PODCAST · tv
The Review
by The Atlantic
Don’t just watch a movie; understand it. Don’t just hear a song; consider what it has to say. On The Review, writers and guests discuss how we entertain ourselves, and how that defines the way we see the world. Join The Atlantic’s writers as they break down a work of pop culture each week, exploring the big questions that great art can provoke, making some recommendations for you, and having a little fun along the way.
Episodes
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Top Gun
Top Gun: Maverick is out soon! But can any movie with fast planes, Tom Cruise, and beach volleyball truly compare to the classic fighter pilot movie about, as writer Shirley Li puts it, "cute boys calling each other cute names"? Find out with Shirley, Megan Garber, and David Sims, and explore the...
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Knocked Up
In a possibly-soon-to-be-post-Roe v Wade world, our hosts Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis thought it'd be worth re-examining the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogan comedy "Knocked Up," to discuss the way the movie treats women's bodily autonomy, angry reactions from men, and abortion. Megan...
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Winning Time
The 1980s Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most dominant teams in sports. At a time when professional basketball was on its heels, the Lakers dynasty brought new excitement: Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird, Jerry Buss and the glitzy Forum Club, and an uptempo flow offense. That’s the story of…
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Severance
The Apple TV+ dystopian thriller Severance is one of the most acclaimed shows of the year. Its grim take on the furthest extreme of "work-life balance" speaks to our strained pandemic-era relationship with the workplace and, according to our critics, offers a gripping throwback to an era of...
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The Northman
Shirley Li, David Sims, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the brutal new blockbuster The Northman. From the director of The Lighthouse and The Witch and based on the viking legend that inspired Hamlet, the film is a visceral experience that’s hard to summarize: Is it an arthouse revenge epic? A viking...
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
Shirley Li, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the hit action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. At a time when every show or movie has a multiverse, how does this film’s “verse-jumping” manage to be so cathartic it made us cry? The trio follows up on last week’s discussion of…
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Turning Red
Shirley Li, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz discuss the Pixar coming-of-age film Turning Red, why they found it utterly charming, and why this post-villain era of animation is a welcome one. Further reading: What the Controversy Over Turning Red Misses Pixar's Turning Red Has the Cleverest…
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Is Pop Music Obsessed With Nostalgia?
Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Hannah Giorgis assess the state of pop music following the Grammys. While the much-derided awards have improved at celebrating the diversity of modern music, they still tend to reward safer throwback sounds. And modern music as a whole seems to be going through…
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The Dropout
From Theranos to WeWork to the socialite grifter Anna Delvey, television these days is all about the art of the scam. Why are we so fascinated with the rise-and-fall stories of swindlers? What do these shows reveal about American culture at this moment? And with many of these shows following…
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West Side Story
West Side Story is a work with some huge names behind it: Leonard Bernstein wrote the musical, Stephen Sondheim the lyrics, and Shakespeare the source material Romeo and Juliet. And sixty years after the classic 1961 film dominated the Oscars, another name was added to that list: Steven…
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The Batman
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,...
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Drive My Car
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...
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The Power of the Dog
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...
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Pam & Tommy
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…
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Can Rom-Coms Make a Comeback?
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...
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The Experiment: Uncle Spam
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...
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Yellowjackets
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…
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The Lost Daughter
“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…
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Frasier
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...
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Don't Look Up
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…
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Emily in Paris
When the first season of Netflix’s Emily in Paris debuted in October 2020, it was met with both delight and ridicule: Delight at its escapism into sunny France from the election and pandemic. But also ridicule at Lilly Collins’ bubbly American abroad blithely Instagramming her croissants by the...
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Spider-Man: No Way Home
After its record-setting opening weekend, the third Tom Holland Spider-Man is already the most successful movie of 2021. David Sims, Shirley Li, and Spencer Kornhaber debate Marvel’s continued dominance of moviegoing — Will it continue? Do we want it to? For a film that navel-gazes about the...
