The Review
Don’t just watch a movie; understand it. Don’t just hear a song; consider what it has to say. On The Review, writers and guests discuss how we entertain ourselves, and how that defines the way we see the world. Join The Atlantic’s writers as they break down a work of pop culture each week, exploring the big questions that great art can provoke, making some recommendations for you, and having a little fun along the way.
Episodes
May 25, 2022 • 41 mins
Top Gun: Maverick is out soon! But can any movie with fast planes, Tom Cruise, and beach volleyball truly compare to the classic fighter pilot movie about, as writer Shirley Li puts it, "cute boys calling each other cute names"? Find out with Shirley, Megan Garber, and David Sims, and explore the moral (but fictional) simplicity of an earlier era: the Cold War 80s.
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May 18, 2022 • 42 mins
In a possibly-soon-to-be-post-Roe v Wade world, our hosts Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis thought it'd be worth re-examining the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogan comedy "Knocked Up," to discuss the way the movie treats women's bodily autonomy, angry reactions from men, and abortion.
Megan also wrote recently on what it says that the movie simply edits direct mention of abortion out — and what that portended for the future of...
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May 11, 2022 • 49 mins
The 1980s Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most dominant teams in sports. At a time when professional basketball was on its heels, the Lakers dynasty brought new excitement: Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird, Jerry Buss and the glitzy Forum Club, and an uptempo flow offense. That’s the story of HBO’s big-budget series Winning Time, whose season 1 finale aired on Sunday, May 8th.
David Sims, Vann Newkirk, and Ross Andersen—three of The...
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May 4, 2022 • 48 mins
The Apple TV+ dystopian thriller Severance is one of the most acclaimed shows of the year. Its grim take on the furthest extreme of "work-life balance" speaks to our strained pandemic-era relationship with the workplace and, according to our critics, offers a gripping throwback to an era of prestige TV before (as David Sims sees it) Netflix ruined everything.
Spencer Kornhaber, Sophie Gilbert, and David Sims go down the elevator t...
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April 27, 2022 • 39 mins
Shirley Li, David Sims, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the brutal new blockbuster The Northman. From the director of The Lighthouse and The Witch and based on the viking legend that inspired Hamlet, the film is a visceral experience that’s hard to summarize: Is it an arthouse revenge epic? A viking myth about toxic-masculinity? Shakespeare for people who love crossfit?
The Northman joins The Green Knight and The Last Duel as part of a ...
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April 20, 2022 • 44 mins
Shirley Li, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the hit action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. At a time when every show or movie has a multiverse, how does this film’s “verse-jumping” manage to be so cathartic it made us cry?
The trio follows up on last week’s discussion of Turning Red to unpack how this movie uses a multiverse to convey the experience of an immigrant family. They also unpack Michelle Yeoh’s incre...
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April 14, 2022 • 55 mins
Shirley Li, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz discuss the Pixar coming-of-age film Turning Red, why they found it utterly charming, and why this post-villain era of animation is a welcome one.
Further reading:
What the Controversy Over Turning Red Misses
Pixar's Turning Red Has the Cleverest Take on Puberty
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April 6, 2022 • 45 mins
Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Hannah Giorgis assess the state of pop music following the Grammys. While the much-derided awards have improved at celebrating the diversity of modern music, they still tend to reward safer throwback sounds. And modern music as a whole seems to be going through a nostalgic phase—just look at Silk Sonic’s retro soul, or Lady Gaga’s big-band ballads, or even Olivia Rodrigo’s pop-punk influences.
The...
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March 30, 2022 • 51 mins
From Theranos to WeWork to the socialite grifter Anna Delvey, television these days is all about the art of the scam. Why are we so fascinated with the rise-and-fall stories of swindlers? What do these shows reveal about American culture at this moment?
And with many of these shows following female scammers through the “Lean In” / girlboss 2010’s in particular, what should audiences make of that brief era of feminism today?
Sophie...
