Deliberate, meditative and quiet, Ad Astra joins a noble group of cerebral sci-fi films, many of which are indebted to Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. At their best, films of this type juxtapose questions about human...

There’s a long and noble tradition of TV shows tackling serious social issues, but there’s also a long and not-so-noble tradition of TV shows transforming social issues into sensationalism. It’s the safe move, from the perspectives of business and st...

Continuing the recent mini-boom in dramas about women forming criminal gangs — a trend that includes Widows and The Kitchen — filmmaker Lorene Scafaria’s latest picture, Hustlers, dramatizes real-life events that occurred in New York City, beginning ...

Juxtaposing one of the darkest chapters in American history with traditional Japanese mythology, AMC’s limited series The Terror: Infamy offers a fresh take on small screen horror. Evocative, mysterious and unnerving, the show features customary elem...

Some popular novels beg for cinematic adaptation because their stories are shaped like movies, with clear beginning/middle/end plots and ample visual potential. Popular novels that are more literary in nature present greater adaptation challenges. Th...

In 2003, Katharine Gun, a translator working for British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), encountered an alarming memo sent from the United States intelligence community. The memo asked British spies to blackmail mem...

Creating mainstream entertainment centered around controversial political figures is a fraught process, not least because the choice of subject matter has the potential to alienate audiences. In the case of The Loudest Voice, Showtime’s recent minise...

There’s a natural tendency among aspiring screenwriters to seek guidance and inspiration only from critically acclaimed and/or financially successful films and TV shows. Yet it’s just as important for new scribes to study films that don’t connect com...

By this point, it’s not bold to describe Veronica Mars as one of Hollywood’s most indestructible franchises. After debuting as a regular series on UPN, where it ran from 2004 to 2005, the show transitioned to the CW for the 2006-2007 season, then ret...