“I don’t usually go for younger girls, but you’re different,” a high-school boy tells Anna Kone in the next new episode of Pen15. On one level, this is a wink at the central gimmick of the Hulu comedy: that Anna (Anna Konkle) and her best friend Maya Ishii-Peters (Maya Erskine) …
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In January 2013, a gay 15-year-old named Jadin Bell, from La Grande, Oregon, hanged himself from a piece of playground equipment and, after being kept on life support for several weeks, died in early February that year. He was a sophomore in high school. He’d dreamed of becoming an artist, …
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I’m not usually one to look up the MPAA ratings for movies. But there came a point while watching the new Mortal Kombat that I got curious. A point sometime after hearing Kano, the notoriously aggro Australian mercenary, call someone a “fucking idiot” for what felt the like 50th time, …
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The Nevers should be a triumphant TV homecoming for Joss Whedon. It’s the first series in more than a decade solely created by the man responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. (He co-created Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. back in 2013 with brother Jed Whedon and sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen, …
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The Father, adapted from director Florian Zeller’s award-winning 2012 play, gives Anthony Hopkins a role designed to nearly break your heart: a role full of anger and displacement and uncertainty but, also, flashes of humor, a sprightly fullness of life. Reminders of who this man once was. This is a …
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Midway through Season Two of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, Aunt Lavinia (Jessica Hecht) takes all the Dickinson women out for a 19th century spa day, promising that by the end of it, “You won’t be the same sick, disease-ridden, melancholy women you are right now.” The show’s title character, rebellious young …
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Alex Gibney, Suzanne Hillinger, and Ophelia Harutyunyan’s new Covid-19 documentary, Totally Under Control, began production in April in secret, while the three directors worked remotely from Maine and New York. (The documentary is now streaming online.) Until recently, the movie’s final cut was almost completely to-the-minute regarding the pandemic’s progress, …
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In the new, cancellation-happy era of Netflix (the latest victims: the fun yet thoughtful Teenage Bounty Hunters, the un-renewed cult favorite GLOW), it seems the safest thing a creator can make is not a sprawling tale requiring many seasons, but something tight and cancel-proof, like a limited series or an …
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There’s a scene near the end of The Nest, Sean Durkin’s follow-up (finally) to 2011’s Marcy Martha May Marlene, in which Carrie Coon dances. She has been suffering through a business dinner in which her husband, a British commodities trader named Rory (Jude Law), is preening on about London’s theater …
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Formed in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union, a.k.a. the ACLU, had been defending the rights of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free for nearly a century when Donald Trump was sworn in to the presidency in January of 2017. The organization knew they would …
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