One of the only compliments I can offer the new Chinese animated film Niu Lai is that it certainly qualifies as a film. There is sound. The pictures move. But beyond the basics of what makes a movie a movie, Niu Lai, which translates to “The Ox Comes,” contains little artistic merit.
Years ago, when the Simpsons animator Chuck Sheetz was a lecturer at UCLA, he invited a producer colleague of his from the series to attend a screening of his students’ work. That was a Saturday night; when Sheetz entered the Simpsons offices the following Monday morning, he found a handful of his pupils in the reception area. The producer had offered them jobs, they said, and they were ready to join the team—the students had the animation skills required of a thriving production.
This article contains spoilers through the series finale of The Bear.
If an episode of The Bear were a dish being served at the show’s titular restaurant, the recipe would probably go something like this: In a saucepan, combine headache-inducing worry, financial pressure, and familial dysfunction. Stir vigorously until the mixture boils over and causes the staff to scream.
In the fall of 1929, the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, then the most successful film company in America, seemed poised to buy Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. The latter was smaller and newer, but it had already become a lucrative commodity, having recently bought Vitagraph, an even tinier studio that operated cutting-edge sound technology.
The following contains spoilers through the series finale of HBO’s Euphoria.
Euphoria’s troubled protagonist, Rue (played by Zendaya), spends much of the drama’s final season dodging one potentially violent death after another. As a drug mule turned strip-club employee turned arms dealer turned informant, she barely survives being buried up to her neck, getting dragged by a horse down a dirt path, and becoming target practice in multiple shoot-outs.
Compared with cinema’s menagerie of big-city talking animals, the ovine stars of the movie The Sheep Detectives lead idyllic lives: They sleep among cozy bales of hay. They graze on the English countryside’s beautiful, grassy hills. Each has been thoughtfully named by their beloved shepherd, George (played by Hugh Jackman)—there’s Lily, Mopple, Sebastian, Cloud, Ronnie, Reggie, Wool Eyes, Sir Ritchfield, and Zora.
Every year, the Met Gala—the opulent celebration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—unveils a theme with a dress code that its famous attendees then attempt to interpret. And every year, many of the guests fail the assignment: They arrive in a superficial take on “punk” or an awkward rendition of “dandyism,” if they don’t veer off course completely. (See: various questionable efforts to capture the 2019 theme, “camp.”) It’s a treat, then, when someone gets it just right.
Early in Euphoria’s newest season, a whisper of a young woman walks down a crowded street in Mexico. She has swallowed several tiny bags of powdered fentanyl, each so-called balloon ingested painfully with the help of a bottle of cheap lubricant. As Rue (played by Zendaya) narrates that these balloons need to stay intact, the woman collapses. The next scene finds her dead, a mess of balloons piled next to her.
Welcome back to TV’s most disturbing show—sort of.
The following contains spoilers for the film The Drama.
The Drama features the kind of unforgettable first-kiss story that would belong in the First Kiss Hall of Fame, if such a thing existed. Late one night, Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) tries to sneak Emma (Zendaya) into the museum at which he works, but his ID clears only the first of multiple doors. The alarms go off, the two get locked in the entry hall, and as Emma panics, Charlie rushes over to kiss her, quieting her fear.
With apologies to baseball, I believe that binge-watching television may have become America’s true pastime. TV sets have ruled living rooms for decades, but gone are the days of viewers exclusively following broadcast schedules. Netflix and its peers have rendered entertainment addictively customizable and hyper-accessible, making entire seasons of shows available at once and commissioning original series of their own.
It was one of the funniest lines of the night: “This is freaking insane, and I have one before you, which is also crazy.” Toward the end of her acceptance speech, Cassandra Kulukundis, onstage as the winner of the Oscars’ first casting award ever for her work on Once Battle After Another, shouted out the movie’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson.
In 1988, shortly after the release of his film Beetlejuice, the director Tim Burton highlighted a cast member who he felt stole the show: Catherine O’Hara, who played the snobbishly over-the-top matriarch Delia Deetz. “Catherine’s so good, maybe too good,” he marveled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “She works on levels that people don’t even know. I think she scares people because she operates at such high levels.
This article contains spoilers through the penultimate episode of Stranger Things Season 5.
In the third season of Stranger Things, Eleven (played by Millie Bobby Brown) learned a pivotal lesson as she stood inside Starcourt Mall, the then-new watering hole for the then-still-pubescent kids of Netflix’s supernatural drama. Eleven, the show’s telekinetic heroine, who grew up in a lab, became dazed by the number of clothing options at the Gap.
The final sketch of a Saturday Night Live episode is usually reserved for the show’s weirdest concepts. Airing in what’s known as the “10-to-1” slot, these bits evoke the feeling of a night gone a little too late. Think of Steve Martin and Bill Murray repeatedly wondering “What the hell is that?” at something off-screen, or a group of profane sloths reciting ridiculous “facts” about themselves in a digital short. These setups are bizarre, provocative, and often hit-or-miss.
