Selected Clips

I joined The New York Times as a staff 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: Art for Everybody (March 27, 2025)
NYT: Eephus (March 6, 2025)
NYT: I’m Still Here (January 16, 2025)
NYT: The Seed of the Sacred Fig (November 27, 2024)
NYT: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (October 31, 2024)
NYT: Anora (October 17, 2024)
NYT: The Substance (September 19, 2024)
NYT: Eno (July 11, 2024)
NYT Book Review: Welcomed Into Joan Didion’s Home, If Not Her Inner Circle (June 11, 2024)
NYT: Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus (March 14, 2024)
NYT: The Taste of Things (February 8, 2024)
NYT: All of Us Strangers (December 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: How I learned to stop wincing and appreciate Jackass (February 5, 2022)
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: On Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Cory Booker (April 2, 2025)
NYT Video: What’s Wrong with the Oscars Best International Film Category (March 1, 2025)
NYT: Nickel Boys and Hale County This Morning, This Evening (March 1, 2025)
NYT: On Instagram Reels and Frederick Wiseman (February 8, 2025)
NYT: Interview with Robert Eggers about Nosteratu (December 27, 2024)
NYT: I Love a Hate-Watch. Don’t You? (August 19, 2024)
NYT: 25 Years Later, The Matrix is as Relevant as Ever (July 31, 2024)
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 Ethan Hawke’s “Wildcat” Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor (May 11, 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: The glories of dining out alone (January 26, 2023)
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’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: After Columbine, martyrdom became a powerful fantasy for Christian teenagers (originally published April 17, 2017)