The Barbie conversation
What started as a summer feel-good movie has opened discussions about embodiment, death, feminist utopias, and whether change can come through consumer goods.
All in with Wes Anderson
Asteroid City might be the most Anderson of all his films, and I came to it like an acolyte who is doubting the mystery.
Welcome to the commodity biopic
These movies about influential consumer objects aren’t really origin stories at all.
It’s me, Margaret’s mom
Judy Blume’s gift to the world is her insistence that young people can be trusted as capable moral agents.
In Broker, petty thieves teach us to forgive
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s characters find and create families in the margins of late-stage capitalism.
Philomena Cunk’s 21st-century expertise
Like Drunk History and History of the World Part II, Cunk on Earth is very funny. But the larger joke is that fake news is winning.
When women speak more than truth
She Said and Women Talking examine the collective power of women’s words for a MeToo era.
Glass Onion threads the Agatha Christie needle
A murder mystery can provide sharp social commentary—and great fun.
How real is Wakanda?
Speculative fiction, at its best, can inspire collaboration by artists and writers and ordinary fans.
Judging Lydia Tár
Todd Field’s movie about a megalomaniacal musician is, like his earlier films, interested in moral ambiguity.
Nope and Prey represent a new kind of alien invasion film
Both movies critique the assumption that survival requires dominance.
When work-life balance turns sinister
The fantasy of Severance is that we can avoid facing the moral peril of the structures we inhabit.
Jurassic World and the scales of time
The latest film seems to have forgotten one of the delights of dinosaur nerdery: imagining the world without humans.
Pride and Prejudice in a Speedo
Mr. Malcolm’s List and Bridgerton offer flimsy historical fantasy. Fire Island goes deeper.