentum, the bidding wars, the rock stardom—was once the standard.) “When I was younger and striving to be a filmmaker and striving at Sundance, I fantasized about what it would be like,” she explained. “I think I let go of the fantasy some years ago.” She added, “I think a lot of us have let go of the old way of success.”

This year's Sundance felt like a more muted affair, sometimes even at the screenings themselves. (Alex Goodlett / The New York Times / Redux)

Bedford Park turned out to be a festival rarity: The film sold to Sony Pictures Classics, becoming one of just five narrative titles to land a buyer out of Park City so far. That statistic underlines just how hesitant companies have become to acquire indie projects. The internet offers various other distribution channels and ways to promote your film outside of a festival, some of the filmmakers I spoke with said. Sundance’s core value, then, is to offer a venue to showcase work to an invested, film-loving viewership.

Elaine Del Valle, a writer and producer of the visually inventive documentary TheyDream and a director herself, is a Sundance veteran who has begun to rely on grassroots tactics. For her most recent feature, last year’s coming-of-age drama Brownsville Bred, she skipped Sundance and reached out to theater chains before finding a distributor at a smaller film festival. By that point, Del Valle just wanted to share her work with an audience who cared. “It’s not about the money,” she told me. “It’s about the value.” These days, she does as much as she can on her own. “I say to myself, I run a studio,” she said. “What part of my studio needs my attention most today?”

Sundance has long championed that indie sensibility, elevating work produced outside of the studio system off a shoestring budget. But in order to remain a meaningful platform for creative renegades, the festival needs to also take risks. At least, that’s what the filmmaker (and Robert’s daughter) Amy Redford told me when I spoke with her the night before screenings began. “More and more, I think what we will see is people finding a way to get their stories out there on their own terms, because they can,” she said. In some ways, she pointed out, the festival’s forthcoming move to Boulder may offer a chance for a reset. “Sometimes,” Redford said, “you need to change your landscape to understand what you’re made of,” even if that change is as simple—or, as she put it, “exciting and messy and imperfect”—as relocating to a different town.

The Western Was Never About Freedom

2026-02-05T11:05:00-05:00

For more than seven months, Walton Goggins watched a Western every day. John Ford’s films, Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, episodes of Gunsmoke—the actor saw them all as he shot Fallout, the postapocalyptic TV series in which he stars. Half the time, he binged for research; Goggins thought of his character, the fictional 1950s-style movie star Cooper Howard, as a peer of cowboy-playing performers such as Alan Ladd.

“I didn’t look at them as Walton. I really looked at them as Cooper Howard,” he told me last spring on the set of Fallout’s second season. “It was like …” He slipped into character, making a dejected expression as if envious of Ladd’s career. “Okay, yeah, Alan got that role, and he was great in Shane,” Goggins, as Cooper, drawled. “I should have taken that, and I should have taken that television pilot.” He laughed. “I should have done Gunsmoke. Why didn’t I do that?!”

But the other half of the time, Goggins explained, he just needed something to stay sane. He also plays “the Ghoul,” a mutated form of Cooper who became a deadly bounty hunter after surviving the end of the world. In many episodes, Goggins switches between playing the Ghoul (in the present) and Cooper (in flashbacks). When he had to sink into the Ghoul’s ruthless mindset—and spend hours getting prosthetics applied—the actor immersed himself in tales of gunslingers, he said, so “I don’t lose my mind.”

After all, Fallout seems designed to make people’s heads spin. The series, based on a popular video-game franchise, takes place in an alternate reality in which World War II yielded a retro-futuristic society thriving on rapid technological development—that is, until a nuclear cataclysm results in civilization’s collapse. Set more than 200 years after, the story involves multiple protagonists, and its tone can careen wildly from moment to moment: a little like The Walking Dead when it leans into dystopian horror, a little like The Last Man on Earth when it indulges in absurd humor.

[Read: The wasteland is waiting for you]

Yet the show most often—and most clearly—draws from what became Goggins’s on-set fixation: the Western. Season 1, among Amazon Prime Video’s biggest hits according to the streamer, injected the genre with weirdness. At the outset, the show’s three primary characters each match an archetype presented in Leone’s 1966 classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: There’s Lucy (played by Ella Purnell), an idealistic young woman who grew up in one of the Vaults; she treks across the wasteland to search for her father, greeting practically every obstacle with the phrase “Okey dokey!” There’s Maximus (Aaron Moten), an orphan raised by the cultlike Brotherhood of Steel, who seeks to impress the group’s leadership. And then there’s the self-serving Ghoul, who dispatches anyone who gets in his way. The show begins with Lucy squarely as “the good,” the Ghoul representing the morally bankrupt “bad,” and Maximus caught somewhere in between as “the ugly”; these designations become intriguingly malleable over time, as both the characters and the viewers become more exposed to the reality of life in the wasteland.

Season 2, which concluded this week, challenges the traditional look of the Western, too. After primarily filming the first season in New York, the show had moved production in part to the historic Melody Ranch studio on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The property was owned by Gene Autry, the actor known as the “Singing Cowboy,” and features an archetypal Western set: a dirt-ridden main street bookended by a saloon and a general store. But, as I discovered when I visited the shoot last year, the Fallout team had built a facade over much of it to represent “New Vegas,” a postapocalyptic version of Sin City. This take on the Strip blended the ranch’s existing features with neon signage, steampunk props, and plenty of dystopian grace notes. A crew member set a car aflame for a wide shot. Another placed more tumbleweed in the path of the dozens of extras milling about. Inside one of the stores, I touched a splatter of gooey fake blood. These details underlined the show’s thematic vision as well: Westerns tend to portray the frontier as a land of opportunity, arguing that a strict set of values provides all the guidance anyone needs. But lawlessness doesn’t grant much freedom, Fallout posits. Neither does having a moral code.

The Western has proved surprisingly enduring. The genre could have easily disappeared after the concept of “manifest destiny”—the idea, explored in many stories, that the United States’ mission was to spread American values westward—grew outdated. But the Western, as the editors of the 2020 essay collection Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre wrote, has “reinvented and hybridized” itself to match the country’s many cultural shifts: John Ford’s silent movies in the ’20s, for instance, reflected the post–World War I era of American exceptionalism, while his 1939 film Stagecoach featured a cast of paranoid, distrusting misfits—an appropriate quality for something released during the Great Depression. Clean-shaven, guitar-strumming cowboys played by actors such as Autry dwindled after the 1940s and ’50s, as Clint Eastwood’s hard-bitten antiheroes emerged. Yet the genre waxed and waned in popularity amid its many transformations; in The Atlantic alone, writers have repeatedly declared the rise, death, and revival of the Western.

“There is something inherently appealing about the idea of being the master of your own destiny,” Jonathan Nolan, an executive producer of Fallout, told me, “of being in a landscape in which there is no order, there is no civilization, and it’s up to you to make these sorts of decisions.” Stories of untamable frontiers, he argued, persevere because they question society’s purpose. (He would know; Nolan co-created HBO’s Westworld, which imagined an Old West–themed amusement park populated by androids and catering to hedonistic guests.) From the roles played by the likes of John Wayne and Kevin Costner, the fantasy of the cowboy mentality—that an individual can dole out his own form of justice, and that without order comes liberation—persists.

But Fallout giddily toys with the genre’s legacy, too, at times turning homages into punch lines. In the scene I watched being filmed, the Ghoul and his newfound fellow travelers—Maximus, suited up in the Brotherhood’s coveted power armor, and Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), Maximus’s former squire who’s begun to mutate after an incident in Season 1—stride confidently onto a crowded main street as if they’re the stars of a Leone movie. Bystanders gawk and cheer from the sidewalks. A parade forms in their wake. And then Thaddeus’s arm falls off, embarrassing his companions.

The show isn’t always so silly. Season 2 explores where this chaos comes from, and the difficulty in distinguishing the sheriff from the outlaw. The answer comes in part from how hard it seems for the characters to hold fast to their beliefs. Lucy, for example, has been raised to respect everyone; the Golden Rule works against her in the wasteland, however, especially after she finds her father, Hank (Kyle Maclachlan), and learns of his misdeeds. The Ghoul, who takes a serum to help retain his human memories, hasn’t found salvation or satisfaction in his barbarism, just more pain. And Maximus discovers that those in the Brotherhood he most admired are fools—a harsh truth that goes for most of the authority figures in Fallout. No white-hatted cowboy can exist, the show suggests, when the world has to be saved from too much at once, including: autocratic, power-hungry leaders; warring factions across the wasteland; and, of course, the mutated creatures that haunt once-thriving cities. The notion of a virtuous do-gooder saving the day is too simplistic for this story.

[Read: Why TV is so worried about free will]

In that sense, Fallout reimagines the Western’s stakes. The show’s landscape has long been mapped—and ravaged. The frontier is instead ideological, about interrogating how to reconcile a complex world into something comprehensible when doing the opposite seems easier. Over and over, people are pushed toward ignorance: Lucy’s former community is led by a woman who handles the first complaint about her alarming behavior by promising to escalate it to herself. Cooper’s wife, a Vault-Tec executive, tells him in a flashback to move past what he heard about the company’s plans to nuke the planet. Hank finishes designing a device that turns strangers he meets into sedate worker bees.

The show’s real villain is mindlessness, in other words. But this type of placid acceptance in the face of obvious danger isn’t unique to this ensemble. Fallout uses the Western’s familiar imagery and machinations to scrutinize all-too-resonant, deeply American themes: how end-stage capitalism and corporate overreach breed resentment and economic anxiety; how overzealous technocrats and self-interested leadership sow division and disorder; and how blind patriotism can undermine democracy. “All sides of the political spectrum right now are talking so much in end-of-the-world terms,” Fallout’s co-creator Geneva Robertson-Dworet told me when we spoke on set. “It actually feels like the show is sort of alarmingly prescient in a way that we’d prefer to not have.”

In Los Angeles’s Autry Museum of the West—named for Gene—hangs a painting by the artist George Carlson of a dead coyote, titled “Mayday!” The creature, left impaled on a barbed-wire fence, caught Carlson’s eye as he drove through Northern Idaho in 2022. From far away, it had looked decorative to him; close up, it was more disturbing. Dead coyotes are strung up throughout today’s rural West, but the tradition varies in meaning: Sometimes, ranchers consider the carcasses trophies; other times, they use them as warnings to other coyotes.

The painting, which I saw on a visit to the Autry last month, reminded me of a scene from Fallout. Late in Season 2, the Ghoul ends up impaled on a pillar, left for dead by Lucy after she pushes him out of a window. In this position, he’s unable to reach the serum that prevents him from losing his human consciousness, so he desperately repeats a mantra: “I’m a human being,” he says, again and again. Trapped there, Goggins manifests both versions of his character at once, flickering between flashbacks of the steady Cooper and the present-day, tortured Ghoul.

Like the strung-up coyotes, the Ghoul typically looks normal from afar but terrifying up close. That illusion epitomizes the Wild West of Fallout: The Ghoul—or whoever Cooper has become in the wasteland—rejects the Western’s either/or approach. He’s neither fully feral nor civilized, neither an avatar for freedom nor one for oppression. This season has also upended the notion presented in Season 1 that he has to act alone. A cowboy is a symbol for quintessential American values: independence, problem-solving, self-sufficiency. But obstinately embracing those qualities is, Goggins pointed out to me, “not necessarily the right way to look at the world.”

Not when the world, Fallout argues, requires reestablishing what right and wrong actually mean. The protagonists may have been forced into roles they never asked for, but they have an opportunity to question their circumstances—to find the middle ground between succumbing to basic, selfish instincts and depending on others for help. If anything, Fallout is defined by an uneasy sense of hope. “It’s not really about the end of a world; it’s about the beginning of a new one,” Nolan told me. Hitting reset without forgetting what came before is perhaps “a weird thread of optimism” for the show to follow, he conceded. But at least it’s the kind of weird that keeps people from losing their mind.

‘She Works on Levels That People Don’t Even Know’

2026-01-30T18:29:16-05:00

In 1988, shortly after the release of his film Beetlejuice, the director Tim Burton highlighted a cast member who he felt stole the show: Catherine O’Hara, who played the snobbishly over-the-top matriarch Delia Deetz. “Catherine’s so good, maybe too good,” he marveled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “She works on levels that people don’t even know. I think she scares people because she operates at such high levels.”

O’Hara, who died today at the age of 71, spent much of her career being the kind of star Hollywood underestimated. Before Beetlejuice catapulted her to greater fame, the Toronto-born O’Hara was best known for being a cast member at the improv theater the Second City, which led to her being cast as a regular on the beloved Canadian sketch series SCTV. The actor was an unparalleled comic performer who could push her most flamboyant characters—spoiled Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, wobbly Cookie Fleck in Best in Show—to their theatrical extremes. Yet the work she put into her career often went beyond the confines of broad comedies. If anything, O’Hara’s brilliance came from her ability to unearth the oddball in anybody.

