Selected Clips
I joined The New York Times as a staff movie critic in November 2023 (and my articles live here).
Before that, I was a senior correspondent at Vox (full archive here), where I wrote reviews, essays, and criticism, and covered festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, New York, Sheffield, True/False, Tribeca, and others. 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
All of Us Strangers (The New York Times, December 21, 2023)
The Boy and the Heron (The New York Times, November 21, 2023)
What the ending of Killers of the Flower Moon means (Vox, October 20, 2023)
Shiny Happy People is a great reminder of why cult documentaries should exist (Vox, June 13, 2023)
The year’s scariest horror film is The Zone of Interest (Vox, May 2023)
On the roots of Women Talking in St. Augustine (Vox, September 14, 2022)
Four ways of looking at The Rehearsal (Vox, August 8, 2022)
Nope, explained: Unpacking the spectacle society (Vox, July 21, 2022)
How I learned to stop wincing and appreciate Jackass (Vox, February 5, 2022)
I feel weird about Dear Evan Hansen (Vox, September 23, 2021)
The ancient palindrome that explains Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (Vox, September 4, 2020)
Woodstock was a beautiful, idealistic mess. The Woodstock Generation was the letdown. (Vox’s The Highlight, August 21, 2019)
Silence is beautiful, unsettling, and one of the best religious movies ever made (Vox, January 24, 2017)
Selected Essays
Disney is a language. Do we still speak it? (The New York Times, December 16, 2023)
Can AI learn to love — and can we learn to love it? (Vox’s The Highlight, September 7, 2023)
There’s no such thing as a new idea — just ask the Little Mermaid (Vox’s The Highlight, May 15, 2023)
The glories of dining out alone (Vox’s The Highlight, January 26, 2023)
Hannah Arendt and the radical political power of friendship (Vox’s The Highlight, August 23, 2022)
The surprising evolution of dinner parties (Bon Appetit, July 1, 2022)
The long, long, twisty affair between Hollywood and the Pentagon (Vox, May 27, 2022)
The best $130 I ever spent: a Major League Baseball TV pass (Vox, May 31, 2021)
We were here: Memorials for a pandemic (Vox’s The Highlight, March 21, 2021)
The Plague Prophets (Vox, March 18, 2021)
The joy and uneasiness of an empty museum (Vox’s The Highlight, November 18, 2020)
Pandemics are not wars (Vox, April 15, 2020)
A syllabus for the end of the world (Vox, April 3, 2020)
Why we wept when Notre Dame burned (Vox, April 16, 2019)
After Columbine, martyrdom became a powerful fantasy for Christian teenagers (Vox, originally published April 17, 2017)