Linda Holmes | WYPR

Linda Holmes



It's no coincidence that when Charlie (Adam Driver) takes his young son out for Halloween in the new Noah Baumbach film Marriage Story, he dresses as The Invisible Man.

The most striking thing about Disney+ as of its launch is that even most of what's new isn't new.

It's holiday TV movie season, and it's not just a Hallmark party. There's also Lifetime, UPTV, and — increasingly — Netflix.

It is both a positive and negative attribute of the anthology series that it tends to be uneven. Black Mirror is, the new Twilight Zone was, Room 104 is. And now, Amazon is presenting an eight-episode series based on the loved, hated, and love-to-hated New York Times column Modern Love. Created by John Carney, who directed Once and Sing Street, it is — of course — uneven.


Note: This piece discusses the events of El Camino, as well as the events of Breaking Bad. If you're looking for a simple recommendation or not, here it is: El Camino is absolutely a satisfying and enjoyable addition to Breaking Bad, and Aaron Paul is very good, as always. Come back after you've watched it.

How did this happen to me?, you may wonder as a weekend afternoon sinks into the deep blue waters of the figurative Mediterranean. I had plans for today. I had dreams. I am still in my pajamas, and it is three o'clock in the afternoon. My bones feel like bungee cords. I may never get up.

Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) wants to be president of the United States. He always has. And when we meet him, he's a high school student who has studied past presidents (only back to Reagan, whom he considers the inventor of the modern presidency) to find patterns in their paths that he can follow. First up: become student body president at his high school and get into Harvard.

[This piece contains spoilers about the first three seasons of The Good Place but treads very carefully with anything about the new season. If you aren't caught up with the earlier seasons, go catch up!]


Good morning from Toronto, where the NPR Movies team has decamped for the next seven days or so, as we attend the Toronto International Film Festival, the largest film festival in North America.



Much of serialized television is made up of monster stories.

Sometimes it's about a seemingly normal person being revealed as a monster, like on Breaking Bad. Sometimes it's a whole family of monsters in training, like on Succession. In Showtime's new series On Becoming A God In Central Florida, the monster is a pyramid scheme called FAM.

Why would a person who has never been interested in running become a person who wants to run a marathon? Not why would she get more active, but why a marathon? That's the question that lingers at the edges of Brittany Runs a Marathon, a likable and upbeat comedy that never quite comes together as a story.


There are comedy creators whose sensibilities are darker than Danny McBride's. There are some whose satire is sharper, some whose characterizations are weaker, some whose sense of the moment is more or less developed. But there is no one more convinced than Danny McBride of the raw, unstoppable comedic power of male nudity — both frontal and rear.

How audacious do you have to be — how direct, how unafraid of accusations that what you're doing is a little on-the-nose — to just go ahead and name a ruthless character "Shiv"?

You have to be as audacious as Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, the Emmy-nominated drama that returned to HBO for its second season on Sunday night.

How do you do a reboot when there's absolutely no reason to do a reboot?

The idea of an anthology TV series inspired by Four Weddings and a Funeral, the 1994 film that established Flopsy-Haired Hugh Grant as a romantic comedy staple, is a solid one. I wish I were here with better news about how it turned out. I hung in with it as long as I could; there are ten episodes, and I watched all seven that they've made available to critics. I really wanted to like it.

Ah, friends.

We should have known Jane The Virgin would know how to execute a beautiful finale, but what a relief to actually see it.

By way of introduction, I should say that I would normally be more hesitant about spoilers than I am about to be with the Netflix film Secret Obsession, except for two things. The first is that the trailer gives away basically everything that happens in the movie (which has been available for a week already). The second is that they called it Secret Obsession, so, I mean, they're kind of giving away the ballgame. It's not called Nice Marriage.


[Spoiler alert: This contains information about the new season of Veronica Mars that dropped on Friday. Do not say you were not warned.]

I confess at the outset that I was skeptical about the 2014 Veronica Mars movie that was crowdfunded by fans. I wrote at the time that "the movie feels more commemorative than creative; more of a gift to put on a shelf than an expansion or even an extension of the story."

Maybe you have opera jokes. We did.

When the Pop Culture Happy Hour team planned a trip to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, we grudgingly served up to each other our dusty old gags about Bugs Bunny and helmets with horns and Pretty Woman and ... have we left anything out?

We chose to see Rigoletto, precisely because it's a classic. It's real, hardcore actual opera. We didn't want to be reluctant, or to insist that opera come meet us where we were. We wanted to dive in. All jokes aside, we really did want the opera experience.



When Mindy Kaling, then a writer on The Office, first started appearing on camera as Kelly Kapoor, Kelly was a quiet, unassuming, frumpily dressed office drone like everybody else — another person for Michael Scott (Steve Carell) to mistreat. It was later that they realized what she should be: She should be awful. Kelly should be vain and insufferable and demanding, needy and greedy and self-obsessed. It made Kaling a star.


Oh, hello, it's a romantic comedy!

Let us begin with a story. A story of revenge (sort of).