Like many Millennials, I first encountered O’Hara in 1990’s Home Alone. The blockbuster holiday film followed a young boy, Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin), who is accidentally left behind by his family when they jet off to Paris for Christmas vacation. O’Hara played Kate McCallister, Kevin’s mother, and at first glance, the role appears serious, if not downright unsympathetic: Kate is so harried that she fails to realize she has abandoned her 8-year-old until she’s on the plane to Europe. As she tries to make it back to Kevin, she encounters eccentric traveling companions, leaving her the straight woman trapped in a nightmare of her own making.

[Read: The bombastic matriarch of Schitt’s Creek]

The movie’s biggest laughs come from Kevin’s hijinks, which involve setting up complex booby traps to fend off a pair of burglars targeting his family’s home. But O’Hara’s performance is also essential to Home Alone’s appeal. When Kate panics mid-flight, she turns the name Kevin into a gasp-screech—Keeev-uhn!—that’s just as memorable as the moment Culkin slaps his face after putting on aftershave. When Kate calls the local police so that they can check on her son, she slows down her words, as if trying her best to sound like she has it together. The move only makes her subsequent frustration—the staccato delivery of the line “Pick up!” into the payphone—that much funnier.

My favorite O’Hara moment from the film, though, comes when she’s almost speechless. Trapped at another airport, Kate is pulled aside by Gus Polinski, a polka musician played by O’Hara’s fellow SCTV alum John Candy. Candy improvised much of the dialogue: Gus telling Kate about his band’s bona fides while she stares back blankly, and chuckling politely as she tries to comprehend what this stranger wants. Eventually, Kate grasps that Gus is offering her a ride home; she beams so widely, her expression imbues the scene with boundless warmth—the kind that helped turn Home Alone into an annual rewatch for so many around Christmastime. You believe her when she says she’d be happy to listen to Gus’s crew play polka music the entire time; everything on her face screams joy, relief, and gratitude, grounding the movie even as the plot grows more absurd.

O’Hara didn’t seem to think much of her Home Alone performance. In a speech honoring Culkin when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023, she recounted seeing two boys fighting the need to leave a screening of Home Alone for a bathroom break until her face appeared, because, as she recalled them saying, It’s just the mom. “Bright boys,” she quipped.

Except those boys were wrong. The mom in Home Alone resonates because she’s not just the overworked, underappreciated parent the film sets her up to be—a subversion O’Hara epitomized throughout her career. She had a talent for subtle versatility, the kind that auteur directors picked up on by casting her in movies as different as Heartburn and After Hours. In her most ridiculous assignments, she ensured that her characters were rooted in something familiar, while in her most straightforward roles, O’Hara found ways to cut loose. Consider her most recent appearances: In the Hollywood-skewering comedy The Studio, O’Hara turned a laughable veteran executive into a sympathetic figure. In the postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us, O’Hara translated her character’s thinly veiled resentment into impeccably deployed zingers. She nabbed Emmy nominations for both performances last year.

O’Hara never anticipated such variety; after SCTV, she had trouble figuring out where she belonged as an actor. “Most of the offers I got were to do the work I’d already done,” she said in 1988. “I didn’t want to keep on repeating myself. The problem is that it’s very tough to get a shot at doing something else, especially when you’re not sure what ‘something else’ is.” She never did define that “something else.” Instead, she kept challenging what it could be.

The Golden Globes Tried to Have It Both Ways

2026-01-12T03:20:58-05:00

During Sunday night’s Golden Globes, the host Nikki Glaser expertly ribbed the nominees in her opening monologue. Beaming presenters read their lines off teleprompters. Some winners cried as they thanked their loved ones. The ceremony ran long.

This was business as usual, in other words. Though the Globes have developed a reputation for being a boozy affair, those inside the ballroom seemed determined to generate a polite atmosphere. Hollywood is undergoing plenty of turbulence—a month ago, Netflix struck a deal to purchase Warner Bros., and a month from now, the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA will enter into a fresh round of contract talks that could lead to another strike—but Glaser delivered only light jokes about the industry’s precarity. A few attendees wore tiny pins that read “Be Good” in honor of Renee Nicole Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent last week in Minneapolis. The winners who mentioned politics in their acceptance speeches opted for broader messages, describing how “we live in a very divided country” and urging “a shared humanity.” The night was a far cry from boisterous past ceremonies that also took place in times of turmoil, and farther still from the work that was being honored.

The evening’s final two film winners captured the apparent tension between defining Hollywood as a place for escapism and acknowledging real-world uncertainty. The Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy winner One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a propulsive thriller about a former revolutionary, who is thrust back into his previous lifestyle to save his daughter. The Best Motion Picture—Drama winner Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s take on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel imagining the hidden origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a potent tearjerker about art’s transformative power. Both movies are made by auteur filmmakers; both offer cinematic visions of best sellers. But while One Battle After Another touches, as my colleague David Sims put it, a “raw nerve” in its examination of the costs of American political violence, Hamnet is its opposite in scope and tone: a formal, intimate period piece about the Bard and his personal tragedy.

[Read: A sobering awards-season pivot]

Anointing this pair of films came across like a deliberate choice. Taken together, they allowed voters to split the difference between making a point about the world Hollywood faces and recusing themselves from doing so. One Battle After Another was the most feted film of the night—it scored four trophies, including Best Director for Anderson—yet it was the somber Hamnet that closed the evening as the winner of the last category presented.

As a result, One Battle After Another’s triumphs at the Globes didn’t feel much like a coronation. Instead, last night’s remarkably muted ceremony at times seemed unsure of what it was meant to celebrate at all. The event is ostensibly meant to recognize the industry’s creative talent, yet it didn’t broadcast one of the craft categories, Best Original Score, which went to the Sinners composer Ludwig Göransson. The evening is also supposed to represent the tastes of the Globes voting body—which is composed of international members of the press—yet the only speech cut short by music was that of Kleber Mendonça Filho, the director of the Best Non-English Film winner, The Secret Agent. Even the freshly added Podcast category offered a confusing sample of what constituted quality: chitchat shows hosted by celebrities and a news program from NPR.

Late in the night, the comedian Wanda Sykes cut through the monotony and brought some sharpness to the stage. As she accepted the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy trophy for the absent Ricky Gervais, she thanked the trans community on his behalf, in a pointed jab at Gervais’s history of offensive joke-making. Fiery moments such as hers were few and far between, though. The ceremony was dominated by winners who had much more of substance to say on-screen than at the podium. Most of the awarded films apart from Hamnet, including The Secret Agent, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Marty Supreme, and Sinners, are defined by a sense of urgency; the same goes for the TV shows honored, such as The Studio, The Pitt, and Adolescence. But with a handful of exceptions—such as Teyana Taylor, who won for her performance in One Battle After Another, punctuating her speech with a rallying cry for her “brown sisters and little brown girls” to remember that “our softness is not a liability”—those in the ballroom seemed incapable of finding much of a spark.

A Deeply Personal Film, but Not in the Way You Might Think

2026-01-05T11:28:00-05:00

Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued in his essay “The Death of the Author” that a writer’s biography should be irrelevant to the meaning or value of their work. In 1983, Nora Ephron asserted the opposite in her novel, Heartburn: “Everything is copy.”

Today’s pop culture has tended to agree with Ephron’s take: Confession fuels the biggest songs; celebrity memoirs dominate best-seller lists. Whether art is inextricable from the artist is central to many of the buzzy dramas vying for trophies during this year’s awards season, too. Hamnet imagines the intimate origins of Shakespeare’s famed tragedy Hamlet. Blue Moon and Jay Kelly follow men who have infused their work with so much of their personal life that they find it hard to exist outside of their career. These movies observe how art can function as therapy for the creator, extracting a truth that they couldn’t grasp otherwise.

Sentimental Value, an emotionally layered film up for eight Golden Globes this weekend, complicates that perspective. It follows a family of storytellers: Gustav (played by Stellan Skarsgård) is a celebrated director hoping to cast his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), an actor, in his first project in 15 years. Nora’s sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is a historian who helps Gustav with researching his script. The tender drama is the latest from the Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier who, along with his co-writer, Eskil Vogt, has made plenty of features about creative types. The protagonists of 2006’s Reprise are novelists. The story of 2015’s Louder Than Bombs hinges on the work of a war photographer. The aimless heroine of their 2021 Oscar-nominated romantic dramedy, The Worst Person in the World, abandons medical school to pursue writing and photography instead.

[Read: The Worst Person in the World is devastatingly relatable]

Focusing on artistic characters became a pattern—enough that conceiving of Sentimental Value, in part, as a movie about moviemaking brought “a certain shame to Eskil and me,” Trier told me recently, grinning sheepishly at the memory. “We were like, ‘Oh no, are we really doing a film about actors and directors?’” The conceit, they worried, could come off as extremely narrow; the plot’s emphasis on the production of Gustav’s movie could pull focus away from the emotional stakes, turning Sentimental Value into commentary on the film industry instead.

But when I watched the film, I found myself, like many viewers, wondering something different: whether the father-daughter relationships depicted echoed any of Trier’s own feelings about becoming a parent. Those reactions didn’t surprise the filmmaker. Since the movie’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival, Trier has spoken often about how having children affected his mindset going into Sentimental Value. In one interview, he conceded that the movie was in part about “exorcising fears” about fatherhood; when we spoke, however, he seemed to bristle at that phrasing. He wasn’t trying to extract his personal anxieties and commit them to celluloid, he clarified. Making his private thoughts so public in his work, he said, “would be my nightmare.”

If anything, Sentimental Value is about that tension between wanting to explain the origin of your ideas and wanting to distance yourself from your own creations. It also interrogates the cost of drawing from specific, individual experiences. “You deserve something more personal,” Gustav tells Nora when pitching her his screenplay, failing to notice how dismissive the comment sounds of her career. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of her artistry, too: Everything Nora does on stage has always been “personal.” When embodying a character, she can express herself more authentically, something Gustav would know if he ever saw her perform. But Nora suffers from severe stage fright as a result; being able to access her feelings under a fictional guise doesn’t mean she’s necessarily embracing them. The truth behind the most intimate art can remain a mystery, Sentimental Value posits—even for the artist.

A film is “lifeless,” Trier said, unless its viewers discover what is personal to them as they watch. “You have a wonderful word in English that we don’t have in Norwegian,” he said, “and that is verisimilitude, the idea of some sort of contract with the viewer that conveys a sense of truthfulness, yet it’s a construct. It’s a code.” The goal, in other words, is for the story to feel genuine without being explicitly so.

That can happen when a performer imbues her character with her own nature. In one of the film’s most affecting moments, Agnes visits a melancholic Nora, who has been unwilling to perform after Gustav moved forward with his movie without her; he recruited an American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), to play the part he’d written for Nora, and has immediately bonded with Rachel. After Agnes encourages Nora to read their father’s script, the sisters marvel at how Gustav reveals, in his writing, a side of himself they’d never seen. Nora goes on to wonder how Agnes turned out stable in such a forbidding household. “I had you,” Agnes replies, before crawling onto Nora’s bed to embrace her. Agnes then whispers, “I love you”—a line that Lilleaas came up with on the spot.

[Read: The sad dads of Hollywood]

The ad-lib dramatically changed the scene from how Trier and Vogt had written it. The dynamic between the sisters was originally more antagonistic: Agnes would be carefree, the one in the family hoping to “make everyone happy through humor and avoidance,” Trier told me—much to her sister’s annoyance. But Lilleaas, Trier explained, conveyed a “calm, grounded, truthful honesty” when they first met, outside of a formal audition. Her demeanor inspired him: “I could look into her eyes as we talked and I felt, You’re real, like really grounded. And then I thought, Let’s reinterpret Agnes.”

Realism and fiction occasionally do combine in Sentimental Value in more anticipated ways. The film is purposefully a family affair for Trier: His two children appear briefly as Nora and Agnes in flashbacks. Gustav’s screenplay is inspired by memories of his mother’s imprisonment in a Nazi camp; her experiences echo those of Trier’s paternal grandfather, the filmmaker Erik Løchen. (Trier has reviewed the files on his grandfather’s captivity the same way Agnes does in one scene, studying the reports about how her grandmother was tortured.) And the actor who narrates the opening scene, describing an essay Nora wrote as a child that anthropomorphized the family home, is Bente Børsum. She’s a celebrated performer in Norway who starred in Løchen’s 1959 film, The Chasers.

Trier doesn’t expect audiences to know any of the above. Sentimental Value avoids explaining, for instance, who the speaker is in relation to the characters on-screen, let alone the fact that a younger Børsum had seen her mother taken to a German camp, too. “Her voice held a lot of weight for me,” Trier said of his choice to include the 91-year-old actor. The film draws power from the subtle specificity; Børsum’s voice, low and knowing, comes suffused with an ineffable meaning. The viewer immediately feels encouraged to pay closer attention to the narration.

These veiled decisions inform the movie Gustav eventually directs as well: He’d wanted the shoot to take place inside Agnes and Nora’s childhood home, but eventually settles for a reproduction on a back lot, a series of ceiling-less facades. A viewer wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s a set, but the care and history Gustav has brought to it lends it an abstract profundity. The opportunity afforded by art for artists to examine—or just merely observe—themselves is essential. “I need to distance myself from the characters to be able to create them,” Trier said. What’s on-screen is akin to “a counter-life,” he explained. “It’s not intended to say, ‘Hey, look at me!’ It’s saying, ‘I’m doing this about something that’s deeply personal, and yet I feel that it’s over there.’”

