“No one confesses on the stand!” a friend assures the title character of HBO‘s Perry Mason remake. The line is meant as a wink at Mason’s previous incarnations, where, in both the books by Erle Stanley Gardner and the Fifties/Sixties TV series starring Raymond Burr, the defense lawyer famously won …
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In an episode of Mrs. America, a new FX on Hulu miniseries about the Seventies political battle over the Equal Rights Amendment, liberal firebrand Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) suggests her side may have an easier time if they focus their argument on a single issue, like women receiving equal pay …
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“I’m a journalist!” Hilde Lisko tells her father, Matt. “You’re a fourth-grader!” he replies. Both are right. In the new Apple TV+ drama Home Before Dark, inspired by the real work of underage reporter Hilde Lysiak, Hilde (Brooklynn Prince) goes to elementary school and has trouble making friends, but she’s …
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In the premiere of Twenties, BET’s new dramedy about a trio of girlfriends negotiating love, life, and showbiz, studio executive Marie (Christina Elmore) praises a black romance movie simply for existing. “We should support black shit,” she insists. Her aspiring screenwriter friend Hattie (Jonica T. Gibbs) retorts, “We should support …
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In an early episode of Netflix‘s new supernatural thriller Locke & Key, teen heroine Kinsey Locke (Emilia Jones) is invited by her new friend Scot (Petrice Jones) to see a Band of Horses tribute act, one of several cover bands operating in Matheson, the remote New England coastal town where …
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When the collective republics of the Soviet Union began their conscious uncoupling in the early 1990s, many Russians saw the collapse as a bold new step toward freedom and democracy. Mikhail Khodorkovsky saw cash. The future billionaire had grown up with dreams of being an engineer — he lived on …
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Through the first season of Netflix‘s charming teen comedy Sex Education, British high schooler Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) sagely dispensed advice to his classmates on all matters of the heart and/or genitals. Early in the second season, Otis finds the tables turned, as he asks a former client for a …
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Lyra Belacqua, the young heroine of His Dark Materials, spends a lot of time in the new HBO fantasy epic asking adults to explain what is happening to her and those around her, and why. The adults either try to change the subject or awkwardly tell Lyra that she’s not …
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Any Terminator fan can tell you that Sarah Connor — former waitress, mother of the anti-machine-resistance messiah, all-around survivalist badass — stops Skynet from turning the world into a dystopic junkyard and saves 3 billion lives at the end of 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Her faith in her fellow …
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A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying. At the Toronto Film Festival, where art films get the most attention, this glitzy true-crime knockout about New York strippers who take their drooling Wall Street …
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