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March 23, 2022 • 42 mins
West Side Story is a work with some huge names behind it: Leonard Bernstein wrote the musical, Stephen Sondheim the lyrics, and Shakespeare the source material Romeo and Juliet. And sixty years after the classic 1961 film dominated the Oscars, another name was added to that list: Steven Spielberg.
The big names behind West Side Story don’t just have status in common though; they’re also all white men telling a story of Puerto Rican...
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March 16, 2022 • 54 mins
The Batman is already 2022’s highest-grossing film. In some ways, it’s yet another comic-book adaptation to dominate theaters. In others, it’s a return to a pre-MCU cinema experience free of the weight of universe-building. Robert Pattinson stars in the first standalone Batman movie in a decade, bringing a grim detective story with the caped crusader that seems to draw more from David Fincher than DC Comics.
While superhero films ...
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March 9, 2022 • 43 mins
Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s Japan’s most Oscar-nominated film ever—and its first to be up for Best Picture. It enters the final weeks of awards season as the first non-English-language film to be picked at Best Picture by all three major American critics groups (including the New York Film Critics Circle, for whom one David Sims tallied the results).
And its Oscar run comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of in...
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March 2, 2022 • 48 mins
The Jane Campion western drama The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated film this year. But does it—as Spencer Kornhaber has written—have a queer problem? Based on a 1967 novel, the movie’s found praise as an incisive study of masculinity. Does its dated source material also make it a collection of cliched gay narrative though?
Spencer joins Shirley Li and David Sims to analyze the film, as well as the Oscar race it’s curre...
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February 23, 2022 • 43 mins
Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and Shirley Li discuss the Hulu series about “the greatest love story ever sold” and ask: Is Pam & Tommy just repeating the exploitation it depicts? Or is its retelling of internet history revealing something new about our current culture?
The sex tape at the core of the show is effectively the first instance of revenge porn online. It opened up questions of celebrity and privacy that we’re still ...
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February 16, 2022 • 51 mins
The romantic comedy was once a cinema tentpole. The films defined A-list careers. They won Hollywood studios awards. And they made oodles of money. Then one day, rom-coms seemed a thing of the past. What happened to the genre? Is it dead, or just alive in another form? And what would it take to mount a comeback?
David Sims, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the state of the rom-com and review two new entrants to the genre ...
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February 9, 2022 • 30 mins
This episode is the first in a new three-part miniseries from The Experiment—“SPAM: How the American Dream Got Canned.”
During World War II, wherever American troops spread democracy, they left the canned meat known as SPAM in its wake. When American GIs landed overseas, they often tossed cans of SPAM out of trucks to the hungry people they sought to liberate.
That’s how producer Gabrielle Berbey’s grandfather first came to know ...
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February 2, 2022 • 49 mins
Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets often lean on creaky comparisons: A female Lord of the Flies? A 90's Stranger Things? Teen Lost, but in Canada?
In any case, the coming-of-age horror story is as addictive as it is perceptive. The show follows a championship-bound girls soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021. Yellowjackets...
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January 26, 2022 • 46 mins
“I’m an unnatural mother.” It was this one line that drew first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal to adapt the 2006 Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Her new Netflix film of the same name examines motherhood and its secret shames.
Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, the movie portrays a woman at two different points in her life: Colman as a present-day professor on holiday in Greece, and Buckley as a mother with two you...
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January 19, 2022 • 45 mins
Comfort watches are a mainstay of the pandemic—old television and movies one can revisit over and over again. And for a few writers on The Atlantic’s culture team, that go-to watch has been the 1990s sitcom Frasier.
Megan Garber, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber debate why, despite its problems, Frasier holds up remarkably well (especially compared to more cringe-inducing contemporary shows like Friends and Seinfeld). What exa...
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January 12, 2022 • 47 mins
Adam McKay’s disaster satire is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman. Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie.
Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, with cycles of backlash highlighting the difficulty of sending a funny yet urgent message. But of ...
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