A film such as Sentimental Value, then, operates like a time capsule for its maker: It reveals its potency to Trier only in the rearview, when he revisits what had been on his mind. “It’s like conversations with friends,” Trier said. “If someone says, ‘I sense around our latest coffees over the last year, that you talk a lot about this. What’s the purpose?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, purpose?’” He laughed. “Shit, I don’t know. But I know I care about it.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Where Stranger Things Lost Itself

2025-12-25T20:05:00-05:00

This article contains spoilers through the penultimate episode of Stranger Things Season 5.

In the third season of Stranger Things, Eleven (played by Millie Bobby Brown) learned a pivotal lesson as she stood inside Starcourt Mall, the then-new watering hole for the then-still-pubescent kids of Netflix’s supernatural drama. Eleven, the show’s telekinetic heroine, who grew up in a lab, became dazed by the number of clothing options at the Gap. “How do I know what I like?” she asked her friend Max (Sadie Sink). “You just try things on until you find something that feels like you,” Max replied. She was talking about fashion, but the advice applied just as well to the challenge of leaving adolescence behind: Coming of age is a process of trial and error, of working toward what seems true to you.

For years, Stranger Things was changing too. The first season of the ’80s-set series—about underdogs triumphing over the terrors of another dimension called the Upside Down—became, after its 2016 premiere, one of Netflix’s most successful original productions. Each subsequent installment ventured into the proverbial fitting room: The second season leaned further into gore and took tonally challenging swings, including an episode exploring Eleven’s past to give its most enigmatic female character a voice. Season 3 explored how Reagan-era consumerism permeated its tweenagers’ lifestyles just as they began dealing with romantic relationships. The fourth examined conspiracy theories through a particularly unnerving, mind-manipulating villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower); he targeted a grieving Max, testing the friends’ bonds as they tried to protect her and understand her pain at the same time.

In the fifth and final season, however, Stranger Things has stalled. This time around, as the gang tries to stop Vecna from ending the world, the show seems uninterested in furthering anything other than its already complicated plot. The cast has expanded several times over, to the point that most scenes look like a crowd awkwardly playing human Tetris. The action sequences resemble previous set pieces, and much of the dialogue amounts to exposition. A new, faceless threat called “exotic matter” takes the crew’s resident nerd, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), multiple scenes to explain. Across the three episodes of Volume 2, the last batch before the series finale, characters regularly express their confusion about what’s going on. I found myself nodding along with them.

[Read: Where Stranger Things loses its magic]

For fans watching to see how Eleven and her friends save the day, much of this stagnation is probably bearable. The show remains compulsively watchable; each episode ends on a cliff-hanger. But Stranger Things initially had much more potential than mere bingeability. It pushed the boundaries of television as a medium, eschewing standard act breaks and run-time constraints while injecting cinematic visuals and frequent mood shifts. It also cemented Netflix as an early winner of the streaming wars by consistently breaking viewership records and generating cultural conversation. A litany of brands has capitalized on the show’s popularity; it has multiple spin-offs (including a Tony-winning stage play); and its massive fandom has spawned conventions worldwide. Stranger Things had the opportunity and the budget to probe more daring themes and storytelling techniques. Instead, in its final hours, what was once an epic about growing pains and the end of childhood becomes algorithmic—as if settling for “compulsively watchable” is more than enough.

Of course, the franchise was built on recycling. From the beginning, Stranger Things has relied on ’80s pop-culture touchstones, drawing heavily on the elements and aesthetics of Steven Spielberg’s blockbusters and Stephen King’s best sellers. In its earlier seasons, the pastiche tended to be poignant and the familiarity fresh: Characters drew on teen-movie tropes but weren’t one-note, and the story arcs found novel angles to archetypal dynamics. (Think of the pint-size Dustin becoming best pals with Joe Keery’s high schooler, Steve.)

Season 5, meanwhile, has noticeably flattened its ensemble, leaning on simplistic personality traits and pilfering from previous arcs. One of the show’s new supporting players, Derek (Jake Connelly), is defined entirely by the two nicknames he has: “Dipshit Derek” and “Delightful Derek.” A tired love triangle reemerges. Much of the plot otherwise hinges on recovering Holly (Nell Fisher), the younger sister of Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer), from the Upside Down, a redux of the first season’s story. One episode features three—three!—separate sequences of characters reconciling after encountering life-or-death scenarios. I was moved by the first; by the third, I felt only indifference.

[Read: Stranger Things comes to an exhausting end]

Glimmers of depth still show up amid this shallow approach. Will (Noah Schnapp) has long served as the show’s most sensitive character, in part because he’s secretly queer and crushing on Mike. Yet the scene where he comes out feels shoehorned in, arriving between Eleven learning of a harrowing plan and the crew storming a military base to enter the Upside Down. Will’s speech is also packed with distracting reminders of the period backdrop. He insists to his friends that his sexuality doesn’t affect their shared interests (among other things: malted milkshakes, renting videos, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Steve Martin). The conversation even ends with a group hug, referencing a key moment from the first season; the callback comes across more like fan service than earned sentimentality. Unlike the show’s previous coming-out sequence—when Robin (Maya Hawke) gently coaxed Steve into understanding why she wasn’t interested in him—Will’s monologue clunkily interrupts the plot. What should have been an intimate reveal becomes another chance for Stranger Things to remix itself.

Sticking the landing is tough for any program, and harder still for a critically acclaimed, fandom-fueling genre saga. Game of Thrones certainly couldn’t withstand the weight of people’s expectations, let alone its overstuffed plot. Stranger Things hasn’t dropped the ball as dramatically in its final season. It has, however, sacrificed nuance by refusing to challenge itself—or to deviate from the brand it has built in the cultural imagination. The series once proved that it could mature alongside its cast, blending its fantastical swings with grounded themes of friendship, grief, and that classic, youthful challenge of discovering who you are as the world changes around you. “The impeccable trick Stranger Things pulled off in its first season was how seamlessly it wove together the opposing qualities of comfort and fear,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in 2017. Eight years later, the show isn’t making viewers nostalgic or giving them nightmares. It’s just telling them what happens next.

Only Timothée Chalamet Could Get Away With This

2025-12-22T16:06:02-05:00

At a party recently, a friend posed a question I’d never heard before. “Have you been blimp-fluenced yet?” she asked me.

“Blimp-fluenced?” I replied.

“You know, the Timothée Chalamet blimp,” she clarified.

Ah, yes, of course I knew the Timothée Chalamet blimp. It’s the streak of orange that’s been hovering over Los Angeles for weeks with the title of Chalamet’s new film, Marty Supreme, emblazoned across its side. I’d spotted it once, appearing like a thought bubble above the Hollywood sign. Chalamet—or, at least, the braggadocious version of himself in a video he posted on Instagram last month—had pitched the airship as part of his master plan to make the movie “one of the most important things that happens on planet Earth this year.” In an 18-minute staged Zoom session with the film’s marketing team, he proposed drenching landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty in orange paint. And not just any orange: “Hard-core orange, corroded orange, falling-apart orange, rusted orange,” he explained.

The whole scheme is stupidly brilliant and brilliantly stupid, emblematic of just how unusual Marty Supreme’s rollout—and Chalamet’s press-tour persona—has been. The actor began cultivating his eccentric approach to marketing this time last year, while promoting the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Back then, he defied expectations of a movie star headlining an Oscar-courting drama: He popped up at his own look-alike contest, rode a Lime bike onto a red carpet, and used his acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards to emphasize his ambition to become “one of the greats.” Now he’s gone beyond generating headlines for his idiosyncrasy. Chalamet’s M.O. thus far has been to make everything about Marty Supreme, and Marty Supreme only: He’s been dressing almost exclusively in orange—excuse me, “hard-core orange”—or in the limited supply of Marty Supreme merchandise. He appears at events flanked by an army of Ping-Pong-ball-headed foot soldiers; the film is about a flashy Ping-Pong player, so the surreal (and slightly terrifying) costume tracks. The Statue of Liberty has not been doused in orange, but it might as well be.

[Read: The celebrity look-alike contest boom]

What Chalamet has been doing feels defiantly risky. Amid a fresh round of Oscar buzz for his performance in Marty Supreme, Chalamet is actively rejecting the contender playbook. Instead, he’s cementing himself as a one-man marketing machine, unabashed about his attention-seeking and box-office dreams. Forget the glitzy galas considered essential stops for awards hopefuls; even when he appears on late-night TV, shows up on the cover of Vogue, or participates in a Q&A sponsored by Vanity Fair, Chalamet turns his Marty Supreme talk into a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. That discussion often includes emphasizing how badly he wants to be respected for his body of work—an admission that’s usually considered gauche. Somehow, though, Chalamet has skirted major repercussions for his cockiness. That’s in part because he’s a young man embodying the familiar archetype of the egotistical striver, and in part because he has the talent to back his claims; he’s received two Oscar nominations before turning 30. But if anything, his off-screen tactics lately prove that he’s the rare current A-lister who can manage a tricky balancing act: seeming spontaneous while being extremely, obviously calculated. He’s effortful, even if what he’s doing to cultivate his public image appears effortless.

It helps that Chalamet’s most obnoxious endeavors could be seen as extensions of Marty Mauser, his Marty Supreme character. Marty is a gifted-yet-arrogant man so convinced of his own eminence, he spirals into a vortex of self-destruction. The actor’s promotional work might as well be called “the Marty Mauser method”: He jangles people’s nerves by making boastful declarations—“It’s been like seven, eight years that I’ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances,” he said recently—that sometimes attract backlash. But much like Marty, Chalamet seems untroubled by naysayers. The more brash he becomes, the more Chalamet blurs the line between himself and his character. As Chalamet told The Hollywood Reporter, Marty “is who I was before I had a career.” Squint, and the actor’s most off-putting moves could be attributed to his commitment to the grind, which could then encourage audiences to go see the results in action.

Chalamet talks openly about how he wants to lean into provocation despite the danger of doing so. “At worst, you’ve rubbed people the wrong way,” he told Vogue. “And at best, someone will get pulled in and go, ‘Hey, this guy really thinks this thing’s worthy.’” His stunts, carefully curated though they may be, seem to genuinely align with his interests. He’s terminally online, so he knew how to make a parody of a Zoom meeting meme-able. He loves hip-hop, so he danced to Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” onstage. None of this came across like they’d been pitched by a team of publicists; rather, they seemed like the product of someone giddily checking items off a personal bucket list.

[Read: Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them.]

Conventional wisdom dictates that a performer hoping to be taken seriously by his peers and the public has to take himself seriously; think sober post-screening talkbacks, not silly bits with blimps. Manufactured setups can backfire easily, as Joaquin Phoenix’s unsettling appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman did in 2009. But many of Chalamet’s efforts bring to mind those of pop stars. Unlike actors drawing a line between their private life and their characters, singers often invite intense scrutiny of both their work and themselves—scrutiny they can then use to their advantage. Chalamet’s matching orange movie-premiere outfits with his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, for example, echo Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s denim wardrobe in the early 2000s; wearing eye-searing hues together produces tabloid fodder, while further anchoring Chalamet in the cultural zeitgeist. His choice to so closely blend his personality with his career resembles a lyricist writing diaristic songs, encouraging a sense of kinship between him and his audience. The outcome is a deliberate impression of intimacy, mixed with an appealing vulnerability. That makes Chalamet the movie star for this social-media-obsessed, parasocial-relationship-building moment: He understands that he can generate viral content with his personality alone, keeping him in not just the so-called awards conversation, but the cultural one at large.

Even genuine passion for a film on the awards track can descend into repetitive sound bites and rote red-carpet appearances. But Chalamet seems to be having the time of his life, even when he’s strapped to the top of the Las Vegas Sphere and cawing at nothing but a drone zooming away from his face. In a culture full of endless distraction, he’s doing all he can to make himself an easy-to-follow focal point, like an orange blimp on the horizon. His enthusiasm is unmissable—and thoroughly infectious.

Bowen Yang Broke Free on Saturday Night Live

2025-12-21T14:25:38-05:00

The final sketch of a Saturday Night Live episode is usually reserved for the show’s weirdest concepts. Airing in what’s known as the “10-to-1” slot, these bits evoke the feeling of a night gone a little too late. Think of Steve Martin and Bill Murray repeatedly wondering “What the hell is that?” at something off-screen, or a group of profane sloths reciting ridiculous “facts” about themselves in a digital short. These setups are bizarre, provocative, and often hit-or-miss.

But this weekend’s concluding sketch was more sentimental than absurd. In “Delta Lounge,” the cast member Bowen Yang played Ed, an old-school eggnog peddler completing his last shift and receiving a call from his partner, Ronda (the night’s host, Ariana Grande). The two launched into a duet of “Please Come Home for Christmas” before Ronda arrived at the airport just in time to help Ed bid goodbye.

