Close readings of films and series — attentive to what a work does, not merely what it says. Narrative, construction, and the pressures a story places on the viewer.
Still from Sentimental Value (2025). Courtesy of Mer Film. On Inheritance, Obsession, and the Ethics of Art There is a distinction, rarely articulated but immediately felt, between films that use art as a subject and films that interrogate it. The first category is comfortable, even celebratory: art as redemption, as self-discovery, as the thing that … Read more
Source: SONY PICTURES Project Hail Mary (2026) How Phil Lord and Christopher Miller transform Andy Weir’s science fiction epic into a film about translation, companionship, and the fragile ethics of understanding another consciousness. The most surprising thing about Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel, is not its scale. … Read more
Source: SHOWBOX The King’s Warden (2026) How Jang Hang-jun reframes a Joseon tragedy through an ordinary man’s moral choice There is a moment near the beginning of Jang Hang-jun’s The King’s Warden when a village official named Eom Heung-do realizes that the exiled figure newly installed in his community is, in fact, a king — … Read more
Source: Universal Pictures Hamnet (2025) A close reading of Hamnet, exploring grief, memory, and how personal loss becomes Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The opening image gives the film away, if you know how to read it. The camera descends through a forest canopy — branches layered over branches, light coming through in fragments — and finds a … Read more
Source: Warner Bros. Sinners (2025) How blues, mortality, and human imperfection shape the emotional and philosophical core of Ryan Coogler’s vampire film A single note on a guitar and something in the room changes. This is how blues has always worked — not as melody but as atmosphere, not as entertainment but as environment. The … Read more
Source: MBC Perfect Crown Episodes 1–4 Control Issues: The First Four Episodes of Perfect Crown Note: In the drama Perfect Crown, “Lee An Daegun” and “Lee Wan” refer to the same character. The difference in name comes from a change in royal title. “Lee Wan” is his given name, while “Lee An Daegun” is a … Read more
Source: Warner Bros. Wuthering Heights (2026) A cinema of touch and presence, where desire sheds symbolism and insists on the body as its only truth Emerald Fennell is not adapting Wuthering Heights. She is using it — clearing away the Victorian scaffolding, the accumulated reverence, the novel’s own elaborate defenses against the rawness at its … Read more
Source: Warner Bros. One Battle After Another Speed, failure, and the strange tenderness of passing something on — Paul Thomas Anderson rewrites the chase film as a generational reckoning Every film contains time. The time its characters inhabit, the time events press against, the time one era yields to another. Some films let that time … Read more
Perfect Crown is a 2026 MBC K-drama starring IU and Byeon Woo-seok, set in an alternate Korea where a constitutional monarchy still exists. The story follows a conglomerate heiress who pursues a marriage into the royal family to claim the status her wealth cannot buy. Source: MBC Perfect Crown Power Without Inheritance: The World of … Read more