The Spool

12/12/2025

Tim Stevens doesn't think LITTLE DISASTERS is a big enough deal to earn the title "disaster," but he wants to be very clear that he thinks it is bad.

12/12/2025

WAKE UP DEAD MAN, the latest Knives Out film, hits Netflix today. Look back at Tim Stevens' review during its theatrical run to encourage you to schedule your weekend around seeing it.

When you are winning, most will frown on changing the game plan. Talk to an expert, though, and they’ll tell you the best coaches are the ones who do exactly. They recognize when a winning formula is at risk of issuing diminishing results. So even when things are paying off, they’re moving to a ...

12/12/2025

HAMNET opens wide today. Check out Lisa Laman's emotionally rich response to the film on The Spool now.

Anything can wield importance. An empty room? The setting of a child’s first steps. An old country song? The score for a first kiss. It is all a matter of perspective, emotion, and memory. For instance, for me, the 2009 Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway Blu-ray was one of the last movies I watched wit...

10/12/2025

Tim Stevens wrestles with JAY KELLY before ultimately concluding that its ambiguity is an advantage.
https://thespool.net/reviews/film-review-jay-kelly-netflix-2025-george-clooney/

08/12/2025

After last night's Tonight Show special on STRANGER THINGS, why not revisit Tim Stevens' review of Season 5's first part.

While there is more to television than openings and endings, one can get a long way by doing them well. Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1 effectively reminds audiences that those are two of the things the show was—and continues to be—good at. Of course, viewers cannot live on attention-grabbing co...

03/12/2025

Rian Johnson breaks with his KNIVES OUT formula some in WAKE UP DEAD MAN, delivering a film that balances its humor and twisty mystery with an earnest evaluation of faith and religion, says Tim Stevens.

When you are winning, most will frown on changing the game plan. Talk to an expert, though, and they’ll tell you the best coaches are the ones who do exactly. They recognize when a winning formula is at risk of issuing diminishing results. So even when things are paying off, they’re moving to a ...

28/11/2025

Looking for a film to keep the entire family happy this post-Thanksgiving weekend? Lisa Laman says you can do worse than WICKED: FOR GOOD. Of course, you can also do better, namely with the franchise's first installment.

Typically, two-part movies are the opposite of the Beach Boys’ discography: better in the back half. The first parts of multi-installment movies shot back-to-back, like The Deathly Hallows or Breaking Dawn, mostly tread water to ensure all the narrative chess pieces are in place for the grand fina...

26/11/2025

Sarah Gorr declares Park Chan-wook's latest, NO OTHER CHOICE, a gift and one of the year's best.

26/11/2025

Tim Stevens praises A MAN ON THE INSIDE Season 2 for empathetically embracing another group too quickly shoved aside as being "outdated": liberal arts institutions. Not to get too punny, but there's no Sophomore slump here.

18/11/2025

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT is a masterpiece, declares Lisa Laman.

OOne of the last interviews in Jafar Panahi’s 2015 feature Taxi centers on Nasrin Sotoudeh. In her brief screentime, the human rights lawyer talks about the psychological experiences of those imprisoned and tortured under Iran’s government. Even after release from these prisons, your suffering i...

14/11/2025

Lisa Laman admires THE RUNNING MAN's rebel heart, but can't deny its leading man derails the whole thing.

In his 2025 book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, author Omar El Akkad references a 2016 Roy Scranton essay. In it, El Akkad writes that the veteran “[confronts] the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the ...

13/11/2025

Tim Stevens admits he's too old for BAT-FAM, but that doesn't mean the series doesn't have its charms.

We age in stages when it comes to television. Or at least that’s this writer’s theory. First, TV is just a collection of colors, shapes, and noises. Hopefully, your parents have selected pleasant ones. Then you enter the era of your toddler programming, where Sesame Street and Bluey are your ang...