TV amp; Movies Reviews

In Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey, the narrative was divided along lines of class: the aristocratic Crawley family upstairs, and their loyal servants downstairs. Fellowes’ new series, The Gilded Age, also includes both servants and their rich and powerful employers, but the story is instead split along a different type of …

“Do you remember me?” It’s an innocent enough question, asked by a young woman sitting outside a recording studio in London. The flicker of panic that plays across the face of the person on the receiving end of it, however — a thirtysomething named Alina (Vanessa Kirby) — suggests something …

One of the countless perfect moments in Get Back, the new three-part docuseries which begins streaming today on Disney+: The Beatles jam on a new Paul McCartney song called “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.” They love this tune. George Harrison wilds out on guitar. Ringo Starr bangs the …

A long, imposing row of straight-backed men and women, all of them on horseback, all of them confronting the horizon of a Western plain. Strange how affecting an image as simple as this can be. But the genre of Westerns is built on such images. We could be talking about …

One of the best things about Venom (2018) is that it so often flew over the heads of people who fashion themselves smart. The movie had an admirable target — and even better aim. Here’s a story about a has-been loser journalist and his alarmingly emotionally-codependent alien-symbiote inner self, starring …

“Believe it or not,” Dr. Jean Milburn tells an acquaintance during Season Three of Netflix‘s high school comedy Sex Education, “I don’t think everything comes back to sex.” This is an interesting statement from Jean (Gillian Anderson), a therapist specializing in sexual relationships, who is among the most sex-positive characters …

It’s been so long since FX’s American Crime Story debuted (Obama was still president!) that it’s easy to forget how much trepidation surrounded that first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson. The O.J. trial was a circus at the time it unfolded. Producer Ryan Murphy‘s track record seemed even more …

Woodstock ’99 was supposed to be sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Instead, what we got was three days of mob violence, sewage spills, and Jamiroquai. If you weren’t there, congratulate yourself on at least one shrewd life decision. (If only the decision not to be born yet.) If you …

When last we saw David (Akili McDowell), the hero of the gorgeous drama series David Makes Man, he was 14 years old, nearing the end of his time in middle school, and still very much an anxious kid hoping to one day feel comfortable in any of the disparate social …

Promising Young Woman, the feature directorial debut of Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, is trying to pull off a tricky balancing act. When it starts, it’s a full-throated, implicitly bloody dive into the rape-revenge thriller — that troubled but fascinating and essential genre in which the long arc toward justice …