The Batman is already 2022’s highest-grossing film. In some ways, it’s yet another comic-book adaptation to dominate theaters. In others, it’s a return to a pre-MCU cinema experience free of the weight of universe-building. Robert Pattinson stars in the first standalone Batman movie in a decade, bringing a grim detective story with the caped crusader that seems to draw more from David Fincher than DC Comics. 

While superhero films still top box office charts, the types of stories they’re capable of telling seems broader each year. Should The Batman make us optimistic for the future of comic-book movies—or cynical that any big-budget film has to include capes?

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss Robert Pattinson, their favorite Batman, and the state of our superhero monoculture.

Further reading:

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Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s Japan’s most Oscar-nominated film ever—and its first to be up for Best Picture. It enters the final weeks of awards season as the first non-English-language film to be picked at Best Picture by all three major American critics groups (including the New York Film Critics Circle, for whom one David Sims tallied the results).

And its Oscar run comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. In both English and Korean though, Minari was put in the “foreign language” category.

Reflecting on that recent history then, should Drive My Car’s success offer some hope for international film? After Parasite’s 2019 Golden Globe win, director Bong Joon Ho urged viewers to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” Are audiences closer than ever to that goal?

The language of Drive My Car isn’t just remarkable for its domestic success too: Based on a story by Haruki Murakami and directed Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the film is also a deeply moving examination of language itself. 

David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz came together to unpack the film, its message about how we communicate with one another, and why it resonated as widely as it has. They also discuss their love for Murakami, despite his gendered flaws and storytelling crutches. (“And then the phone rang and it was a secret agent!”)

Further reading:

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The Jane Campion western drama The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated film this year. But does it—as Spencer Kornhaber has written—have a queer problem? Based on a 1967 novel, the movie’s found praise as an incisive study of masculinity. Does its dated source material also make it a collection of cliched gay narrative though?

Spencer joins Shirley Li and David Sims to analyze the film, as well as the Oscar race it’s currently leading. David also breaks down some recent Oscar history with how the reforms that followed #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 have shaped the Best Picture award in particular.

Further reading:

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Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and Shirley Li discuss the Hulu series about “the greatest love story ever sold” and ask: Is Pam & Tommy just repeating the exploitation it depicts? Or is its retelling of internet history revealing something new about our current culture?

The sex tape at the core of the show is effectively the first instance of revenge porn online. It opened up questions of celebrity and privacy that we’re still grappling today. Now, shows like Pam & Tommy (with which Pamela Anderson was not involved) similarly raise questions about where the line is with telling a public person’s private story.

The series also falls into a familiar category these days of the modern reconsideration of 90s culture: Framing Britney Spears, several American Crime Story iterations, even Girls5Eva and Yellowjackets. What is it about this era that’s drawing us to it? 

[Note: Spoilers through episode 6 of Pam & Tommy.]

Further reading: Sophie Gilbert’s review: Pam & Tommy and the Curse of the '90s Bombshell

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The romantic comedy was once a cinema tentpole. The films defined A-list careers. They won Hollywood studios awards. And they made oodles of money. Then one day, rom-coms seemed a thing of the past. What happened to the genre? Is it dead, or just alive in another form? And what would it take to mount a comeback?

David Sims, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the state of the rom-com and review two new entrants to the genre that premiered this past Valentine’s Day Weekend: First, the glitzy Marry Me starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. Second, the indie-inflected I Want You Back starring Charlie Day and Jenny Slate.

The trio breaks down what they love about the genre, what works and what doesn’t in the new films, and how Hollywood can recapture the old magic. (Maybe cast male leads for chemistry over comedy?) They also share their favorite rom-coms from the golden age of the genre—the 1990s and early 2000s, of course—and why they love them despite their formulaic flaws. Romantic comedies are, after all, the only movies that meaningfully explore how regular people connect with each other. As Sophie succinctly explains: “It’s this or porn, people.”

Further reading:

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This episode is the first in a new three-part miniseries from The Experiment—“SPAM: How the American Dream Got Canned.” 

During World War II, wherever American troops spread democracy, they left the canned meat known as SPAM in its wake. When American GIs landed overseas, they often tossed cans of SPAM out of trucks to the hungry people they sought to liberate. 

That’s how producer Gabrielle Berbey’s grandfather first came to know and love SPAM as a kid in the Philippines. But 80 years later, SPAM no longer feels American. It is now a staple Filipino food: a beloved emblem of Filipino identity. Gabrielle sets out on a journey to understand how SPAM made its way into the hearts of generations of Pacific Islanders, and ends up opening a SPAM can of worms.

Listen and subscribe to The Experiment here:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

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Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets often lean on creaky comparisons: A female Lord of the Flies? A 90's Stranger Things? Teen Lost, but in Canada? 

In any case, the coming-of-age horror story is as addictive as it is perceptive. The show follows a championship-bound girls soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021. Yellowjackets takes the life-or-death feeling of high-school to its furthest extreme, with the pilot episode teasing a cannibalistic cult that the girls become after nineteen months in the wilderness.

Episodes have kept viewers rapt and spawned dozens of theories about the show’s many mysteries: Who are the ‘pit girl’ and the ‘antler queen?’ Who’s blackmailing the adult Yellowjackets? What does the cult’s strange symbol mean? And Is Christina Ricci’s Misty the best character on television?

Shirley Li, Megan Garber, and Lenika Cruz break down the first season.

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“I’m an unnatural mother.” It was this one line that drew first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal to adapt the 2006 Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Her new Netflix film of the same name examines motherhood and its secret shames. 

Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, the movie portrays a woman at two different points in her life: Colman as a present-day professor on holiday in Greece, and Buckley as a mother with two young daughters decades earlier. Arriving two years into a pandemic whose burden has fallen especially hard on parents, the movie received a fiercely polarized reaction.

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Shirley Li analyze The Lost Daughter and the questions it raises. Is anyone a “natural mother”? How far does society expect women to sacrifice for their children? And how did they react to the film as parents?

Further reading:

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Comfort watches are a mainstay of the pandemic—old television and movies one can revisit over and over again. And for a few writers on The Atlantic’s culture team, that go-to watch has been the 1990s sitcom Frasier.

Megan Garber, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber debate why, despite its problems, Frasier holds up remarkably well (especially compared to more cringe-inducing contemporary shows like Friends and Seinfeld). What exactly explains its enduring appeal?

Frasier is a show whose tastes are very much of its time. (See: Niles Crane’s lapels.) But in a uniquely ‘90s end-of-history kind of way, the sitcom wrings its comedy from class tension while also existing in a strangely post-partisan world. 

That lack of politics can seem like fantasy to a viewer in 2022, but its treatment of identity is fantastical as well. Frasier is a comedy about class that elides race and, often, sexuality. (Is this a show for—or even about—gay men?) The trio breaks down the legacy of the sitcom today, shares favorite moments, and debates whether Frasier is the worst or best character on his own show.

Further reading:

• Megan Garber: Frasier Has Always Had a Maris Problem

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Adam McKay’s disaster satire is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman. Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie. 

Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, with cycles of backlash highlighting the difficulty of sending a funny yet urgent message. But of course, isn’t that what political satires have done for decades? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?

As McKay told David Sims, he wrote the story about a planet-killing comet (and our society’s inability to act collectively to stop it) as a climate change metaphor. But after the script was done, production shut down for the pandemic and he watched the follies of a real disaster surpass his fictional one. Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and David Sims unpack Don’t Look Up and whether modern satire can make a difference.

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