I’ll be honest with you. I almost didn’t watch this season. Not because Sweet Magnolias is bad it isn’t but because four seasons in, I had started to feel like the show was going in circles. Maddie cries. Helen carries everybody, Dana Sue yells at something in her kitchen, and Bill Townsend shows up and … Read more
Romance readers have a word for this feeling, they call it “unputdownable” that compulsive forward pull of a story that hooks you somewhere around chapter three and doesn’t release you until two in the morning, when you’ve finished the whole thing and feel vaguely embarrassed and not at all sorry. Carley Fortune’s Every Summer After … Read more
There’s a moment quiet, almost accidental, when Daniel Kellner tries to calm Margaret Fairchild down as she hyperventilates on a moving train somewhere in the middle of America. The world is apparently hours from nuclear war. Proof of extraterrestrial life is sitting on a hard drive between them. Margaret has recently discovered she can speak … Read more
I’ve been trying to figure out what bothers me about Next Life, and I think it’s this: Emilia Clarke is giving a real performance in a film that keeps flinching away from her. She plays Ivy, thirty-eight, freshly unemployed, freshly dumped, both by the same man, which is either efficient or catastrophic depending on your … Read more
Jennifer Lopez has a hair toss in this movie. You’ll know the one. The camera slows down for it, the lighting goes golden, and Brett Goldstein looks at her the way the film has decided he should look at her. It’s a perfectly executed hair toss. And I sat there thinking: this is the most … Read more
Nobody told me a vampire rock tour would be the thing that finally made me understand Lestat de Lioncourt. Not two seasons of watching him through Louis’s grief-warped memory, not Anne Rice spelling it out across four hundred pages. It took watching Sam Reid bomb a guitar solo in front of a half-empty venue playing … Read more
There comes a point in Apple TV+’s Cape Fear when Javier Bardem’s Max Cady has inserted himself into the Bowdens’ lives so completely that he starts feeling less like a stalker and more like a permanent houseguest. He appears at their workplace. He appears at their social events. He appears at moments that should be … Read more