The Five-Star Weekend Review: Jennifer Garner Plates Grief Beautifully
Hollis Shaw receives news that her husband has died in a car accident, then remembers the candy cane meringue kisses...
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Childhood rarely preserves itself with this much enthusiasm. Ayden Mayeri, Jessica Hall, Janet Kariuki, and Mary Washburn spent their Santa Rosa years pointing a home-video camera at songs, dances, mini-dramas, and breathless conversations about the pop culture of 2000. Two decades later, the tapes have acquired an accidental severity. The girls were playing. The adults are studying the evidence. Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story, Mayeri's directorial debut, returns to the eight-song album the four friends recorded as X-Cetra when three of them were eleven and Mary was nine. Janet and Mary's musician mother, Robin O'Brien, produced the record, layering the...

Daniel Lombroso has chosen a subject that could collapse into a feature-length dirty joke within minutes. Penile enlargement comes with built-in discomfort, absurdity, and enough visual possibilities to keep a comedy editor employed for years. Manhood refuses the easy version. The documentary centers partly on Bill Moore, the entrepreneur behind PhalloFILL, a temporary dermal-filler treatment designed to increase penile girth through repeated injections. Moore wants the procedure discussed with the same casual familiarity as Botox, and his growing network of practices suggests plenty of men are listening. Two patients make that sales pitch much harder to dismiss or accept cleanly....

New Edinburgh gives you heat for free and immediately finds three other ways to kill everyone. That swap matters. Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust, the second major paid DLC after Fractured Utopias, drops the usual opening scramble for warmth and puts the player in charge of a city already living off geothermal energy. The problem is that years of extraction have destabilized the volcanic caldera beneath it. Earthquakes are coming, food is disappearing, and the previous Captain has taken his own life. By 1927, Aurora, an agricultural colony built on a frozen lake, has also cut ties with New Edinburgh....

Jessica Lipki does not discover greed when a severed finger appears in her chili. Greed is already there, living beside college travel costs and the humiliations of working as a divorce attorney for clients who cannot pay. The finger simply gives it paperwork. That distinction matters in Chili Finger, Edd Benda and Stephen Helstad's dark crime comedy, because Jessica, played by Judy Greer, behaves like someone tired of being reasonable. After she and her husband Ron send their daughter Kris to college, their house contracts around them. Ron accepts the silence. Jessica seems personally offended by it. Then comes Blake...

American boxing movies have long treated the ring as a machine that converts private hardship into public recognition. Liborio enters that machine carrying a border on his back. Jonás Cuarón's Campeón Gabacho takes the familiar underdog shape and filters it through a young Mexican migrant who reaches New York only to discover that arrival is another form of crossing. Juan Daniel García Treviño plays Liborio with a defensive swagger strongest when he speaks directly to the camera. His claim that he was "born dead" is a survival habit. The film tests it through the bookstore loft where he sleeps, the...

Puerto Rico in Esta Isla seems to remember through water. Bebo’s parents disappeared at sea. Charlie fishes because the sea remains one of the few things that can still be worked and sold. Later, grief is carried into crystal-blue water among motorboats, and the image feels almost indecent beside the pain it contains. Cristian Carretero and Lorraine Jones return to one contradiction: a place can be beautiful enough to worship and still fail the people who belong to it. Bebo (Zion Ortiz) has learned this lesson without language for it. He and his older brother Charlie (Xavier Antonio Morales) haul...
Hollis Shaw receives news that her husband has died in a car accident, then remembers the candy cane meringue kisses...
Read moreDetailsSomething strange happens when a story stops being about seizing power and turns immediately to its administration. Episode 3 lands...
Read moreDetailsNetflix has found a rare thing in Enola Holmes: a young-adult film franchise that can survive without pretending every entry...
Read moreDetailsScarcity has always been the cleanest way to make Voyager make sense as a video game. Captain Janeway’s ship was...
Read moreDetailsPink arrives in Seattle like a clerical error nobody at Rainier West High wants to correct. The joke in Prime...
Read moreDetailsNetflix has found its sports agent. Colin Woodell will lead the streamer's adaptation of Harlan Coben's "Myron Bolitar" novels, playing the former college basketball star turned agent whose career pivots after an injury derails his shot at the NBA. KJ Apa and Diane Guerrero round out the trio of leads,...
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The opening episode of the BBC's nature documentary series Mammals takes us into the nighttime world inhabited by many furry ...
Read moreChildhood rarely preserves itself with this much enthusiasm. Ayden Mayeri, Jessica Hall, Janet Kariuki, and Mary Washburn spent their Santa Rosa years pointing a home-video camera at songs, dances, mini-dramas,...
Daniel Lombroso has chosen a subject that could collapse into a feature-length dirty joke within minutes. Penile enlargement comes with built-in discomfort, absurdity, and enough visual possibilities to keep a...
New Edinburgh gives you heat for free and immediately finds three other ways to kill everyone. That swap matters. Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust, the second major paid DLC after...
Jessica Lipki does not discover greed when a severed finger appears in her chili. Greed is already there, living beside college travel costs and the humiliations of working as a...
American boxing movies have long treated the ring as a machine that converts private hardship into public recognition. Liborio enters that machine carrying a border on his back. Jonás Cuarón's...
Puerto Rico in Esta Isla seems to remember through water. Bebo’s parents disappeared at sea. Charlie fishes because the sea remains one of the few things that can still be...
Simon has spent so long explaining his unfinished documentary that the explanation has become its own creative product. He calls it a nostalgia-driven travelogue concerned with the past, present, future,...
Going to bed at sunrise changes the emotional rhythm of a farming game in a surprisingly immediate way. The clock in Moonlight Peaks counts toward daylight, your vampire farmer needs...
Television has spent decades treating technological progress as scenery: a few smoking factories, a telegraph key, perhaps an inventor shouting that the future has arrived. Sparks of Tomorrow is far...
Karl has built his adult life like a firebreak. He leases cars for his father-in-law, has married into a comfortable family, and is celebrating the naming of his infant son...
New Edinburgh gives you heat for free and immediately finds three other ways to kill everyone. That swap matters. Frostpunk...
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