Criticism

best of 2025

The Best Books of 2025 (So Far)

 What if Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was written like The Savage Detectives? By Vulture Editors
movie review

Thunderbolts* Really Is Marvel’s Answer to an A24 Movie

 The MCU’s anti-hero team-up is less Suicide Squad than Everything Everywhere All At Once. By Alison Willmore
best of 2025

The Best Podcasts of 2025 (So Far)

 If you really want to absorb something, immerse yourself in the wonkiest podcasts imaginable. By Nicholas Quah
  1. best of 2025
    The Best Podcasts of 2025 (So Far)If you really want to absorb something, immerse yourself in the wonkiest podcasts imaginable.
    By Nicholas Quah
  2. best of 2025
    The Best TV Shows of 2025 (So Far)Great television will not be confined nor defined by genre.
    By Jen Chaney, Roxana Hadadi, and Kathryn VanArendonk
  3. theater review
    Real Women Have Curves
    Bright and Bold in Undocumented L.A.: Real Women Have Curves“It’s got plenty of bubbly, cheeky joy and big-dreaming sincerity, but it pulls back before crossing the line into either treacle or fluff.”
    By Sara Holdren
  4. theater review
    From 'Dead Outlaw,' at the Longacre Theatre.
    In Dead Outlaw, Elmer McCurdy Gets One More Turn in the SpotlightAn antihero takes an exceptionally long, exceptionally strange, exceptionally American voyage through the West.
    By Jackson McHenry
  5. theater review
    Just in Time Will Teach You About Bobby Darin and Even More About Jonathan GroffA dual psychological portrait of subject and star in the form of a bio-musical.
    By Jackson McHenry
  6. endings
    You Should’ve Aimed HigherIt wasn’t just the sexual predation that made Joe Goldberg so evil.
    By Nicholas Quah
  7. movie review
    In Praise of Revenge of the Sith, the Saddest and Sincerest Star Wars MovieThe final film in the Star Wars prequel trilogy feels like George Lucas’s attempt to step back from his creation and really reckon with it.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  8. that’s all i wanted
    Be Our Father Figure, HarrisBabygirl’s best scene is when its upstart intern reaches for the brown liquor.
    By Roxana Hadadi
  9. movie review
    Babygirl Might Just Be the Year’s Hottest MovieThough what’s great about this sexy Nicole Kidman-Harris Dickinson drama is how surprising it can be.
    By Alison Willmore
  10. sxsw 2025
    The Accountant 2 Cannot Be Taken SeriouslyDo not approach this sequel, starring Ben Affleck as an underworld accountant again, with any sort of sobriety.
    By Alison Willmore
  11. art review
    Rashid Johnson’s Visual FeastThe new Rashid Johnson survey at the Guggenheim is sprawling and stunning.
    By Yinka Elujoba
  12. theater review
    Pirates! The Penzance Musical
    Pirates! Is the Very Model of a Modern Major DebacleThe ever-delightful David Hyde Pierce can’t disguise that Gilbert and Sullivan’s confectionery operetta has been keelhauled.
    By Sara Holdren
  13. movie review
    Havoc Feels Like a Grand Theft Auto Adaptation (Derogatory)Tom Hardy plays a dirty cop in the new movie from the director of The Raid, which is all cool elements and no coherence.
    By Alison Willmore
  14. close read
    #1 Happy Family USA Keeps SwingingRamy Youssef’s post-9/11 animated series throws punches in every direction on its way to an absurd, sneakily tragic cliffhanger.
    By Roxana Hadadi
  15. song review
    It’s Nice to See Lorde Moving OnEven if her new single feels a bit last decade.
    By Craig Jenkins
  16. movie review
    We Have Good News and Bad News About The Legend of OchiThe good news is the controversy over the new A24 film’s supposedly AI-looking critter is baseless. The bad news? Well…
    By Bilge Ebiri
  17. tv review
    I Can’t Believe Étoile Got Away With ThisAmy Sherman-Palladino cashes her blank Amazon check on a transatlantic TV show about ballet. C’est merveilleux!
    By Jackson McHenry
  18. endings
    The Deeper Meaning Behind Conclave’s Surprise Ending, ExplainedThe conclusion of this gossipy Vatican drama makes one distinct change from the book it’s based on, in service of a message about progress.
    By Louis Peitzman
  19. theater review
    High School, Dramatically: Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Grief CampThe great American unifier, put onstage at two vastly different scales.
    By Sara Holdren
  20. close read
    Sinners’s Music Goes for the JugularThe film upends what we’ve come to expect from stories about the blues.
    By Craig Jenkins
  21. theater review
    Floyd Collins Is Beautiful But Can’t Break FreeA few crucial staging choices kneecap this production from the start, undermining its epic tragedy.
    By Sara Holdren
  22. tv review
    Star Wars Needed ThisAndor’s second season doesn’t just cement the series as the best of the franchise, it also deepens the saga surrounding it.
    By Nicholas Quah
  23. movie review
    Cinderella Was Always a Body-Horror StoryNorwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister underlines the base grotesquerie of the original fairy tale.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  24. movie review
    The Wedding Banquet Is Rom-Com Whiplash in the Best SenseThe characters in Andrew Ahn’s remake of an Ang Lee classic can get gay-married, but they’re going to get fake straight-married instead.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  25. you have bewitched me