The sketch doubled as a send-off for Yang, who’d announced earlier yesterday that he would be departing the show after that night’s episode. He was overcome with emotion as his character began talking about the job he was leaving behind. “I just feel so lucky that I ever got to work here, and I just wanted to enjoy it for a little bit longer, especially the people,” Ed said, holding back sobs. “I’ve loved every single person who works here, because they’ve done so much for me, especially my boss.” Cher, the night’s musical guest, then appeared as his manager—a larger-than-life cameo befitting Yang, a comedian who’d begun his tenure facing what seemed like outsize expectations.

In 2019, Yang became only the third cast member in Saturday Night Live history to be openly gay, and the first Chinese American performer in the program’s lineup. Yang has said he’s found these facts limiting: “There’s an idea that all of what I do is queer and Asian, which I don’t think is true,” he told Esquire earlier this month. “I get sick of people reducing the work I do on the show to those identifiers.” He covered a wide spectrum of roles: He could play a pygmy hippo gone viral, or J. D. Vance, or the mythical “evertree” that also worked as a lawyer. He could offer ridiculous takes on inanimate objects, such as a drone hovering mysteriously over New Jersey, or deepen a seemingly thin premise, as he did in a sketch about the couple featured in the choking-hazard poster, begrudgingly meeting their fans.

Yet his biggest contribution was a subtle sweetness. Yang’s go-for-broke characters tended to convey a vulnerability that’s hard to achieve in sketch comedy. Take, for instance, the iceberg that sank the Titanic and insisted on talking about his new album rather than the 100-year-old tragedy. His plea was tinged with a mix of guilt and frustration, making him unexpectedly sympathetic. Or consider Barry, the self-absorbed midwife so miffed to be forgotten by a colleague that he sows chaos in the delivery room: Yang, beneath a hilariously ever-growing wig, communicated through his body language Barry’s fear of not being taken seriously.

As a Chinese American viewer of Saturday Night Live, I’ll concede that I initially paid close attention to Yang’s performances because of the traits that made his casting so significant. But as time went on, I watched him because he made his identity appear not like a burden he carried, but like a joy he embraced. Terry Sweeney, the show’s first openly gay cast member, has spoken over the years about feeling pigeonholed during his single season; he was relied upon only to do impressions of female public figures or to deliver caricatures of his sexuality. Yang also played no shortage of such parts. But LGBTQ characters and performers have become more visible—and more dimensional—on the small screen in the decades since Sweeney was in the cast, and Yang was able to inject his roles with both personal specificity and wider resonance. The queer-coded slang—mentions of “poppers” and “twinks,” for example—in the Sara Lee sketch, in which he played a manager charged with disciplining a lustful employee who misused the company’s public Instagram, made its humor more nuanced. Yang’s mock competition with the actor Simu Liu, best known for being the first Asian star of a Marvel movie, poked fun at how goofy these milestones could sound, while also ribbing the expectations set by the model-minority stereotype. In other words, Yang drew from who he was, to his creative benefit.

His castmates channeled Yang’s own warm-but-boisterous brand of silliness last night, even in sketches from which he was absent—as in one where a group of squeaky-voiced Elf on the Shelf dolls discussed their trauma. The meta elements of Yang’s farewell appearance, meanwhile, resembled the many characters he embodied throughout his run, whose layers peeked through from underneath the farce. Comedy can sometimes seem antithetical to tenderness; it’s often easier for meanness to yield laughs, if the long history of roasts is any indication. But Yang unearthed sensitivity, helping the 50-year-old series, for which he earned five Emmy nominations, feel fresh. Like a 10-to-1 entry, he took unconventional swings. “I went into this being like, I’m just going to do whatever, and it kind of afforded me some latitude,” he told Vanity Fair last year. “That’s the whole point of the show: It’s a variety show.”

The 14 Best TV Shows of 2025

2025-12-17T09:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2025” coverage here.

On the small screen, 2025 was all about money—the ostentatious peacocking of wealth on shows such as Sirens, And Just Like That, Selling Sunset, and With Love, Meghan; the spiraling production costs of episodes themselves; the politicized wrestling over which megacorporation will take over Warner Bros. Discovery and its TV arms, including HBO. CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in what seemed to many critics like an obvious sop to the Trump administration, ahead of Paramount’s $8 billion merger with the production company Skydance. ABC briefly pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air, until public outrage mounted to such an extent that the market value of Disney, its parent company, fell by $4 billion. It’s hard to remember another time when the line between profiteering and entertainment has felt quite so porous.

With all of this in mind, the television series we loved most this year exemplified and defended the medium’s artistry, demonstrating what can be done with serialized storytelling, ingenuity, and ambition. They leaned into topical flash points and dispensed with bland distraction. During a stretch when so much felt resolutely mid, these shows were anything but.

Netflix

Adolescence (Netflix)

Adolescence opens with a photo of a chubby-cheeked boy posing for a first-day-of-school photo, his hair cowlicked, his face proud. From that image onward, the show insists on the point that this boy—named Jamie (played by Owen Cooper), now 13 and accused of murdering a classmate—could be anyone’s child, even yours. The immersive miniseries, created by the playwright Jack Thorne with the actor Stephen Graham (who stars as Jamie’s father, Eddie), is filmed in a series of continuous shots: We follow the police into Jamie’s bedroom; we watch Eddie recoil from his son after realizing what Jamie has done; we learn more, as children are interviewed and footage is revealed, about what’s happened, but only fragments of why. The third episode, in which Jamie is gently interrogated by a psychologist (Erin Doherty), is excruciatingly tense; it’s also revelatory, in the bleakest way possible. If Jamie is a monster, Adolescence posits, he’s the kind that implicates everyone. — Sophie Gilbert

FX / Everett Collection

The Lowdown (FX)

With apologies to Ethan Hawke, part of the pleasure of watching The Lowdown comes from seeing how his character takes a beating. Lee Raybon, a used-book-store owner and self-proclaimed “truthstorian,” tends to chase risky scenarios without fully thinking things through, but getting hurt only assures him he’s on the right track. Created by the Reservation Dogs showrunner Sterlin Harjo and set in present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Lowdown is a shaggy neo-noir that understands the appeal of a scrappy troublemaker. During his investigation into what he believes is a murder plot involving a powerful family, Lee pinballs around his surroundings and runs into all kinds of eccentric locals, played by an ensemble of excellent character actors. The result is a kinetic watch, anchored by a top-notch Hawke, bruises and all. — Shirley Li

HBO

Task (HBO)

What does it mean to be a man? The Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby’s newest show—also set in Delaware County, and also fascinated with the flaws and vulnerabilities of tight-knit communities—contrasts the lives of two very different male figures set on a collision course. Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) is a former priest turned grieving FBI agent; Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a single father who robs drug houses, is his latest target. Over seven episodes, Task considers the two antagonists’ oppositional responses to tragedy while also sketching out the world around them: a fentanyl-trafficking biker gang, local and federal law enforcement, a 21-year-old trying to raise her younger cousins as best she can. Beautifully shot, and more propulsive the longer it goes on, Task interrogates masculinity without losing sympathy for any of its adherents. — S.G.

Adults (FX)

The ensemble at the center of Adults could easily be called the Gen Z Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe. But what differentiates the series from that other New York–set comedy about 20-somethings is the fact that, to borrow a little more from Friends, these characters knew life was gonna be this way. They feel pressured to get serious but struggle to navigate the ever-changing expectations of growing up. Is it more important to stand out or be liked at the office? Which is harder: paying off deep medical debt or getting on the phone to dispute the costs? The season’s highlight involves a character totally unprepared to throw the dinner party she’s hosting, only for a much older guest to be the one who embarrasses himself the most. That’s the fun of Adults: The titular group may be striving for maturity, but the show understands that adulthood can be a moving target. — S.L.

Netflix

The Diplomat (Netflix)

I have a soft spot for any show willing to consider women in positions of power, and Season 3 of The Diplomat offers up two of them: In addition to Keri Russell’s brilliant, unkempt, impossibly charming Kate Wyler, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, there’s Allison Janney’s icy Grace Penn, now—thanks to her predecessor’s heart attack—promoted to president of the United States. Can the two find common ground? The Diplomat reliably examines all of our most special relationships, understanding that marriage can sometimes feel no less complicated, ambitious, and humbling than statecraft. There are twists galore, but I liked the smaller moments—such as Bradley Whitford’s wacky contentment as first gentleman, and Kate’s MacGyvered costume change for Grace’s first presidential appearance. — S.G.

HBO

The Pitt (HBO Max)

At their best, hospital procedurals maintain a curious balance: They combine the stress of seeing patients suffer with the pleasure of watching competent doctors. In its first, Emmy-sweeping season, The Pitt perfected that formula. Starring the ER alum Noah Wyle as Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch, a physician still reeling from the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, the drama follows a sprawling ensemble of emergency-room workers over the course of a single shift. The real-time framework gives viewers an intimate look at the people who trickle in and out of the facility with various maladies—some comical, others terrifying. Through it all, Wyle’s lived-in performance grounds the stakes in the doctors’ emotional reality, keeping The Pitt focused on what it takes to be in the business of saving lives. — S.L.

Apple TV / Everett Collection

Severance (Apple TV)

Goats. Ether. Doppelgängers. Animatronic deities ushered in to music by the Alan Parsons Project. Severance is a weird trip; Season 2, which came three years after the show’s premiere and took us on frozen waterfall hikes and into secret pastoral laboratories, was no exception. Unlike most puzzle-box shows, though, the series sometimes offers answers as to WTF is actually going on at Lumon Industries. Season 2 develops the relationship between Innie Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower) while continuing the investigation into what happened to Mark’s not-actually-dead wife, now imprisoned on a secret floor at Lumon and undergoing a series of agonizing emotional trials. Stylized to a modernist extreme, Severance looks cold to the touch—which is why it’s always surprising when the show reveals a little of its heart. — S.G.

[Read: Severance can’t save you]

Peacock

The Traitors (Peacock)

Most reality shows rely on a simple conceit: Dozens of men vie for the affections of one woman; strangers become roommates; a famous-enough family gives audiences a glimpse into their life. The Traitors seems just as uncomplicated at first, thrusting its contestants—many of them veterans of other unscripted series such as Big Brother and the Real Housewives franchise—into a game of Mafia for a cash prize. But the competition toys with reality-TV tropes, borrowing from and satirizing the genre itself. The result, much like the host Alan Cumming’s eye-popping wardrobe, is delightfully over-the-top. This year, many of the designated “traitors” and “faithfuls” entered the castle with established rivalries and reputations—think Tom Sandoval of “Scandoval” fame, or “Boston Rob,” a notoriously crafty Survivor winner—boosting the mischief and melodrama. As my colleague Megan Garber put it, this is “hyperreality TV.” — S.L.

FX / Everett Collection

Dying for Sex (FX)

“Are you on some kind of sex quest?” Gail (Sissy Spacek) asks her daughter, Molly (Michelle Williams), midway through Dying for Sex, as the pair sit in a hospital waiting room. And the answer is: yes. Molly, given a terminal-cancer diagnosis, is enraged by how little she’s actually lived—and thus decides to venture out on a boundless journey of sexual exploration, aided by her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate). What makes the show work is Williams’s wide-eyed guilelessness as Molly; she is in some ways liberated by the finality of her illness, approaching dating apps and novel kinks with the positivity of a Disney princess and the enthusiasm of a sailor on shore leave. After a lifetime of quieting her desires, she’s finally able to look inward. Molly’s closeness with Nikki also upends ideas about which relationships can mean the most to us in the end. — S.G.

HBO

The Rehearsal (HBO)

As a comedian, Nathan Fielder tends to push every gag to its furthest extreme—which is why, in some ways, the fact that he turned the second season of The Rehearsal into an extended attempt to prevent all future airline disasters isn’t that surprising. But the show, in which Fielder stages elaborate practice sessions for ordinary people facing uncomfortable scenarios, offers an array of unexpected twists. In one episode, Fielder has pilots judge a singing competition; in another, he tries to embody Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who famously landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River. The Rehearsal’s sophomore outing became unforgettable television because it was often hard to tell what kind of television it was: comedy? Drama? Reality TV turned performance art? No one really knows except Fielder himself. Perhaps that’s what made the show irresistible. — S.L.

Netflix

Dept. Q (Netflix)

It feels like not much can surprise me anymore, at the end of this exhausting shocker of a year. But Dept. Q, Scott Frank and Chandni Lakhani’s Scotland-set procedural thriller, delivered a truly jaw-dropping narrative turn at the end of the first episode and then never let up on the suspense. Matthew Goode is in fine misanthropic form as Detective Carl Morck, a police investigator left traumatized and surly after being shot during a case. His boss tasks him with reinvestigating lost-cause cold cases, a thankless job that leads him to a compelling mystery; meanwhile, his therapist (Kelly MacDonald) struggles to get him to open up about his PTSD. Dept. Q’s tone is mordant and its imagination can be monstrous, but like any good crime show, it knows who its heroes are and the reassurance we get from them. — S.G.

