About midway through “Social Studies,” Lauren Greenfield’s new five-part FX docuseries about teens and their relationship to social media, we see one of the show’s protagonists—an eighteen-year-old University of Arizona freshman named Sydney—as she exercises on an elliptical machine at the gym. Wearing a gray tank top and black short shorts, with her hair tied … Read more
The best-loved Pixar movies are often spoken of in terms of their tried-and-true emotional impact, how reliably they reduce us to quivering lips and choked-back sobs, year after year, rewatch after rewatch. Sometimes a single inspired sequence can do the trick: I’m no great admirer of “Up” (2009), but its famous opening montage of married … Read more
The new movie by Jane Schoenbrun, “I Saw the TV Glow,” is among the most nocturnal films I’ve seen. Even in the handful of scenes that take place in daytime, the sun seems dark, shadowed by the dominant form of light in Schoenbrun’s world: the screen. There are cell-phone screens, computer screens, arcade games, glimpses … Read more
