Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
Making the leap from four-paneled comic to animated series, Nathan W. Pyle’s Apple TV+ show Strange Planet drowns its unique and subtle charms with far too much plot, character, and story. It’s unfortunately boring as hell.
Paul Reubens and his brilliant character Pee-wee Herman offered viewers a kind of weird, joyful, hilarious television and film that we aren’t lucky enough to get very often.
With a clever opening sequence and an excellent cast, Barbie manages to overcome cumbersome plotting and feminist pieties to provide a delightful spectacle of funny moments that add up to something pretty good.
Oppenheimer ignores the darker sides of the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer in order to deliver a crowd-pleasing, blockbuster spectacle.
The new neo-noir series Full Circle, directed by Steven Soderbergh, has big ideas to share about class, race, nationality, and crime. But so far it’s a slog to watch.
FX’s second season of The Bear gives both dignity and drama to the realities of work.
Actor, director, musician, and certified New York “red diaper baby” Alan Arkin (1934–2023) was the rare Hollywood talent whose onscreen genius grew out of his own innate warmth and kindness.
I’m a Virgo is a superhero satire about a 13-foot-tall black teenager making his way in Oakland. It’s far more wild and surprising than almost anything we normally see on TV.
Asteroid City dials up the “Wes Anderson” to 11, leaving an emotional void in its wake.
The once great animation studio continues its fall with Elemental, another clumsy Pixar parable about the joy of finding a career.
Jennifer Lawrence is a fantastic comic actor. So it’s too bad that No Hard Feelings trades in the raunchy laughs for feel-good sentimental dramedy.
The highly hyped new crime series The Crowded Room could’ve been an unsparing take on extreme mental illness in a society that’s never been equipped to deal with it. Instead, it gives away its only source of suspense far too early.
The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of the successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres — from the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter Very Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost.
Even with a cast led by the hilarious Julia Louis-Dreyfus, You Hurt My Feelings struggles to find a single laugh in this comedy of manners about affluent New Yorkers learning the value of “little white lies.”
It’s been nearly 50 years since Charles Bronson first mowed down New York muggers in Death Wish. But defenses of the recent killing of Jordan Neely suggest that the film’s reactionary, Wild West–style vigilante violence still holds the imagination of many.
Do you want to see a bunch of Nazis get the bloody, gory treatment they deserve in the wilds of Northern Finland? Of course you do. Then go see Sisu.
In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of the Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as Richard Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. It’s approaching a Coen brothers level of satiric genius.
Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. is probably a nice, worthwhile coming-of-age movie. But it comes off as a bland fantasy film about a land peopled by smiling denizens in sunny dreamscapes who have such mild problems that they aren’t actually problems.
In the 1970s, the public flocked to movies about the US government’s shadowy misdeeds.
Even a respected auteur like director David Lowery can’t save Peter Pan & Wendy, yet another bland live-action adaptation of a Disney classic — this time with a dash of 2020s pop feminism.