Amazon Studios

The Summer I Turned Pretty (Prime Video)

The 21-year-old college student Belly (Lola Tung) is just so torn: between marrying the hot but immature Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and reigniting her relationship with his hot but moody brother, Conrad (Christopher Briney); between staying in a picturesque vacation town and studying abroad in the equally picturesque Paris. Her turmoil may seem inconsequential, but in its final season, The Summer I Turned Pretty turned into appointment viewing, even for many older viewers. This adaptation of Jenny Han’s best-selling young-adult novels scratched an itch for the teen melodramas of yesteryear—The O.C., Dawson’s Creek. The series takes its heroine’s emotional crossroads seriously while offering the fantasy of life lived in a perpetual glow, as sweet as a peach bought off a stand on the side of the road. — S.L.

Netflix

North of North (Netflix)

Siaja (Anna Lambe)—plucky, loving, and prone to pratfalls—is a classic sitcom heroine in an underutilized setting: Canada’s Arctic territories, where she lives in a tiny Inuit community with her vain, selfish husband (Kelly William) and her young daughter. By the end of the series premiere, after realizing how small her life has become, Siaja leaves her husband (in painfully public fashion) and sets out on a mission to make something of herself. “You’re acting like a white girl with options,” her mother, Neevee (Maika Harper), tells her. Nevertheless, Siaja is convinced that she can forge her own path. North of North pays painstaking attention to the details of life in Nunavut, and the icy landscapes are gorgeous on-screen. But Siaja’s relatability, and her unflagging optimism, is what really sells the series. — S.G.

Disney / Everett Collection

Andor (Disney+)

The second and final season of the most mature Star Wars show moves at light speed compared with the first, the plot leaping forward a year in time every three episodes: Newly introduced characters disappear; planets that seem pivotal to Cassian (Diego Luna) and his mission to help the Rebellion aren’t visited again. Yet Andor never feels unsteady. The Rogue One co-writer Tony Gilroy’s extended foray into a galaxy far, far away offers a stronger thesis than the average Star Wars spin-off: that the line between the dark side and the light can be terribly blurry. Perhaps the series, with its spy-thriller stylings, bold speeches, and lack of anything Jedi-related, isn’t really a conventional Star Wars story. It thoughtfully contemplates the painful reality of a conflict’s anonymous foot soldiers, who believe in, fight for, and sacrifice themselves for an ideology. In that sense, Andor conveys a force—lowercase f—all its own. — S.L.

A Daring New Take on Shakespeare’s Most Famous Soliloquy

2025-12-15T12:21:09-05:00

While writing the novel Hamnet, which imagines the hidden origins of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the author Maggie O’Farrell did something counterintuitive: She avoided referencing or quoting the Bard as much as possible. Characters never utter his name. The narrator mentions him obliquely, as the husband of Agnes Hathaway and the father to two daughters and a son, the titular Hamnet. As a child, Hamnet dies during the plague—a loss that O’Farrell depicts as catalyzing Shakespeare’s tragic play about the Danish prince. (The theory that Hamnet’s death led to Hamlet comes from the names Hamnet and Hamlet being interchangeable around the turn of the 17th century, when Hamlet was written.) Only a single line from Hamlet gets spoken, and not until the book’s end. “You can’t cut and paste large speeches of Shakespeare and put them into a novel,” O’Farrell told me last month. “It just doesn’t work on the page.”

Telling the story on-screen, however, was different. The film adaptation of Hamnet, co-written by O’Farrell with the movie’s director, Chloé Zhao, embraces the playwright’s work wholeheartedly. It expands Shakespeare as a character, transcribes portions of Hamlet, and reproduces the totemic “To be, or not to be” soliloquy not once, but twice. In the first instance, William (played by Paul Mescal), better known as Will, delivers it while contemplating what to do after Hamnet’s death. In the second, Agnes (Jessie Buckley) watches an actor recite the speech during a production of Hamlet, grasping in his performance something she previously could not about her and her husband’s grief. Both moments reinterpret the soliloquy as an extended conversation between two characters—two parents, one of whom is the writer himself—as they navigate the unfamiliar country of life after death.

[Read: The long history of the Hamnet myth]

As effective as the scenes are in the finished film, Zhao was torn about including the soliloquy. The director, who won an Oscar for the pensive Nomadland, wanted Hamnet’s screenplay to incorporate more Hamlet, but, she told me, “there’s a very fine line you have to walk.” The story focuses on Agnes and Will’s marriage and how their divergent approaches to mourning test their bond—Agnes’s sadness curdles into rage, whereas Will turns inward, pouring his feelings into his work. Including such a familiar speech risked, as Zhao put it, being “too much,” a distraction rather than a way to convey the characters’ anguish.

Mescal convinced her that the addition was necessary as he worked on processing his character. The actor felt that Will was not just trapped by his pain but also being pulled in opposite directions—a sentiment Zhao recognized that Shakespeare had captured best. The words “To be, or not to be” wrestled with, as she put it, “the great paradox of the universe” exemplified by Hamnet’s death. “It’s so unimaginable that we were born to die, right?” she said. “It’s like a big cosmic joke.”

Hamlet may be a dream role for many actors, but it also invites heavy scrutiny. The play is perhaps the most adapted of the Bard’s works, with numerous silent features, 20 major sound versions, and a litany of spin-offs and movies that are loosely based on it, such as Ophelia. Lines from the play—“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”—are as recognizable as the image of a man holding a skull, no matter where the events take place: in contemporary New York City, corporate Japan, the African Savannah.

The “To be, or not to be” soliloquy sets a particularly tricky trap. On-screen, the speech’s prestige can overwhelm its existential subject matter, and the passage tends to get overacted. “Because it’s a beautiful speech,” Peter Kirwan, a professor of Shakespeare and performance at Mary Baldwin University, told me, “the beauty of the speech kind of takes away from what it actually means for someone to be working through this.” The fact that any soliloquy halts dramatic action also poses a challenge. Onstage, an actor can naturally hold an audience’s attention, being in the same physical venue. Cinema’s visual language, though, has the potential to undermine the words’ meaning. The sentiment can become a spectacle more than an interior reflection made exterior.

Across film history, “To be, or not to be” has often been interpreted in one of two ways. Some movies, such as Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet, underline the speech’s raw power as a peek inside a conflicted hero’s mind. The soliloquy is heard partly as a voice-over while Olivier’s Hamlet positions himself on a cliff, emphasizing his mental turbulence. As a result, Lucy Munro, a professor of Shakespeare at King’s College London, explained to me, “you want to see what he does next, but you also want to see what he thinks next.” Other movies approach the passage as an opportunity to further convey the stakes. In the 1996 adaptation, which tangles with contemporary ideas such as surveillance, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet delivers the speech before a two-way mirror; the moment, Kirwan said, “becomes both an overt reflection of his interiority but also seems to be expressing a challenge to the people behind the mirror.” On rare occasions, the lines are taken out of their original context entirely. In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, an Indian adaptation of Hamlet set in Kashmir, Hamlet is reimagined as a political activist, and “To be, or not to be” is rendered as a political slogan.

[Read: In Shakespeare’s life story, not all is true]

Hamnet’s approach transforms the soliloquy further. The words are both divorced from Hamlet and indebted to it by the end of the film. They’re spoken by the play’s creator, then by the actor starring as Hamlet in its debut at the Globe Theatre. The first scene recalls adaptations such as Olivier’s: Will is next to the roiling River Thames, perched precariously on a wall as he struggles to process his grief. The second scene is akin to a take like Branagh’s, highlighting the observers—in this case, Agnes and the audience around her—taking in the soliloquy. Hamnet’s iterations of “To be, or not to be” form two halves of a complete narrative arc: Will’s recitation is a private expression of chaos; Agnes’s viewing is a public tableau of order. The speech offers each of them a semblance of peace, and the play reconnects them: By placing their strife on display, Will finally reaches Agnes through the performance.

In a way, Hamnet’s treatment of the soliloquy also updates the passage. Each generation’s takes on Hamlet tend to be imbued with the values of their time, Kirwan pointed out. Shakespeare’s play echoed the interrogative, anxious mood of the late-Elizabethan era; Branagh’s film confronted modern political overreach; Hamnet perhaps fits into our current social-media age by underlining the inclination to share even the most intimate thoughts. The film involves Shakespeare himself broadcasting his inner turmoil. “The interior,” Kirwan said, “is becoming public again.”

The question of what drove Shakespeare to write Hamlet is an irresistible riddle, and theories abound: Maybe his son’s death did lead Shakespeare to write Hamlet. Or maybe the Scandinavian folk figure Amleth actually planted the seed. Shakespeare’s words draw power from their malleability. But Hamnet goes beyond imagining what went on in Shakespeare’s head. The story, Zhao told me, offers a way to better understand the act of producing art. To her, Hamnet shows how creativity exists as a primal force, able to “alchemize one’s grief.” “We try to create a mystery around geniuses and artists, as if they somehow have a more special mind or something,” she said. But in Hamnet, the “To be, or not to be” meditation is infused entirely with the tumult of loss and moving on—feelings anyone can grasp. “The soliloquy didn’t come from the intellectual mind,” she explained. “It came from the tension in the body.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Comedian Dismantling the Alpha-Male Persona

2025-11-28T09:00:00-05:00

The comedian Tim Robinson seems to love playing obsessive weirdos. His Emmy-winning sketch series I Think You Should Leave is packed with them: a dating-show contestant who can’t stop using a zip line; an office drone attempting to beat a nonsensical computer game; a rideshare driver who has taped-up window decals and wants—no, needs—people to call him “the driving crooner.” In the film Friendship, Robinson played a man so crushed after being rejected by a new friend group that he later holds the men who rebuffed him at gunpoint.

As a result, Robinson’s work can be intense and disturbing to watch. His characters are often beyond belligerent, and the cinematography can resemble horror films or true-crime dramas. Still, he’s cultivated a dedicated following, as evidenced by his apparent box-office pull and by the proliferation of Robinson-related memes over the years: Even those who haven’t seen a minute of his work have probably become familiar with his face via images of him, say, dressed as a hot dog or furiously pointing at the camera. His latest show, HBO’s The Chair Company, is the clearest distillation yet of what makes Robinson so compelling as a performer. The episodic series, which he co-created with his collaborator Zach Kanin, offers an intimate look at a certain type of socially challenged man: someone who believes himself to be macho, while also yearning to be accepted as a regular guy. In the process, Robinson taps into a persona audiences can laugh at—and maybe even recognize—but find sympathetic anyway.

Robinson plays the bespectacled everyman Ron, who unravels when his chair collapses moments after he delivers a rousing speech at work. Embarrassed over having his time in the spotlight thwarted by a piece of furniture, Ron seeks out the manufacturer. The quest leads him down rabbit holes that threaten to upend his otherwise average existence, while exposing parts of Ron’s psyche he perhaps never understood. He’s a more intimately observed version of the disgruntled-but-desperate man Robinson has often played in his sketch comedy—and that many comedians have embodied in recent years as well. Some of today’s most popular comics have built their personal brands on the kind of aggressive behavior Ron exhibits. But Robinson maintains a line between who he is and who he plays on-screen; in this way, he’s more akin to the comedian Nathan Fielder, who similarly uses long-form fiction to explore the wannabe-alpha-male archetype. That helps him frame Ron’s journey as a story about more than just an average man’s fragile ego. His descent into conspiracism-driven madness illuminates both the ridiculousness and pain of trying to be liked.

[Read: The comic who’s his own worst enemy]

The pressure to keep up appearances amid the wackiness of daily life gets enhanced by the show’s offbeat dialogue, a tool Robinson has relied on throughout his career; some of his most popular sketches come peppered with technically incorrect English in grammatically loopy lines such as “Triples is best” and “For 50 seconds, I thought there was monsters on the world.” This type of bizarre wording is inherently quotable, but in The Chair Company, such Robinson-isms also help underline the strangeness of casual communication. In one of my favorite exchanges, Ron tells another man to “have a nice day.” That’s a perfectly routine sign-off, but the man, who had approached Ron by mistake, becomes despondent. “How?!” he replies. Ron doesn’t answer; engaging with such an abstract question would mean becoming the last thing he wants to be seen as: weird.

That desire to seem normal may be what makes Robinson’s characters irresistible. In his sketches, even the most oddball figures—a focus-group participant with terrible ideas, a man struggling to back out of a parking lot—are self-conscious about their unpopularity. Throughout The Chair Company, Ron’s need for approval yields something of an identity crisis. He’s hyperaware that his investigation into the titular furniture enterprise is unusual, yet he can’t deny that his double life as a suburban vigilante who’s actually uncovering the existence of a shadowy corporation makes him feel powerful. But his life gets a lot harder with his secret in tow. Fitting in, the show suggests, means fighting an eternal battle against your own impulses. Ron’s efforts to juggle his dogged, sometimes cringeworthy pursuit for justice with his responsibilities to his family are admirable—maybe even inspiring. Not all of us would risk so much humiliation just to fix a faulty chair design.

Besides, Ron doesn’t seem to be entirely delusional. The show has planted plenty of clues that Ron has indeed stumbled upon a conspiracy of some sort; he’s just ill-equipped to fully understand what it is, or what it means. And if anything, he’s not alone in feeling like the odd man out. The series’ running gags involve other characters’ off-kilter fixations, such as an accomplice of Ron indulging in X-rated comfort watches, or Ron’s work rival insisting on throwing a party with an overly complicated theme. Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with something. Maybe that’s what makes us human.

