Julia Sirmons

If horror films today are largely read as political satires or commentaries, then the “moral” of Gerard Johnstone’s M3gan, about a sentient robot doll unwisely invited into the family home, is clear enough. Playing on our fears of the AI technology increasingly being used as “labor-saving devices,” M3gan is a tale of bad mothering and the price to be paid by career-oriented millennial women if they try to “have it all.” This may make it catnip for trolls and conservative commentators who love to chide women for any parenting style that doesn’t involve frilly aprons and a plastered-on smile. But you need to squint a bit to see this latent message. If you do, you’re missing a more complex (and more horrifying) story.

Life imitated art to a depressingly predictable degree when a clip from Todd Field’s Tár circulated online. It’s part of a scene where the film’s title character, superstar conductor Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett), leads a masterclass at Juilliard. She haughtily dismisses students’ reluctance to learn the classical canon because of their difficulty “identifying” with its composers. To some, Lydia’s monologue was a vindication: a righteous tirade against "wokeness." To others, the speech exemplifies Lydia’s abuse of power, which includes not only dressing down students and mentees but sleeping with many of them and torpedoing their careers.  But oversimplified views of Lydia as a crusader or villain flatten the film’s wrenching complexities.

Screen adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries never go out of style. The problem is that they're so often concerned with literal fidelity that they get bogged down in self-seriousness, so desperate to “update” everything that they veer into the ludicrous. With 2019's Knives Out, Rian Johnson successfully updated the Christie-style whodunit because he had a deep knowledge of its formula and he played it with a pitch-perfect, kooky sensibility. For Knives Out’s sequel, the newly released Glass Onion, Johnson does what you should do when Netflix gives you buckets of money to make a whodunit. There are expensive locales and production design, a bevy of great character actors and a twistier murder plot.