Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.
Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning Danish drama Another Round celebrates the ways in which alcohol can bring joy to a midlife crisis — but there’s no way the coming Hollywood remake can avoid American moralism.
HBO’s Mare of Easttown is constructed around a familiar, virtually surefire plot: a shocking crime in a small town leads to an investigation that ultimately reveals every major local scandal in an astoundingly errant community. And it works.
Hulu’s docuseries Sasquatch uses Bigfoot as a hook to zero in on an unsolved 1993 triple homicide in the weed empire of Northern California. The series has some compelling material to work with — which it proceeds to squander.
Raoul Peck’s HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes isn’t easy to watch — but it’s important popular education on the 600-year development of the concept and system of white supremacy associated with colonialism, slavery, and genocide.
The mystery of Agatha Christie’s enduring popularity is rooted in a nostalgia for the certainties of the Victorian class system.
Minari is a gentle, universal story about a resilient South Korean family trying to make it in 1980s America. You should watch it.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS docuseries Hemingway sheds new light on writer Ernest Hemingway’s life. But it leaves out key details of his left-wing political convictions — including the FBI surveillance that haunted him until his suicide.
After a long internet campaign demanding its release, HBO Max has unleashed Zack Snyder’s Justice League on the world. But it’s four hours of tedious superhero melodrama you’ll never get back.
Jessica Walter thankfully found fame through roles like Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth late in her life. But she should’ve been a major star when she was a young woman. Hollywood’s misogyny in the 1960s and ’70s made that impossible.
Eddie Murphy is one of the most talented actors alive. Yet his brilliance is wasted in this sloppy sequel to the classic 1988 film Coming to America.
While Nomadland goes out of its way to avoid talking politics, its genius is in locating the emotional truth of what it’s like to be one of the many millions of Americans cast adrift by disaster.
The story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s assassination by Chicago Police and the FBI has finally been made into a movie. Judas and the Black Messiah is uneven as a film, but it’s a small step toward a serious reckoning with America’s past.
Dylan’s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, is a fitting capstone for our end times.
Chadwick Boseman’s final performance in playwright August Wilson’s new Netflix adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a haunting but appropriate farewell.
Disney Plus’s new Marvel show WandaVision promises a surreal spin on a 1960s sitcom reality. But so far, it’s delivered little more than winks and nods to Marvel Cinematic Universe loyalists.
The big-budget Wonder Woman sequel is an ugly, tedious, bloated, badly CGI-ed mess and a wretchedly directed film. And yet critics keep making excuses for it because of its supposed social relevance.
David Fincher’s ode to Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz revives an eighty-year-old debate over whether or not Orson Welles deserves a co-writing credit — and it’s exactly as entertaining as that sounds.
The first film in Steve McQueen’s new Amazon Prime anthology chronicles the struggle for racial justice in Britain with the 1970s Mangrove Nine trial. It’s a wonderful achievement and valuable popular education on the British struggles against racist policing.
A new Showtime docuseries reminds us of just how awful Ronald Reagan was and how his brand of demagogic racism became a model for Trump.
The only good thing we have to say about the reactionary film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy is that it’s so boringly told you’ll forget about it in an hour.