The Big Risk Wicked Is Taking

2025-11-20T17:20:09-05:00

Jon M. Chu always knew that the second Wicked film wouldn’t fully resemble the first. The director’s adaptation of the blockbuster musical brought theatergoers back to Oz last year, capturing the fizzy glamour found in the stage show’s first act. The movie was a smash hit, winning two Oscars and entering the words holding space into the cultural lexicon. Yet its sequel, Wicked: For Good, has to translate the musical’s notoriously knotty second act, which weaves the story of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, often messily, into the premise. Plus, there’s no “Popular” or “Defying Gravity”—no sparkly or soaring numbers to make the audience feel elated. Even the song that lends the sequel its title, “For Good,” is a tearjerker, a ballad about saying goodbye.

Wicked was a frothy coming-of-age tale; For Good is a more challenging story. As Dorothy and Toto make their way toward the Emerald City, Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo), now known as the Wicked Witch of the West, and her best friend, Oz’s It Girl, Glinda (Ariana Grande), must wrestle with their self-perception, a conflict that’s not easily translated into splendiferous spectacle. For Good is, as a result, a minor-key riff on its predecessor. “It’s not about going darker,” Chu told me over Zoom earlier this week. “It’s going deeper.”

Chu anticipated pushback from Universal Pictures on his approach. Thus, before the release of Wicked, he delivered a rough cut of its sequel to executives. “I needed the studio to understand the tone difference so that they weren’t expecting the first movie, a year later,” he explained. Only after Wicked debuted did the director revisit the cut. Chu and I recently spoke about the half decade he spent on the production of the two films, wrestling with the story’s second act, and the one quote from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that guided him throughout the process.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shirley Li: Let’s start with the decision to split the story into two films. There were two scripts available—a one-movie version, and a two-movie version. Why were you so certain that Wicked needed to be two films, shot simultaneously no less?

Jon M. Chu: You usually have a few weeks right when you jump on a project when you’re king, so you better make the big decisions. [Laughs.] That’s what I’ve learned. I just told everyone, “We have to do the two-movie version. We cannot keep going back and forth.” Like, this debate is going to kill this project again until someone comes in and says, “This is what we are doing.”

Now, deep down, I was always like, “You never know.” We’re betting huge. This thing is either going to tank our careers or let them soar. There was no in between. But to me, it was like, the movie needs the room. Wicked took The Wizard of Oz and deconstructed our ideas about fairy tales. I always envisioned it as a one-year, two-movie experience, and that the time between them was actually critical to the storytelling of this—that you were going to absorb the fairy tale so it could shatter in front of us.

Li: Once everyone was on board, how did you feel? You started production in the middle of the pandemic, shortly after your last movie-musical, In the Heights, hadn’t done well at the box office; people weren’t going to the cinemas then, and musicals can be a tough sell in general. To embark on a project of this scale, even while working alongside Wicked’s original writers, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, as well as the producer Marc Platt, must have been daunting.

Chu: Honestly, it’s weird to say, but I didn’t fear a lot at that moment. We didn’t have much to lose. I think the biggest fear was: Are the Wicked fans going to want this to be as deep and as truthful as I see the material? And am I going to get along with Stephen Schwartz? [Laughs.] That actually is the biggest thing. Like, it was a complicated production. Are these people going to be tied so preciously to their original material that I cannot do the things that I know need to be done? I didn’t know Schwartz or Winnie or Marc Platt well enough, and I thought, If they want to strangle this, they could. Luckily, they let go.

In COVID lockdown, nobody even knew what the future of movies was, so part of me thinks I got this job only because they were like, “No one’s ever going to make movies again.” But I knew exactly what this movie was. It’s part superhero movie, part drama, part romantic comedy, part romance, part friendship saga. The musical element was the language in which we were telling it, but it was not the genre in which we were doing it.

[Read: The fairy tale we’ve been retelling for 125 years]

Li: How did you keep all of that straight while filming two movies?

Chu: I saw it as one giant story. I had the plotting of Movie 1 and Movie 2 on my office wall, and every scene was labeled with the emotion I wanted the audience to feel. And so all of the departments could walk in there, and I would say, “Today is yearning. Today is courage. Today is resentment.” That was my map, and each of the girls had their maps. I think Cynthia used perfumes. Ari’s notes were like a madman’s notes. And then our crew had a war room. For both movies, you could walk from one side of the room to the other, and there’s models, pictures, fabrics. There’s designs for everything, so you could see the color story. You could feel the design story. You could walk the movie.

There were things we were insecure about in the first movie. Can we make people buy into a musical? Is Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship going to be the thing that people buy into? Can we get the audience to care about these girls? They did, and they were in deeper than I ever thought they could be. What they fell in love with in the first movie was not the musical numbers and the bubbliness. They were seduced by these, but they’re not why people came back multiple times; it’s not why they dressed up as the characters for Halloween. These characters are fighting for their optimism, their idea of what they want. The more we throw at them, the more they have to figure out how to live in the reality of the mess but know that the dream can still exist.

That gave me room to go deeper in these characters. We would have no debate with the studio about darkness in this movie, because we already had the hearts of people. They were rooting for these characters, so you should throw as much shit at them as possible, because that’s great storytelling.

(Giles Keyte / Universal Pictures)

Li: There’s a lot of shit they have to go through. The second act of Wicked is famously messy: You have to incorporate the plot of The Wizard of Oz, ensure that a significant time jump makes sense, and wrap up every character’s story in a satisfying way. How did you know the audience would follow you into this more complicated realm?

Chu: The biggest advantage we ever got from the 20-year production of Wicked onstage was the mantra that the producers handed to me, which was: “It’s about the girls, stupid.” They said that at my first meeting. “Whatever you do, wherever you go, the biggest lesson to learn is ‘It’s about the girls.’” Every scene had to be: If one of them was in it, then it had to be about why the other one wasn’t in it. If none of them was in it, then it had to be about one of those girls not being present.

Li: How did that affect the way you approached “For Good,” the finale number? You shot it in a way that goes somewhat against what one would think a musical’s big finish should be like: It’s restrained, just a camera swooping around Cynthia and Ariana confessing how much they mean to each other.

Chu: The thing that trapped me for “For Good” early was the fact that it’s the last song of the two-movie, year-long saga. You’re like, Okay, we gotta give them the big ending. So did I have my cranes out there? Did I think, Should I have it snow? Of course I had all of that stuff ready, but when we rehearsed it, it just became very clear: I don’t want to leave their faces when they’re singing these words. Their faces were the only things I wanted to look at.

Li: Your take on “For Good” captures how these two films work, in a way. It’s like the first Wicked is a Trojan horse, delivering big, bubbly musical elements before revealing, in the second film, the trickier messages inherent to the show’s second act. Is that how you feel too, or am I way off?

Chu: No, I think you’re right on. I don’t know if I’d say a Trojan horse, but I think all great musicals are about something that’s very relevant, and I think musicals have a great cover. Music is a great cover.

In a weird way, Wicked was always the second movie. That’s why we wanted to make this. The second movie is about: How much bravery and courage does it take to pop your bubble? And does courage have an expiration date?

Li: Wicked is a story of transformation for both Glinda and Elphaba. But what about you—how has making these films changed you?

Chu: Crazy Rich Asians came from a place of desperation for me as a filmmaker, to know who I am. In the Heights was my heart—I put all my creativity into that. Wicked is the only job that I never had to pitch for, that was given to me. I had to find within Wicked why I had to be the one to make it.

(Giles Keyte / Universal Pictures)

I think about my parents, and I think about the American dream. And I think, If I can be as great as I can be, then I can show that the American dream is real and that fairy tales do happen. I can hire a diverse cast at the highest form of entertainment, and no one can question why. I can just set the precedent. That’s kind of what I feel like my role is: Do it, prove it, and show it.

Li: We are talking just a few days before this film hits theaters, and the reviews are here too. Does this conjure a sense of pressure? Fear?

Chu: I’m not fearful at all. How the audience takes it, how the reviewers take it, that’s not my problem. I think we were in it for so long, we had to validate it for ourselves and be like, Did we do everything we could? Did we turn every stone? Did we do our best? Yeah, we did.

Li: I’m starting to understand why Ariana and Cynthia were crying so much on the press tour last year. They’d finished For Good, unlike the rest of us.

Chu: [Laughs.] We really believe in it! It’s in our DNA; it’s not bullshit!

There’s a quote that I love from the L. Frank Baum book that we inscribed on the Tin Man’s outfit. We never got a close-up of it, so no one’s ever going to see it, but it was something that stayed with me throughout Wicked. It’s this: “If we walk far enough, we shall sometime come to some place.” It is not a romantic quote, it is not a flashy quote, but I feel like that’s life. That’s actually what our job is. It’s not about getting to a destination. Just keep walking, and you’ll end up at the place you need to be.

Parenting Is the Least of Her Worries

2025-11-06T16:51:04-05:00

The film Die My Love takes place mostly in a remote farmhouse. Tucked away amid tall grasses and verdant woods in rural Montana, it seems idyllic. But Grace (played by Jennifer Lawrence) appears uncomfortable as soon as she sets foot inside her new home. She flops over like a rag doll while her boyfriend, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), explores the building, which he inherited from his uncle. Months later, she and Jackson have a baby. Grace becomes a doting mother, but the house becomes the subject of her wrath. She demolishes a mirror, claws at the bathroom wallpaper, and smashes through a glass door. Something about living in this place is breaking her mind.

At first glance, Grace resembles the type of mothers who have become a dominant cinematic presence in recent years—women portrayed as troubled about being a caregiver. This year has seen a spate of them: In the propulsive psychological dramedy If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, whose daughter has special needs; at the end of the film, after a series of escalating disasters, Linda throws herself repeatedly into the ocean as if hoping the waves will subsume her. In the horror movie Bring Her Back, Sally Hawkins depicts a grieving foster parent who goes to extreme lengths to remedy the mistakes she made as a mom. Even the mainstream studio movie One Battle After Another hinges on the intimate drama of caretaking, the story unspooling after a woman abandons her infant.

As someone who’s lonely, caustic, and adrift, Grace may share some of those women’s traits, but she’s never at a loss about what to do with her child. Die My Love draws much of its raw power from Grace’s love for her son, Harry; the director, Lynne Ramsay, a master at precisely conveying a character’s inner life, creates a kaleidoscopic study of Grace’s shattered headspace while showing how Harry serves as her lone anchor. The demands of being a mother, as a result, are only ever a red herring for Grace’s pain—a significant change from the source material, a 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz, in which the protagonist is much more detached from her baby. In a field of movies this year that dwell on women tormented by motherhood, Die My Love is the exception. Grace puts it well: “I don’t have a problem attaching to my son,” she says. “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.”

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]

That “everything else” is, for Grace, hard to define. By avoiding the obvious culprit for her suffering—her identity as a new mother—Die My Love beckons the viewer closer, encouraging them to make sense of her. The film is packed with nods to what else is going on: She wants Jackson’s attention but frequently lashes out at him when he’s home. She indulges in barefoot walks with Harry while she wears flowy, flowery dresses, the picture of an earthy, grounded mother, but bristles at a store clerk who coos at Harry and compliments her. Again and again, Grace receives unsolicited parenting advice, some of which she quietly accepts, and some of which she dismisses with sharp retorts. Although those around her believe that Grace, an aspiring author who is unable to get started on her book, is immobilized by the weight of motherhood, what’s actually happening seems to be much more complex. The ignored “voice within women,” Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique, yearns for “something more than my husband and my children and my home.” But that’s not true of Grace: She actually wants Jackson and Harry and a happy life with them. Maintaining a house in the woods seemed ideal, too; a peaceful locale was supposed to help her focus on the writing she’d intended to do.

As I watched Die My Love, I thought of what the director Maggie Gyllenhaal told me when we spoke about her movie The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel in which a woman abandons her children for three years. Gyllenhaal explained that, to her, two types of mothers exist on-screen: the “fantasy mother,” perfect in every way, and the “monstrous mother,” who embarks on a redemption arc over the course of the story. Grace is neither, and yet also both at once. She bakes Harry’s birthday cake and then slinks, catlike, across the front lawn with a knife in her hand. She dances before his carrier to cheer him up, but keeps him awake when she feels restless. Grace is in limbo, the film posits, mired in a crisis seemingly brought on by her inability to see herself as either archetype of a young mother. An early, pointed visual captures this idea: Months before she gives birth, Grace approaches the house and pauses just short of the entrance. She’s framed through a series of doorways, simultaneously outside the walls and trapped within them.

Lawrence is superb at exemplifying Grace’s confusion. She alternates fluidly between domestic tranquility and feral rage, often in the same scene. Even as Grace’s grasp on reality seems to slip, her turbulence comes off as entirely natural; Lawrence’s performance hints at years of built-up frustration about circumstances that her character can’t bring herself to articulate. In Grace she unearths a primal fear: that a person can fail to understand herself—and, as such, perhaps can’t be helped. Grace appears dazed when others pick up on her ache, and takes a perverse pleasure in Jackson’s struggle to deal with her deteriorating mental health. Lawrence also finds a naivete to Grace’s agony: After scrabbling so hard at the walls that her fingertips bleed, Grace acts like a wounded child, taken aback by her own strength. It’s no wonder she’s bonded so tightly with her equally guileless infant son.

