Raphael Bob-Waksberg's family comedy jumps across six decades in ten half-hours. The jumping is not the design. The design is what gets handed from one pair of hands to the next.
Richard Linklater's Blue Moon keeps Lorenz Hart at Sardi's all night on the opening of Oklahoma! and ends on the song he wrote because a publisher asked him to.
Edgar Wright's Stephen King adaptation took $69 million worldwide on a $110 million budget. The film was fine. The price tag assumed a star Paramount had never actually tested.
Scott Frank's Edinburgh cold-case series tells you in its first episode that the missing woman is alive. Everything that works in the show follows from that one decision about information.
Kleber Mendonça Filho's Recife thriller left the Academy Awards with nothing from four nominations. Its subject was never the chase. It was who gets to keep the record of a city.
A $55 million studio film about a man refusing to let a four-track demo turn into a studio record. The film took $45 million. The cassette had the better argument.
Everybody wrote about the Predator becoming the protagonist. The genuinely dangerous decision was the rating, and it returned $184.6 million on a $105 million budget.
Paul Thomas Anderson's Pynchon adaptation took six Academy Awards and $213.1 million, and the reason it works is a running joke about a man who cannot remember a phrase.
Brad Ingelsby's seven-episode HBO drama looks like a crime series about armed robbery. Its actual subject is who gets to keep which child, and every storyline is a version of that question.
Zach Cregger spent a decade writing sketch comedy and then applied the sketch runner's structure to a film about seventeen missing children. It made $270 million on $38 million.
One email a month. The sharpest criticism, the quietest recommendations, no sponsored content. Unsubscribe whenever.