Roxana Hadadi

The Boroughs’s ensemble cast is so experienced and gives the characters such depth that the series’ hokier creature-feature ideas become tolerable and its larger considerations about what the purpose of life is as we near its end feel momentous.

A layered, propulsive series exemplifying the energy and dynamism that keeps the cops-and-robbers genre so appealing. It’s a shot of pure adrenaline and hell-yeah vigor followed up with a chaser of pathos and longing, and it’s one of the best new series Netflix has released this year.

By the time the series breaks the fourth wall, Salieri transcends this story and becomes an avatar for all the depraved things desperate men will do when they’re convinced they deserve more than they’ve got. All of Amadeus’s contemporaneous stylistic and dialogue choices are a blast, but the series’ suggestion that this kind of guy is plaguing our present, too, feels the most timeless, and the most unsettling.

It’s another challenging, sometimes sluggish episode about Mikey’s deteriorating mental health and his attacks on the people he loved. Bernthal is very good at this. .... The more nuanced work in this episode belongs to Moss-Bachrach, whose character has had the greatest growth arc throughout the series.

Half Man is most provocatively compelling when it paints in shades of gray, when Ruben and Niall are young and their instincts are unclear to each other and to themselves. But as the miniseries exits adolescence, Half Man feels increasingly afraid of the messiness it initially embraced, and increasingly didactic.

Lee’s new story is more wacky, condescending, romantic, and nastily, wonderfully furious than the already nastily and wonderfully furious first season.

The ends always justify the means. Even a stand-up act can be praxis. How compelling you find that suggestion will depend on how much you jibe with Hacks’s combination of teasing and endorsement, and how quickly you might tire of how heroic everyone has become. (By now, the characters’ edges have been so sanded down that it’s shocking when it’s revealed that Deb once made a slightly homophobic joke about a lesbian comedian.) But the series throws itself into portraying how Deb’s galvanization activates those around her, and into positioning their transformations as persuasive devices.

Just like Rue’s transformation into an AR-15 salesperson, so much of this early phase of Euphoria’s return feels completely airless.

An all-timer of a movie lurks inside Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and the spookiest thing is that it exists in this bloated form.

All those detours, breezily paced in sub-30-minute episodes, ultimately return to the series’ overarching ideas about what it costs — culturally, commercially, personally, domestically, romantically, professionally — to exist as a minority within a majority. Bait is most intriguing when it refuses to answer that question in a tidy way.