Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the director of 25 feature films, and the author of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
Astronaut Ed Baldwin (played by Joel Kinnaman) still has his head in the clouds. Photo: Apple TV+
There are guns on the moon — repeat there are guns on the moon — in a new For All Mankind with a mildly elevated pulse! Everyone’s making hard choices and living with regrets on this week’s episode of no one’s favorite space soap on Apple TV+.
Will Pullen plays the ghost of Emily's future in the season 2 finale. Photo: Apple TV+
Bad dreams, dead rebels, crumbling marriages, and new babies all collide in Dickinson’s season 2 finale.
The Apple TV+ show about the famous feminist legend of poetry needs to tie up a lot of loose ends. But it’s got to also leave enough left unanswered to entice viewers for next season. Can it accomplish all this on its own terms?
Alice and Sophie say a long goodbye at last. Photo: Apple TV+
On this week’s Losing Alice, Apple TV+’s erotic thriller series about filmmaking, director Alice has a big premiere coming up but her star isn’t present. Just what happened in Room 209 — and what’s next?
Astronaut Tracy (played by Sarah Jones) goes Hollywood. Photo: Apple TV+
For All Mankind, the Apple TV+ soap opera about the lives of astronauts in an alternate-history America, takes a few leaps toward disaster in its sophomore season’s second episode. Crisis looms around every corner — and everyone’s gearing up for the worst.
She's young, she's human, get used to it. Photo: Apple TV+
With Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, the young pop star gets a showcase and a bio-doc, which means she’s gotten so hugely popular that people demanded to know more about her.
The good news is, Eilish is a humble and interesting subject. The bad news: Being a depressed teenager with high-tension demands placed upon you isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
Even Spider-Man can't save this disaster. Photo: Apple TV+
After years of shepherding the Marvel Cinematic Universe to its first major climax, directors Joe and Anthony Russo decided to make one of the proverbial “one for us” movies — as in “one for them, one for us.”
It’s a classic Hollywood strategy, where filmmakers follow up a moneymaking blockbuster with a personal project that’s more like an indie flick. The trouble with the Russo brothers “one for us” movie — a drama called Cherry, which opens in theaters Friday before coming to Apple TV+ on March 12 — is that the “us” in this case possess no style, no ideology, no ideas and no ambition. Cherry is a total waste of $10 million and 2-and-a-half hours of screen time.
On this week’s episode of Apple TV+’s millennial melodrama Dickinson, Austin’s drowning, Emily’s flailing, Mrs. Dickinson’s catering two tea parties, and John Brown’s raiding Harper’s Ferry. And that’s just in the first few minutes.
The future hangs in the balance. And with only two episodes left in the show’s second season, every action and word counts. The show only wastes some of them.
Alice, played by Ayelet Zurer, finally gains the upper hand this week. Photo: Apple TV+
Losing Alice starts to wind down its look at the perverse triangle formed by a screenwriter, a director and their star in the Apple TV+ psychothriller’s penultimate episode.
The time has come for Alice to direct David and Sophie in their big, erotic close-up. Can they find the chemistry needed to sell it before the wheels come off the machine and Sophie is found out?
The Cold War heats up -- on the moon! -- in Season 2 of For All Mankind. Photo: Apple TV+
Apple TV+’s alternate-history space race extravaganza For All Mankind is back for a second season (with a third already paid for). Things are different on the moon but they’re very much the same in the drama department.
Emily Dickinson (played by Hailee Steinfeld) gets published ... and promptly disappears! Photo: Apple TV+
Emily Dickinson is finally a published author, but will that stitch the tear in her heart or repair the fraying nerves of everyone in her orbit? Anyone who knows the story of the 19th-century poet knows the answer to that, but we’re not watching Apple TV+’s revisionist history for its accuracy, are we?