Selected Clips
I joined The New York Times as a staff movie critic in November 2023, and all of my articles live here.
Before that, I was a senior correspondent at Vox (full archive here). Since 2006, I've contributed thousands of reviews, features, and essays to publications including Rolling Stone, Vulture, The Atlantic, Bon Appetit, Eater, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, RogerEbert.com, Christianity Today, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Marginalia, Pacific Standard, Paste, Bright Wall / Dark Room, Books & Culture, Thrillist, Flavorwire, and others.
Here is a (very small) selection of clips. You can find my most recent work at The New York Times.
Selected Reviews
NYT Book Review: Welcomed Into Joan Didion’s Home, If Not Her Inner Circle (June 11, 2024)
NYT: Hit Man (May 23, 2024)
NYT: Gasoline Rainbow (May 9, 2024)
NYT: Late Night With the Devil (March 21, 2024)
NYT: Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus (March 14, 2024)
NYT: About Dry Grasses (February 22, 2024)
NYT: The Taste of Things (February 8, 2024)
NYT: Perfect Days (February 7, 2024)
NYT: All of Us Strangers (December 21, 2023)
NYT: The Boy and the Heron (November 21, 2023)
Vox: What the ending of Killers of the Flower Moon means (October 20, 2023)
Vox: Shiny Happy People is a great reminder of why cult documentaries should exist (June 13, 2023)
Vox: The year’s scariest horror film is The Zone of Interest (May 2023)
Vox: On the roots of Women Talking in St. Augustine (September 14, 2022)
Vox: Four ways of looking at The Rehearsal (August 8, 2022)
Vox: Nope, explained: Unpacking the spectacle society (July 21, 2022)
How I learned to stop wincing and appreciate Jackass (February 5, 2022)
Vox: I feel weird about Dear Evan Hansen (September 23, 2021)
Vox: The ancient palindrome that explains Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (September 4, 2020)
Vox’s The Highlight: Woodstock was a beautiful, idealistic mess. The Woodstock Generation was the letdown. (August 21, 2019)
Vox: Silence is beautiful, unsettling, and one of the best religious movies ever made (Vox, January 24, 2017)
Selected Essays
NYT Book Review: The Essential Guide to Joan Didion (April 26, 2024)
NYT: When the Stage Harnesses the Power of the Movies (May 31, 2024)
NYT: What We Lose When ChatGPT Sounds Like Scarlett Johansson (May 20, 2024)
NYT: The Power of the Planet of the Apes (May 15, 2024)
NYT: What Ethan Hawke’s “Wildcat” Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor (May 11, 2024)
NYT: When Tom Ripley Stares Into the Mirror, He Sees Us (April 8, 2024)
NYT: In “Oppenheimer” and “The Zone of Interest,” We Are What We Hear (March 3, 2024)
NYT: Disney is a language. Do we still speak it? (December 16, 2023)
Vox’s The Highlight: Can AI learn to love — and can we learn to love it? (September 7, 2023)
Vox’s The Highlight: There’s no such thing as a new idea — just ask the Little Mermaid (May 15, 2023)
Vox’s The Highlight: The glories of dining out alone (January 26, 2023)
Vox’s The Highlight: Hannah Arendt and the radical political power of friendship (August 23, 2022)
Bon Appetit: The surprising evolution of dinner parties (July 1, 2022)
Vox: The long, long, twisty affair between Hollywood and the Pentagon (May 27, 2022)
Vox: The best $130 I ever spent: a Major League Baseball TV pass (May 31, 2021)
Vox’s The Highlight: We were here: Memorials for a pandemic (March 21, 2021)
Vox: The Plague Prophets (March 18, 2021)
Vox’s The Highlight: The joy and uneasiness of an empty museum (November 18, 2020)
Vox: Pandemics are not wars (April 15, 2020)
Vox: A syllabus for the end of the world (April 3, 2020)
Vox: Why we wept when Notre Dame burned (April 16, 2019)
Vox: After Columbine, martyrdom became a powerful fantasy for Christian teenagers (originally published April 17, 2017)