We must find another word for what happens to us during the films of Béla Tarr. We don’t observe them without them observing us right back. We don’t listen to them; the sounds and songs creep around us, the manifestation of unhinged but repressed emotion in endless repetitions. The movies become music boxes. Even in

The team behind HBO’s “The Pitt” probably knew they had something special, but even they had to be shocked by the remarkable success of one of the best shows of 2025. It turns out that not only is there still life in the medical drama, but that treating the profession seriously, rather than just using

While the streaming (and now TikTok) era has changed how people watch TV, the fundamentals remain the same: people will always be drawn to storytelling and characters that entertain, move, thrill, or even surprise them. Sometimes it’s easy to see a new critical darling coming (“Pluribus”), while sometimes a new hit comes entirely out of

In May of 2025, Jafar Panahi won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or, for his film “It Was Just an Accident,” a stark drama about several former prisoners who debate whether to kill a man they believe tortured them when they were inmates. Rather surprisingly, the government of Iran actually allowed Panahi

“Best Medicine” is not a good show. I bring you this sad news as a Josh Charles fan. I can still conjure just how devastated I was when his Will Gardner shockingly departed from “The Good Wife.” And this new sitcom, with episodes inexplicably stretched to an hour, sounds, at least on paper, like it

Can you remember the sweepingly melancholy and even depressive romantic tone of the music that Georges Delerue composed for Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963)? This music accompanies shots of a nude Brigitte Bardot that were insisted on by the producers of that film, and it is meant to underline the disappointment and disillusionment felt by both

I first remember seeing James Ransone on my screen when I was eleven, while watching Larry Clark’s “Ken Park” on a tiny television screen with some of my childhood friends. We were all too young to be watching the film, but we were also too young to have gone through what many of us had.

“That’s the problem with Rome: ancient history is everywhere.” –Emily, preaching a sermon Last year, when writing about Season 4 of the candy-coated Netflix series, I said, “After almost 4 seasons, I’ve discovered the cheat code for enjoying ‘Emily in Paris,’ it’s recognizing while Emily is a hero in her own mind, she’s the villain

If you’re a music lover of a certain age, you remember how exciting and polarizing the rise of Hip Hop in popular music was. From the amiable goofiness of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” to the scratching pyrotechnics and audacious musical mashups of “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” to cosmic

It’s that time of year when critics look back and try to capture the quality of an entire art form in one feature. Was it a good year for TV? Sure. Great? Maybe? It feels like the top of this list contains programs that will undeniably be remembered when we’re discussing the best of the