[Read: Enough with the mom guilt already]

This isn’t Ramsay’s first portrait of a distraught parent. In the haunting 2011 drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, the director explored the psyche of a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son committed a series of unspeakably violent crimes. The final scene is soundtracked by the Washington Phillips song “Mother’s Last Word to Her Son”; it’s an ironic pick that underlines the distance between the movie’s lead characters. Phillips croons about a mother’s bond with her child as Swinton walks off, her character freshly wrecked by a visit with her son in prison.

Die My Love also features a meaningful song choice. John Prine’s duet with Iris Dement, “In Spite of Ourselves,” comes on the car radio one day, and Grace insists on turning the volume up to sing along. Prine’s and Dement’s voices mix with Pattinson’s and Lawrence’s as they serenade each other about how they’ll be together forever. It’s a bouncy, sweet-sounding love song, but the lyrics are also full of eyebrow-raising digs: “He ain’t too sharp, but he gets things done,” and “She takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.” The dissonance mirrors the film’s loopy approach to Grace. Her troubles—sleepless nights, endless exhaustion—could simply be the result of young parenthood. But the truth is far more complicated: She loves her family—she really does. She just can’t stand herself.

An Intimate Portrait of Humanity at Its Worst

2025-10-31T16:14:36-04:00

Bugonia, the latest film from the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, begins with shots of bees. As they gently buzz about in a field of wildflowers, a voice-over intones the glory of the insects’ lives. Their ability to help another species reproduce through pollination is, the speaker marvels, like “sex, but cleaner.” Their beauty emerges from their “larger organizing principle.”

The voice belongs to Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons), a recluse who spends his days alternating between beekeeping and obsessively researching “Andromedans,” a humanoid race of extraterrestrials that he and other deep-web truthers believe has infiltrated Earth’s population. Teddy is convinced that their kind is planning to destroy the planet, and that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company, is an alien central to their scheme. But Bugonia’s provocative premise doesn’t yield a sci-fi thriller. The film instead offers an intimate, unhurried exploration of human cruelty.

A remake of the 2003 South Korean black comedy Save the Green Planet, Bugonia retains the broad strokes of the earlier film’s plot. But Lanthimos applies his own, distinctive touch. Save the Green Planet indulges in knotty twists and a maximalist visual flair; Bugonia, meanwhile, is muted, often resembling a chamber drama. There are few characters, minimal flourishes of surreality, and a complete lack of the outré whimsy that defined several of Lanthimos’s previous projects with Stone, including Poor Things and The Favourite. The filmmaker instead evokes his earlier work—namely Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer—combining the mannered, hermetic bleakness of those tales with the befuddled existentialism of a Samuel Beckett play.

[Read: The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a dark twist on a Greek myth]

The resulting story amounts to a paranoia-fueled war of attrition. Teddy, after successfully kidnapping Michelle and imprisoning her in his basement, spends much of the film attempting to make her admit that she’s an Andromedan; Michelle, believing that her high profile will expedite her rescue, refuses to give in. Assisting Teddy is his autistic cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), whose childlike innocence and loyalty to Teddy make the negotiations feel even more uncomfortable: The more enraged Teddy becomes at Michelle’s denials, the more Don questions whether he should support his cousin—a conundrum he’s forced to parse alone. But Bugonia’s restrained approach conveys Teddy’s dread about the world around him. The bees are dying, the corporations have too much power, and every other online fringe community has ignored him; for someone like Teddy, believing that aliens are to blame is almost a comfort. At one point, he explains to Don that the only way they can get Michelle to confess is to practice “maximum focus.” The film follows his lead, constructing a near-relentless study of misery that culminates in a disturbing finale.

That such a grim movie enthralls more than it repels is largely because Plemons and Stone, who proved to be excellent scene partners in Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, ground their characters in an unexpected poignancy. Teddy, who seems perpetually covered in grease and dirt, is hard to root for as a protagonist; he’s self-righteous, quick to anger, and at times mistreats Don, his only ally. Yet Plemons imbues him with despair, finding a pitiful fragility in his aggression. Michelle comes across as an outright villain at first, talking almost exclusively in chilly, insincere corporate speak and treating her employees with passive-aggressive disregard. Stone portrays Michelle’s ruthlessness as something of a mask, however—a well-practiced method to quash her fears and insecurities. Both characters, Bugonia suggests, delusionally believe themselves to be heroes. They’re so self-important and solipsistic that they’re oblivious to how heartless they’ve become.

Maybe that’s why Teddy and Michelle’s conversations tend to resemble a feedback loop, in which neither character is willing to compromise: Teddy accuses Michelle of being an Andromedan, Michelle counters by insisting that Teddy needs help, and Teddy follows up by lashing out at her. Although plenty of these exchanges are biting—and broken up by an amusing subplot involving a local cop poking around Teddy’s property—they can make the film an endurance test for viewers. Lanthimos indulges in long takes, while the composer Jerskin Fendrix’s thudding, metronomic score contributes to the film’s oppressive atmosphere. The characters’ discussions touch on topical subjects, such as the wealth gap, the internet as a breeding ground for conspiracism, and the psychological effects of climate change. But rarely do they lead to anything other than further animosity between the adversaries. I certainly itched for a fast-forward button when Teddy threatened Michelle for the umpteenth time.

[Read: The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory]

But Bugonia won me over when that resentment finally exploded into cathartic violence. Given how much of the story takes place in a confined setting, when one character launches themselves across a table to attack another, the moment is breathtaking. Throughout the movie, Lanthimos doles out pieces of backstory in short, dreamlike sequences that unfurl in black and white, artfully filling in the blanks of Teddy’s particular interest in Michelle. These scenes add an emotional heft to the barbed-tongue dialogue, giving meaning to all the pent-up anger.

Bugonia, the word, never gets uttered in the film. The term calls to mind the begonia, a type of flower—but it actually refers to an ancient-Greek belief that a cow’s carcass could spawn bees, that life could come from death. Teddy refuses to entertain that notion; he keeps Michelle alive, believing that he can be the one to negotiate the terms to keep Earth intact. Humans like him, he insists, deserve to survive. Yet all his “maximum focus” seems to have merely led to myopia. Teddy blames an extraterrestrial race that may not exist for turning people into mindless drones, instead of wondering whether the planet he’s trying to protect is beyond saving. For all its strangeness, Bugonia seems concerned, in the end, with a pair of pretty simple truths: Humankind hasn’t taken care of Earth. No one else is about to, either.

The Worst Art Thief in America

2025-10-23T09:34:10-04:00

The director Kelly Reichardt encourages stillness. Her style—long takes and low stakes, often punctuated by unhurried silences—forces viewers to slow down, to immerse themselves in the atmosphere being created on-screen. Her movies can resemble landscape paintings, like those by the artist Arthur Dove. His work is featured in The Mastermind, her latest film, which mirrors the tableaus its protagonist covets: textured, abstract studies of reality that reveal their true potency over time.

James Blaine—or “J. B.”—Mooney (played by Josh O’Connor) isn’t the patient type, however. He’s an unemployed carpenter who’s grown restless amid his suburban comforts. Set in 1970 in Massachusetts, the film follows J. B. as he hatches a plan to steal four of Dove’s paintings from the (fictional) Framingham Museum of Art. His plot would make the likes of Danny Ocean cringe: It involves having two amateurs rob the exhibit in broad daylight without any plan to circumvent the security guards. The pair is then to deliver the goods to an undisguised J. B. idling in a car outside the front entrance.

Unlike the successful smash-and-grab at the Louvre last weekend, J. B.’s scheme goes awry immediately. But the robbery isn’t the primary focus anyway. The Mastermind—an ironic reference to J. B.—mines drama from its methodical deconstruction of the burglary’s aftermath. J. B. clumsily goes on the lam, leaving a trail of hurt feelings and broken relationships in his wake. That contrast, between how meticulously Reichardt builds her story and the way her protagonist pinballs through his, yields a remarkably precise exploration of hubris as a self-destructive force. The Mastermind isn’t a heist movie so much as a character study that dismantles the criminal himself, one selfish act at a time.

[Read: Why are art heists so fascinating?]

The film is also possibly Reichardt’s funniest thus far. The small scale of the central heist allows the director to prioritize observing how J. B.’s troubles are caused by ordinary, easily avoided obstacles. J. B. rushes through vetting his criminal collaborators, because he’s forgotten that he has to look after his sons, who don’t have school that day. A cop happens to pull into the museum’s parking lot, making J. B. panic, but J. B. didn’t have to wait in such a conspicuous spot. (Even more amusing: The officer isn’t keeping an eye out for would-be thieves at all; he’s just taking a break to eat a sandwich.) One sequence shows J. B. hiding the paintings inside the loft of a barn, only to get covered in mud after the ladder he’s using falls to the ground, leaving him stranded.

Yet J. B. is not entirely hapless either. The Mastermind makes clear that the cushy, middle-class life he leads is populated by similarly self-absorbed personalities. J. B.’s wife, Terri (Alana Haim), is so disinterested in J. B. that she can’t be bothered to see what he’s up to in the basement. His mother carefully compares the lengths of two halves of corn at a family dinner, keeping the longer one for herself while she tunes out the conversation. Buoyed by the composer Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score, the film produces a rich portrait of 1970s suburbia and the jadedness such an environment could breed: Reichardt and her go-to cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, immerse J. B.’s town in a warm, autumnal glow, but his home is a dimly lit series of cramped spaces, full of faded upholstery, rumpled laundry, and board games played on the floor. It’s no wonder J. B. can’t take his eyes off of Dove’s paintings, so striking in their designs and vivid in their hues. With apologies to Ariana Grande, his subsequent urge to steal them comes with a heavy whiff of thoughtless, “7 Rings”-esque materialism: He saw it. He liked it. He wanted it. He got it. He’s an inelegant protagonist, seemingly incapable of considering what happens next, because he’s never had to do so.

O’Connor is no stranger to playing an art thief, and his understated performance finds compelling shades of a man who commits such an obviously boneheaded act without a clear motive. As clues to J. B.’s mentality emerge, O’Connor imbues the character with a hangdog charisma that deepens each revelation. J. B.’s family, for instance, turns out to be wealthy enough to support him; when cops stop by his home, he sheepishly name-drops his father, the local judge, to defend himself. Even when he goes on the run, J. B. moves through the world as if everything will turn out fine for him. He seems genuinely shocked when he’s told he can’t stay with two art-school friends of his for more than a night.

[Read: An entrancing fairy tale about Italian grave robbers]

What J. B. has aced is clearly not the art of persuasion or thievery. His real specialty, The Mastermind suggests, is his ability to tune out everything but his own wants and needs. Reichardt blankets the world around J. B. with period-specific details: She lets the audience notice the Army-recruitment poster affixed to the wall behind J. B. at a bus station, the radio reports about the Vietnam War that play in the background while J. B. concentrates on assembling a false passport for himself, and the protests in the streets of Cincinnati that J. B. casually wanders into. Images of flimsy objects pepper the film too, conjuring a sense of inevitability to J. B.’s comeuppance. Reichardt lingers on the paper plane that one of J. B.’s sons grips while running through the museum, as well as a woman dashing through the streets amid a downpour with only a newspaper to shield her. The life J. B. has led, as mundane as it is, has never been sturdy either. By taking it for granted, J. B., who doesn’t actually steal very much from the museum, robs the most from himself.

When One Word Changes an Entire Film

2025-10-22T07:30:00-04:00

The following contains spoilers for After the Hunt.

After the Hunt, the latest film from the director Luca Guadagnino, seems designed to inspire debates about “cancel culture.” Set in 2019 amid the #MeToo movement, the movie follows a group of academics in Yale’s philosophy department who are embroiled in a sexual-assault scandal. The characters are perfectly comfortable discussing morality. But as soon as they’re made to confront their personal beliefs, philosophy becomes, as Guadagnino put it in an interview at the New York Film Festival, something of a “special effect”—the fuel that can turn any conversation incendiary.

The movie, now in theaters, hinges on a provocative event: Maggie (played by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) accuses a popular professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Hank’s colleague, the enigmatic Alma (Julia Roberts), is subsequently caught between the two—the student who worships her, and one of her closest friends. The most daring scene, though, arrives right at the end: In a brief epilogue, Alma reunites with Maggie five years after the allegation dissolved their relationship. The women are uninterested in relitigating what happened. Instead, they insist upon their own happiness: Alma has recovered from the drama; she’s now a dean at Yale. Maggie, too, is thriving—engaged, with a giant ring she shows off to her former mentor. After their conversation wraps, the camera lingers on Alma until Guadagnino, from somewhere off-screen, calls out, “Cut!”

