Angie Han

If The Bombing of Pan Am 103 struggles to find the specific humanity of its generic characters, the impulse behind creating them in the first place — to commemorate those departed, and those who cared about them — cannot help but feel touchingly humane.

There’s no curiosity about the universes Stuart is passing through, no sense that he registers the untold billions or trillions of lives he’s saving as people rather than abstractions. Even recurring supporting characters like comic book guys Kyle and Trevor, or jockish bro Gary (Tommy Walker), are treated by Stuart and company as one-dimensional NPCs.

So maybe Ride or Die isn’t quite singular enough to inspire the kind of devotion referenced in its title. But it’s more than winning enough to follow to the end of this adventure, at least, and perhaps on to the next.

The Westies settles for retracing the familiar tropes they’re built on.

The Peacock limited series is perfectly palatable as a mid-summer binge, just hefty enough to hold your attention but not so heavy as to tax it. It’s just never as special, or as memorable, as one might expect from the sum of its very promising parts.

It feels stuck somewhere between the show it thought it wanted to be and the show it has the potential to become.

Painting an impressively thorough portrait of the country’s founding and the men behind it. .... This might please those who watch history docs for fun, and U.S. history teachers looking for an easy lesson; it’s unlikely to attract, much less enthrall, those who fall into neither camp.

A little bit twisty, a little bit funny and ultimately so frothy it’ll disappear from memory faster than bubbles from a champagne coupe, this Hong Kong-set English-language Hulu drama may not be your next obsession. But under the right circumstances, it could be an ideal distraction.

The connection between the two leads is most charming in the early tween years. .... But Every Year After is full of undercooked details that get brought up only as an excuse to bring its would-be lovers together or pull them back apart, and then get discarded when they’re no longer needed for that purpose.

If the instigating incident feels overly contrived, the emotions it dredges up feel real enough to make up for it — and nowhere more so than in Walker’s fearless, ferocious performance.