Richard Lawson

At least, that’s how I remembered it, and how I covered it for work back then. Thus I eagerly dove back in this week, excited to reconnect with these rich city youths: haughty P.C., his quietly besotted bestie Jessie, littlest playboy Sebastian, his public school paramour Taylor, nerdy Camille, timid and lovelorn Kelli. What details of their televised lives had I forgotten? Was P.C.’s trip to Mexico actually as subtextually fraught as I once thought? Pressing play felt like stepping into a novel…

But Under the Bridge, adapted for television by Quinn Shephard, works admirably hard to differentiate itself. It is both solemn and furious about its story: Virk was bullied for her appearance and her Indian heritage before she was viciously beaten by a group of her classmates and then killed by two of them. It was a terrible crime that became sensationalized, nationwide news in Canada. Shephard gestures toward all that media frenzy, but otherwise keeps her gaze tightly focused on the sad and fr…

That said, the series (HBO, April 14) is fascinating. The Sympathizer is a strange and vital counterpoint to the many Western-centric accounts of the Vietnam War (which, the series is careful to remind us, is called the American War by the Vietnamese) that have cluttered culture for decades. Nguyen seeks to broaden and complicate Western perception of the conflict and its fallout, to assert the agency, the ache, the confusion of people long depicted as animalistic aggressors or hapless victims.…

This moment is indicative of the film as a whole, a robustly shot and performed movie that presents a scary and guiltily intriguing scenario and then defiantly declines to explore it. What we know is that at some point near-ish to our present day, a strongman president (played by Nick Offerman) likened to dictators like Pol Pot and Ceaușescu is seizing onto his power. A faction of rebels representing Texas and California (and I believe Florida, to some extent) have gone to war with the army loya…

But Steve Zaillian, a remarkably peripatetic screenwriter (Schindler’s List) and TV creator (The Night Of), has decided to take a crack at it anyway. In Ripley, a new series premiering on Netflix on April 4, Zaillian has shrewdly determined that trying to do some episodic rehash of Minghella’s film would be a mistake. No one could ever recapture the magic of those young stars—all working perhaps at the top of their game—playing patsies and predators in sun-dappled corners of the world’s lovelies…

On Netflix, the hotly anticipated series Ripley (based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley) puts Sherlock breakout Andrew Scott back in the villain seat, after some time spent in the world of sensitive gay drama and as TV’s most famously hot priest. Creator Steve Zaillian takes a more restrained approach to the material than did Anthony Minghella in his brilliant 1999 film adaptation, but the show has its own kind of heat—in an economical, buttoned-up way. Going more classicall…

The hook of the series—created by D.C. Moore, adapting from Benjamin Woolley’s book The King’s Assassin—is titillating. Mary & George casts us into the realm of ruffle collars and capotain hats and then says, But wait! What if everyone was gay? Or bisexual, or whatever? Even more compellingly, it’s based on what is, in fact, somewhat settled history: King James VI and I (so-called for his reigns over both England and Scotland) preferred the company of men, most especially a gorgeous young courti…

The End We Start From Killing Eve breakout Jodie Comer (who recently won a Tony for her staggering solo performance in Prima Facie) further proves her talent in this somber but never lugubrious survival drama from Mahalia Belo. As floodwaters overtake London, a new mother must head north in search of safety and sustainability while a nation credibly collapses around her. Finely observed and avoidant of melodrama, The End We Start From is a thoughtful, occasionally profound manifestation of a col…

It’s all very nice, complementing Dalton’s relaxed, polite way of moving through the world. Sure, he’s a former MMA brawler with a troubled past (though a slightly less graphic past than Swayze’s version). But he’s so cute and affable. And those island breezes are blowing, and the band’s wailing away at the Road House bar (and grille, I’m assuming), so who cares if Dalton has to break up a little fussin’ and a-fightin’ pretty much every night? Dalton is presented, in all his solid but tender mas…

But, unfortunately, vibes do not a movie make. At least, not unless balanced and textured in just the right way. (Terrence Malick is kind of a vibes guy, after all.) Glass’s film is caught in a frustrating middle place between mood and story. Watching Love Lies Bleeding becomes a trial of patience, as the viewer waits for the plot to rise to meet the film’s good looks, or for those stylish aspects to blossom further into elegant abstraction. Instead, the film hobbles along, revealing ever more c…