The director’s voice breaks the fourth wall with as much subtlety as a character waking up to say that everything was merely a dream. The moment is jarring, and implies that everything that happened on-screen until then shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Some critics have interpreted the ending as a glib last-minute twist that threatens to neutralize the story’s potency and dismisses the seriousness of the movie’s premise. Among the other complaints: There seems to be no point, beyond pure button-pushing, to using a Woody Allen–style typeface in the opening credits, thereby referencing a real-life disgraced figure. The script is blanketed in sweeping claims found in online discourse about sex and gender, but it ultimately has little to say about cancel culture. Perhaps its message is meant to be deliberately ambiguous—or maybe there’s no message at all.

[Read: A #MeToo movie devoid of sensationalism]

Yet Guadagnino’s decision to insert himself into the movie’s final beat is revealing, in that it clarifies more about After the Hunt than anything that precedes it. The scene illuminates the story’s preoccupation not with the post-#MeToo world but with performance, hints of which can be found throughout the film. An early sequence finds Alma and Hank theatrically debating, before a collection of awed students, whether any of the philosophers they study led a wholly moral life. Inside Alma’s home, her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), acts the part of the dutiful spouse when guests come over, baking a tart for Alma’s colleagues; alone, he falls asleep to porn. Alma visits the dean of humanities to talk about Maggie’s accusation, but they don’t discuss how the assault may have happened—or the fact that Maggie just attended Alma’s boozy, intimate dinner party, which encouraged a fair amount of boundary-blurring. Instead, the dean worries about how the situation will come off to the rest of the academic community. “Against all odds,” he says, “I’ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance.”

Studied mannerisms inform every relationship in the film. The movie questions whether anyone is telling the truth: whether Maggie falsely accused Hank in order to deflect how she plagiarized her dissertation, whether Hank’s pitiful self-deprecation is an act belying a disturbingly aggressive demeanor, and even whether Alma actually cares about her students. But truths go ignored, the film argues, when everyone prefers inventing realities for themselves. Consider the fantastical visual language Guadagnino deploys—he frequently captures characters via their reflections, including a moment in which Hank is positioned in front of a pair of intersecting mirrored walls; his gesticulating makes him look like a many-tentacled beast. Alma, who seems to almost always be hiding behind a mask, fades from her couch at one point via a bit of camera trickery, like she’s a ghost.

After the Hunt, in other words, is not what it initially seems like it might be: a film that examines changing cultural mores. Rather, it’s a cynical movie in which characters carefully position themselves for maximum validation. This need to be seen as morally good poisons them all—the more Alma stands up for Maggie in public while doubting her in private, the more Alma’s health deteriorates. The more Frederik keeps up a facade of warmth in his marriage, the more he descends into cruelty. After the Hunt pointedly avoids showing the faculty’s deliberations on Hank’s firing—the titular hunt, if you will—in favor of examining how each of its characters, indifferent to what actually happened, insists on being perceived as correct.

[Read: How colleges foretold the #MeToo movement]

Guadagnino, in interviews since the film’s debut at the Venice Film Festival, in August, has waved off critiques that the film is hollow. He has resisted the notion that After the Hunt is a “movie about #MeToo,” calling the label “a bit of a lazy way to describe it.” And, he’s noted, the choice to insert his own voice into the story’s final seconds is nothing but a way to remind the audience that the film is, well, a film. “Once we say ‘Cut,’ we invite the audience to think that this is a movie,” he said at the New York Film Festival. “We wanted to entertain them.”

After the Hunt does entertain. The production design impressively transforms a London soundstage into New Haven, the plot is fabulously convoluted, and Roberts is particularly compelling to watch, clearly relishing the opportunity to deliver a slippery performance. The film around her is equally slick, using as its backdrop a moment in recent history when people in power felt under the microscope. It never peers through that microscope itself, but in its final moment—“Cut!”—After the Hunt invites the viewer to do so instead.

It’s Not Enough to Read Orwell

2025-10-21T12:50:03-04:00

George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984 in the late 1940s on the desolate Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Tuberculosis ravaged his body, and typing thousands of words a day only weakened him further. His skin flaked off. Blisters burst across his throat. Feverish and emaciated, he endured painful procedures to support his failing lungs, but the treatments were too late. Eventually, in 1950, Orwell succumbed to the disease.

Close-ups of microscopic tuberculosis bacteria fill the screen in the opening minutes of the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5—images as bold and unnerving as what follows. Directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, the film examines an idea popularized by 1984: that blatant falsehoods can, through propaganda, be accepted as truth. That conceit, along with Orwell’s state of mind during his final months, has been scrutinized for decades—by high-school students, biographers, and other documentarians. But Peck builds out a bigger argument, using material provided by the Orwell estate—including the writer’s letters, essays, and diary entries—to trace the authoritarian tactics that can suppress truth and lay out what he sees as a disturbing pattern: one of wide-scale complacency in the decades after Orwell’s death. Generations of readers have recognized the prescient warnings of 1984. Yet according to Peck’s film, recognizing that reality can resemble Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece has led to numbness rather than to meaningful change.

The tuberculosis-bacteria motif underscores this idea. To compare authoritarianism’s rise to an infection is perhaps obvious. But as the microbes spread across the screen, the visual becomes almost hypnotic—and, as Peck recently told me, akin to how dictators overwhelm people’s abilities to determine fact from fiction. “It’s the same story again and again,” he said, “and we don’t learn.”

Peck grew up under multiple authoritarian regimes. At 8 years old, he and his family fled Haiti after François Duvalier, the dictator known as Papa Doc, began his rule. Around the same time that his family moved to the Republic of the Congo, that country’s first democratically elected prime minister was assassinated; the following coup placed the despot Mobutu Sese Seko in power. To Peck, Papa Doc and Mobutu followed the same playbook: “They attack intelligence, they attack universities, they attack science, they attack the press,” he said. “They attack every institution that can be a bulwark against them.”

Those memories shaped Peck’s approach to Orwell: 2+2=5. A more traditional exploration of Orwell’s fiction might turn to interviews with scholars of his work to unpack his resonance. Peck instead explores the idea cinematically, as he did in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 deconstruction of James Baldwin’s work: He creates an impressionistic collage, featuring scenes derived mostly from Orwell’s writings—which are recited by the actor Damian Lewis—or from relevant archival footage.

[Read: James Baldwin was right all along]

The documentary, Peck said, is intended to convey his frustration that Orwell’s name has too often been flattened into an adjective, and 1984 into mere speculative fiction. In one scene from Orwell: 2+2=5, Apple’s well-known Super Bowl ad—in which a model hurls a sledgehammer at a Big Brother broadcast—plays on a giant billboard above a busy street as passersby completely ignore it. Perhaps in an effort to unflatten Orwell’s warnings, the film points out what it sees as contemporary parallels to Newspeak, the uncanny English used throughout 1984 to prevent the articulation of abstract concepts. (Rather than say something is “great,” Newspeak uses the word plusgood. A more insidious example would be calling any ideas that go against the ruling party “thoughtcrime.”) Peck argues that some world leaders have seemed to embrace the practice of twisting words: In one sequence, he displays a modern glossary of terms—peacekeeping operations, campaign finance, illegals—that he implies obfuscate thornier realities.

While constructing the documentary, Peck thought of Orwell as “a fighting companion,” he told me—a guide rather than an encyclopedia of insights to pull from. He structured the film according to the three tenets of the ruling government in 1984: “War is peace,” “Ignorance is strength,” and “Freedom is slavery.” Then he found pointed visuals to illustrate those ideas. A clip of George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq, for instance, rolls as the first chapter begins, to emphasize how even nontotalitarian countries can use conflict to stoke nationalistic fervor. A graphic charting the slew of banned books in the United States illustrates the power of ignorance, while a montage of security cameras in public spaces underlines the notion of freedom as an illusion. Peck also adds newsreels of world leaders delivering speeches, footage of war zones past and present, and scenes from futuristic Hollywood films, to emphasize the reach of Orwell’s ideas throughout time.

The film, as a result, can feel overstuffed. But even when he incorporates discordant images, Peck keeps a close eye on Orwell’s vision. For example, he uses AI-generated art during some sequences about the misuse of technological innovation; the moments come off as jarring at first, but they successfully evoke Orwell’s description in 1984 of a world in which records and books are produced “without any human intervention.” And the ending of Orwell: 2+2=5, in which Peck knits together recordings of protests—of Russian citizens lining up outside the dissident Alexei Navalny’s funeral, of women demonstrating over the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran—brought to my mind a line from Orwell’s essay “Why I Write”: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

[Read: What Orwell didn’t anticipate]

Peck told me that he resisted noting every parallel he saw between Orwell’s words and today’s reality, because he didn’t want to turn the documentary into an ongoing history lesson. (To go into the editing bay and, say, incorporate news reports of the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel being taken off air “would be the trap,” he told me.) If anything, Peck hoped that the film’s density and wide scope would illuminate how frequently the past’s most painful moments repeat themselves. Knowing that many dictators have come to power through familiar means isn’t enough to stop them, the film argues; a democratic system needs “to be renewed and reinforced every day,” Peck said, through a commitment to truth. Such pursuits may be the only way to shake off intellectual paralysis—the only way to remember what 2+2 actually equates.

A Surprisingly Endearing True-Crime Movie

2025-10-15T09:00:00-04:00

Delinquent protagonists in true-crime stories tend to have a memorable MO: Young lovebirds might find the thrill of theft romantic, while a teenager might relish roping her friends into targeting their favorite celebrities’ homes. But Jeffrey Manchester, the robber known as “Roofman,” made headlines for being unusually polite when he executed his misdeeds. After he surprised McDonald’s employees by dropping in through the roof—hence his nickname—and holding them at gunpoint, he gently reminded one of them to breathe while they collected cash. Before he locked them in the walk-in refrigerator, he made sure that they had coats to wear so they’d be comfortable in the cold.

Roofman, a movie dramatizing Manchester’s life, is similarly eager to please. Starring Channing Tatum as the titular crook, the film transforms the absurd tale of a criminal on the run into an intimate character study. It begins in 2004, with Jeffrey landing in prison—only to escape shortly afterward and find shelter inside a Toys “R” Us. The ensuing series of events incorporate elements of romance and melodrama with farce and action. Anxious to reunite with his estranged family, he ventures outdoors under a false identity; he ends up falling in love with a single mom, Leigh (played by Kirsten Dunst), who works at the store Jeffrey has turned into his hideout. Roofman deftly blends genres to create a low-key crowd-pleaser—one that avoids merely reveling in what made Manchester notorious in the first place.

Movies based on the lives of real people can easily turn into hagiographies, hyperbolizing their circumstances or papering over their scandals. Even an uplifting sports drama such as Rudy or a period piece such as Argo exaggerates scenes for added tension, treating its heroes like unassailable underdogs. But the writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who’s best known for making Blue Valentine and other complex tragedies, doesn’t excuse Jeffrey for his lawlessness. Cianfrance depicts the character evenly, as someone who can be as clever as he is careless. Jeffrey is resourceful enough to build a security system for his refuge by stringing up baby monitors throughout the store—but he also eats so much candy that he gives himself a toothache. The opportunities for big set pieces are similarly subdued. The closest thing to a car chase comes when Jeffrey drives a used sedan he purchased for Leigh’s elder daughter, pushing it beyond the speed limit to impress her. Tatum, too, infuses Jeffrey with a disarming naivete that makes him compelling to watch.

[Read: The 14 movies to watch out for this fall]

The actor is especially charming in his scenes with Dunst; the two share a down-to-earth chemistry as a pair of single parents who are surprised to find themselves in a budding romance in their 40s. Their relationship fuels the plot, making Jeffrey delay his getaway and revealing what the story is actually about: the emotional toll of starting over. If Leigh likes his cover identity—he calls himself “John Zorn” and gives her an invented backstory—Jeffrey reasons that maybe he doesn’t need to keep looking for a way back to his old life of heists. Would acceptance into a new family, even under false pretenses, be enough for him to abandon his past? Is quiet domesticity worth the risk?

Cianfrance uses these questions to explore the humor and suspense in mundanity—how everyday drama can become all-consuming. For Jeffrey, accessing the Toys “R” Us security cameras has become quotidian, but decorating Leigh’s apartment for Christmas provides a genuine thrill. Cianfrance captures Jeffrey’s misadventures inside the store as if his protagonist is trapped in a cage, underlining how tiny his fugitive life is compared with the immensity of his relationship with Leigh. Even Jeffrey’s initial escape from prison is small in scale, his movements practiced, his expressions stoic. He seems much more engaged when he’s studying the store employees on the baby monitors as if they’re the cast of a reality show. These moments help the film feel lived-in, its sentimentality earned rather than maudlin.

Roofman isn’t entirely devoid of more conventional big-screen beats. Tatum mines plenty of laughter from the sillier parts of Jeffrey’s story—he almost gets caught while naked one night—and a third-act heist leads to an explosion. But what’s most pleasing to watch is Jeffrey’s search for companionship: The real Jeffrey Manchester will perhaps always be remembered for his odd behavior as a burglar, but Roofman is more interested in why he couldn’t resist connecting with a stranger. In the film, he had the money and the means to flee much earlier. Yet, as Jeffrey puts it in an early scene while attempting to fill a sorry-looking kiddie pool for his daughter’s birthday, “it’s the trying that counts.”