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Succession (Season 3 Finale)
Succession’s Season 3 finale opens with a family session of Monopoly, a game that offers the perfect summary of the show: Players fight to be the last one standing—trading advantages and risking jail—going around the board over and over without a clear end in sight. But with the season’s...
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House of Gucci
David Sims, Shirley Li, and Spencer Kornhaber try to decipher House of Gucci — what exactly is the new Ridley Scott film? Comedy? Tragedy? True-crime family epic? And what does the Lady Gaga / Adam Driver vehicle say about the state of movies? Only a few weeks ago, Ridley Scott’s well-reviewed…
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Adele’s '30' and The Year of the Breakup Album
Adele’s new album 30 is a cinematic exploration of “divorce, babe, divorce,” but it caps a year rich with breakup anthems. From Kacey Musgraves Star-Crossed to Taylor Swift’s reissued Red (Taylor’s Version), pop music has seemed like a months-long opera of celebrity splits, all beginning of…
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Passing (Bonus from The Experiment)
We’re off this week for the holiday, so here’s a special bonus from The Experiment, a podcast from The Atlantic and WNYC about the conflicts and contradictions that make America. Hollywood has a long history of “passing movies”—films in which Black characters pass for white—usually starring white...
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Dickinson
Emily Dickinson’s life, according to the show Dickinson, had a lot more gay sex and twerking than middle school English class would have had you believe. And, from what we now know of the reclusive poet’s life, at least half of that is true. The cult hit Apple TV+ show—now in its third and final...
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Spencer
Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Shirley Li discuss Spencer, the new “fable from a true tragedy” about Princess Diana. After Jackie, director Pablo Larraín turned his attention to another high-profile woman captive to family and publicity. Does the movie’s surrealist approach complicate the Diana...
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The Ring
Who says Halloween’s over? This week, we’re revisiting a modern horror classic. Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Lenika Cruz discuss The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s 2002 adaptation of the Japanese film Ringu. The Ring brought J-horror to North America, rekindled the supernatural monster movie after a...
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Dune
David Sims, Shirley Li, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the new big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic Dune. The ur-text of modern sci-fi, Dune has a legacy that echoes through Star Wars, Alien, and countless Hero’s Journey epics. Does Denis Villeneuve succeed where David Lynch…
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Succession (Season 3 Premiere)
The boar is on the floor. The Greggs are in the Tomelettes. And season 3 of HBO’s Succession is finally here. Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Hannah Giorgis break down the season premiere and unpack the appeal of Succession. What explains the unique obsession for a show about feuding media...
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No Time to Die
James Bond now spans 25 movies, six actors, and six decades—not to mention the books, video games, and imitations. Over the years, the character has evolved from the stoic, womanizing emblem of British empire to Daniel Craig’s emotionally driven interpretation. But with the Craig era ending…
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Ted Lasso
David Sims, Megan Garber, and Sophie Gilbert examine the unlikely success that is Ted Lasso, and ask what the show’s much-discussed second season has to say about the merits (and the limits) of American optimism. Visit theatlantic.com/thereview for more about the show. And check out Megan’s…
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Introducing: The Review
On The Review, The Atlantic's writers and guests discuss how we entertain ourselves and how that shapes the way we understand the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Don’t just watch a movie; understand it. Don’t just hear a song; consider what it has to say. On The Review, writers and guests discuss how we entertain ourselves, and how that defines the way we see the world. Join The Atlantic’s writers as they break down a work of pop culture each week, exploring the big questions that great art can provoke, making some recommendations for you, and having a little fun along the way.
HOSTED BY
The Atlantic
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Review have?
The Review currently has 34 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Review about?
Don’t just watch a movie; understand it. Don’t just hear a song; consider what it has to say. On The Review, writers and guests discuss how we entertain ourselves, and how that defines the way we see the world. Join The Atlantic’s writers as they break down a work of pop culture each week,...
How often does The Review release new episodes?
The Review has 34 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Review?
You can listen to The Review on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Review?
The Review is created and hosted by The Atlantic.
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