The comedian Tim Robinson seems to love playing obsessive weirdos. His Emmy-winning sketch series I Think You Should Leave is packed with them: a dating-show contestant who can’t stop using a zip line; an office drone attempting to beat a nonsensical computer game; a rideshare driver who has taped-up window decals and wants—no, needs—people to call him “the driving crooner.
Jon M. Chu always knew that the second Wicked film wouldn’t fully resemble the first. The director’s adaptation of the blockbuster musical brought theatergoers back to Oz last year, capturing the fizzy glamour found in the stage show’s first act. The movie was a smash hit, winning two Oscars and entering the words holding space into the cultural lexicon. Yet its sequel, Wicked: For Good, has to translate the musical’s notoriously knotty second act, which weaves the story of L.
The film Die My Love takes place mostly in a remote farmhouse. Tucked away amid tall grasses and verdant woods in rural Montana, it seems idyllic. But Grace (played by Jennifer Lawrence) appears uncomfortable as soon as she sets foot inside her new home. She flops over like a rag doll while her boyfriend, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), explores the building, which he inherited from his uncle. Months later, she and Jackson have a baby.
Bugonia, the latest film from the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, begins with shots of bees. As they gently buzz about in a field of wildflowers, a voice-over intones the glory of the insects’ lives. Their ability to help another species reproduce through pollination is, the speaker marvels, like “sex, but cleaner.” Their beauty emerges from their “larger organizing principle.
An existential thriller set in the middle of the Moroccan desert, a whodunit doubling as a crisis of faith, a musical about the founder of the Shaker movement—this year’s Toronto International Film Festival not only screened some of this fall’s biggest movies, but it also offered attendees a rich array of stories to indulge in.
In the lead-up to last night’s Emmy Awards, the host, Nate Bargatze, explained that he wanted to keep the evening as tightly-run as possible, so that the ceremony wouldn’t exceed its three-hour timeslot. To enforce order, he intended to rely on a single bit throughout the show: For every second a winner went over their allotted time for giving an acceptance speech, he’d take $1,000 away from a planned $100,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Like its mischievous demigod protagonist, the Chinese animated fantasy film Ne Zha II has been a practically unstoppable force. Since its initial release in China, over Lunar New Year, the blockbuster has earned more than $2 billion worldwide. It’s now the highest-grossing film of 2025, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and the highest-grossing non-English-language film in history.
The Bear didn’t wait long to stress out its viewers. “Review,” the seventh episode of the dramedy’s first season, is one of the most anxiety-inducing viewing experiences in recent TV history. In it, the employees at the sandwich shop in which the show originally takes place lose their cool after a food critic’s praise directs a deluge of customers their way. But the crew’s panic quickly permeates off-screen too.
Modern dating, experts have lamented, has become a numbers game; the more matches you make, the more likely you are to land a mate. But in the new film Materialists, the only number that really matters is a suitor’s net worth. Take Harry (played by Pedro Pascal), for example: He’s a partner in a private-equity firm and the owner of a $12 million penthouse apartment in Manhattan.
Every major movie franchise has boxes to check. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs must run amok; in Planet of the Apes, apes have to meditate on intelligence; in The Fast and the Furious, Vin Diesel absolutely has to evangelize the benefits of family, Corona beers, and tricked-out cars. But Mission: Impossible took four films to fully establish its franchise must-have: the ever more blurred lines between its death-defying, stunt-loving star, Tom Cruise, and the superspy he plays.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
This article includes spoilers for the film Warfare.
Since 2012, Ray Mendoza has been building a hefty Hollywood résumé: performing stunts, choreographing gunfights, and teaching movie stars how to act like soldiers in films such as Act of Valor and Lone Survivor. He also helped design the battle sequences in last year’s Civil War, the writer-director Alex Garland’s speculative thriller imagining America as an endless combat zone.
These projects have been a particularly good fit for him.
Predicting how an episode of the HBO show The Rehearsal will end is nearly impossible. The pseudo-docuseries, in which the comedian Nathan Fielder stages elaborate exercises to help—or rather, “help”—ordinary people prepare for challenging interactions, tends to go down rabbit holes dictated by Fielder’s fixations. A Season 1 installment found him supporting a man who wanted practice having a difficult conversation only for the focus to shift to Fielder rehearsing his own confessions.
This article contains spoilers through the second episode of The Last of Us Season 2.
Players of the game on which HBO’s postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us is based knew it was coming—“it” being the death of the show’s protagonist, Joel (played by Pedro Pascal).
At the end of the Season 4 premiere of Hacks, Deborah (played by Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) pose for the cover of a prestigious magazine. Glamorously dressed and impeccably lit, they look ecstatic, beaming in every shot.
This article contains spoilers through Episode 6 of Daredevil: Born Again.
For a character whose flagship show ended seven years ago, the blind lawyer Matt Murdock—better known as the vigilante Daredevil—has maintained a steady presence on Marvel’s roster. In the film Spider-Man: No Way Home, he impressed Peter Parker (Tom Holland) with his reflexes. In the TV series She-Hulk, he flirted with the titular heroine.