35 pieces
Most television uses the unbroken take to show off. The Studio uses it to trap its lead inside his own disasters, which is the most honest thing a Hollywood comedy has done in years.
Kristoffer Borgli's A24 feature used Nicolas Cage as the vehicle for a media satire that landed in late 2023 and has aged, through 2024 and into 2025, into a specifically sharper object than the reviews initially registered.
The contemporary comedy, across film and TV, has made the cameo its dominant register. An essay on what the cameo does structurally, why it has become default, and what comedy used to do instead.
A year after Sean Baker's fourth feature took five Oscars including Best Picture, the predictable backlash has arrived on schedule. Here's why the Academy, improbably, got it right.
Eva Victor's Sundance-premiering debut is the early breakout of the 2025 indie year, and a specifically careful film about a specifically difficult subject.
Tina Fey's adaptation of the 1981 Alan Alda film is a show about three couples, four vacations, and what middle-aged friendship sounds like when nobody is performing for an audience.
Jonathan Tropper's Apple series gave Jon Hamm a part he has been waiting a decade for. The show itself is a more complicated object.
Eighteen months after The Bear's third season landed to the worst reviews of its run, the season has quietly become the one I most want to rewatch. An argument for the slow, prickly middle chapter.
Julio Torres's 2024 debut feature is a specifically strange American indie about a Salvadoran immigrant, a specifically difficult art-world widow, and a specifically failing visa petition. It is also, quietly, great.
Nathan Silver's improvisational comedy about a grieving cantor and his retired music teacher is the specifically strangest American indie comedy in years. I keep coming back to it.
Shondaland's White House whodunnit handed Uzo Aduba the role she has been waiting for since Orange is the New Black. The rest of the show is trying to catch up to her.
Josh Margolin's debut feature gave June Squibb her first leading role at 94. It was not a stunt. It was a film.
Aaron Schimberg's 2024 comedy about an actor who gets a medical procedure and regrets it is the year's strangest mid-budget indie, and the one whose specific comic machinery I keep returning to.
Jesse Eisenberg's second film as director is a tightly written cousins-on-a-trip movie that uses its ninety minutes to say something particular about inheritance, grief, and the specific tolerances of family.
Jesse Eisenberg's second feature as director-writer is a specifically small, specifically patient Polish heritage-tour film, and the film it most resembles is a Broadway play that someone has somehow filmed correctly.
A year after Deadpool & Wolverine made $1.3 billion and saved a bad year for the MCU, the film looks less like a triumph and more like the last thing Marvel is going to get away with.
A year on from Hit Man's Netflix release, the film is a quieter argument than it first appeared. Richard Linklater made a star-launcher for someone he knew would not, in the end, need launching.
A year after Hacks Season 3 landed, the show is quietly one of the best ongoing comedies on television. An argument for the series whose cruelty keeps getting better-calibrated.
Mindy Kaling's Netflix NBA comedy is a vehicle for Kate Hudson's return to screen work. The show around her is more conventional than her performance deserves.
Mike Cheslik's 108-minute silent slapstick about a 19th-century fur trapper fighting mascot beavers is one of the strangest American indie films of the decade. It is also one of the funniest.
I took my younger sister to see Megan Park's second feature thinking it would be a throwaway, and we walked out crying. The retrospective case is that it is the sharpest coming-of-age indie of the year, and I'll fight about it.
Mike Schur's Netflix show placed Ted Danson inside a retirement community as an amateur investigator. The premise is a disguise for the comedy Schur has been moving toward for a decade.
Nathan Fielder returned in April 2025 with six episodes about cockpit communication and commercial aviation safety. The premise sounds like a joke. It is not a joke.
Aki Kaurismäki's 2023 film, out of retirement and better for it, is one of the shortest great films of the decade. An 81-minute case for the romantic comedy as serious cinema.
Brian Jordan Alvarez's FX comedy arrived on Hulu in September 2024 and renewed quickly. The show is doing more than its loose register suggests, and the workplace logic is the reason.
Raine Allen-Miller's 2023 debut is the rare contemporary British romantic comedy that actually commits to its register. Specifically a London film in a way very few London films are.
The second season of Apple's therapist comedy deepens rather than complicates, which is the correct instinct for the show and an increasingly rare one on contemporary prestige TV.
Lawrence Lamont's debut landed in January 2025 with SZA and Keke Palmer centred inside a rent-day comedy that remembered how buddy pictures actually move.
Charlie Covell's Greek-myth reworking arrived on Netflix in August 2024 and was cancelled a month later. The show deserved better, and the cancellation revealed something specific about Netflix's renewal math.
ABC's High Potential premiered in September 2024 to the strongest broadcast numbers of the season and built from there. The show is a throwback in ways that reveal what streaming has quietly stopped doing.
Hulu's Arconia comedy moved its fourth season to Los Angeles and brought a Hollywood satire with it. The season is the show's most uneven and reveals a specific structural tension the format was built to avoid.
Tim Burton returns to Beetlejuice after 36 years and makes a legacy sequel that actually works, mostly because he refused to make a serious one.
Pixar's ninth sequel turns out to be, surprisingly, one of the studio's best films in a decade. An argument for the animation that grew up with its audience.
Cord Jefferson's debut feature is two films trying to be one. The surprise, two months into its run, is that both films work.
Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane's Amazon spy drama is not a remake. It is a character study dressed as a spy show, and it works because of what it refuses to be.