    Why We Still Yearn for Pride and PrejudiceJoe Wright’s 2005 adaptation is filled with lovely images, but it’s all still so experiential, like we’re seeing through the characters’ eyes.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  26. movie review
    Sinners Is Bold, Ambitious, and Just Misses GreatnessIt’s a film that will haunt me just as much as it will keep me wondering who Ryan Coogler wants to be on the other side of Creed and Black Panther.
    By Angelica Jade Bastién
  27. movie review
    If Only David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds Weren’t So LifelessThere’s adultery and cuckoldry and doubles and all the other good Cronenbergian ideas. But none of it really fits together.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  28. theater review
    Caryl Churchill, Acrobatically, at the PublicFour short plays by the master of knotty stage language.
    By Sara Holdren
  29. tv review
    Matthew Rhys’s Frown Lights Up Towards ZeroAn otherwise by-the-numbers Agatha Christie adaptation gets a welcome jolt of grumpy energy whenever he shuffles onscreen.
    By Roxana Hadadi
  30. album review
    Bon Iver Is Out of the WoodsOn Sable, Fable, Justin Vernon is committed to having a better time.
    By Craig Jenkins
  31. theater review
    A Crucible of Teen Drama: John Proctor Is the VillainWhen the stressors in Arthur Miller’s play and the ones in a classroom full of high-schoolers collide.
    By Sara Holdren
  32. tv review
    The Baldwins Almost SucceededSometimes you nearly forget this exercise in crisis management was a wild miscalculation.
    By Kathryn VanArendonk
  33. tv review
    The Last of Us Grows UpThere will always be infected, but this series excels when its characters consider how to be human.
    By Kathryn VanArendonk
  34. movie review
    What Was America?America was a movie in which the president saves the world in a ball gown with an automatic weapon.
    By Alison Willmore
  35. close read
    Full Circle
    Yellowjackets’s Big Bad Was Hiding in Plain SightThe series has finally embraced what now seems like an inevitability, turning this into a horror story of a different kind.
    By Roxana Hadadi
  36. movie review
    In Warfare, the Fog of War Is Both a Literal and Spiritual FactAlex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Iraq War drama plunges us into the horror and confusion of combat.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  37. movie review
    The Thriller Drop Is a Perfect Addition to the Bad-First-Date CanonMeghann Fahy, you will always be famous.
    By Alison Willmore
  38. theater review
    Smash Is the Wrong Kind of DudInstead of embracing its legendary love-to-hate-watch roots, the Broadway adaptation of the NBC show about a musical is surprisingly timid.
    By Jackson McHenry
  39. movie review
    One to One: John & Yoko Cuts Through the Beatles-Industrial ComplexBuilt around Lennon and Ono’s 1972 concert at Madison Square Garden — John’s last — the film presents a powerful look at their activism.
    By Bilge Ebiri
  40. tv review
    World Got You Down? Head North of North.Netflix’s winning new Canadian comedy is the Black Mirror counterprogramming we need right now.
    By Roxana Hadadi
  41. theater review
    What’s to Discuss? Old Friends Is a Familiar Trip Through the Sondheim Canon.Led by a committed Bernadette Peters.
    By Jackson McHenry
  42. movie review
    Rami Malek May Be Too Weird for HollywoodIn spy thriller The Amateur, the Oscar winner and his pulpy material can’t get along.
    By Alison Willmore
  43. theater review
    Jasmine Amy Rogers (Betty Boop) and Ainsley Melham (Dwayne).
    Does Betty Boop Exist in Three Dimensions?Boop! The Musical tries to get her out of her cel.
    By Jackson McHenry
  44. tv review
    The Handmaid’s Tale Remains Frustrating to the EndThat’s the point.
    By Jen Chaney
  45. art review
    The Wary Gaze of Amy SheraldA majestic new show at the Whitney features the artist’s gift for portraiture that seethes with subtleties.
    By Jerry Saltz
  46. book review
    Katie Kitamura Gets Too AbstractAudition’s lack of novelistic detail is both a strength and a weakness.
    By Emma Alpern
  47. rich texts
    Let’s Read Into That White Lotus FinaleMike White’s go-to themes and imagery flow through the season-three finale like so many symbolic waves.
    By Jen Chaney, Jackson McHenry, and Nicholas Quah
  48. tv review
    The White Lotus Didn’t Earn ItLaurie’s monologue teaches a lesson season three failed to grasp.
    By Kathryn VanArendonk
  49. theater review
    Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas in The Last Five Years.
    A Messy Breakup: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren in The Last Five YearsNick Jonas’s pop-star casting runs up against Adrienne Warren’s sheer luminosity, and the two leads’ onstage power dynamic never feels quite right.
    By Sara Holdren
  50. movie review
    Gazer Is a Reminder of When Indie Films Were ExcitingThe New Jersey–set thriller may have been made on the cheap, but its ambitions are huge.
    By Alison Willmore
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