The Playlist Podcast Network

“The Agency” approaches espionage less as a series of action beats and more as a study in information, perception, and control. The show is at its absolute best when it leans into that tension, allowing seemingly ordinary conversations to simmer with unease while drawing on its wealth of densely fleshed-out characters, each carrying their own agendas, vulnerabilities, and secrets. Conversations are rarely straightforwar...

Robin Hood has been a lot of things over the centuries: noble thief, romantic outlaw, swashbuckling folk hero, animated fox, Kevin Costner with an accent that wanders wherever it pleases. But in Michael Sarnoski’s hands, the myth becomes something darker, sadder, and more spiritually eviscerated. His new film, “The Death of Robin Hood,” is less interested in the legend as a heroic brand than in the man who might b...

Just when you think Spider-Man has lost all novelty, “Spider-Noir” finds its spark by going backward into smoke, shadow, bruised conscience, silly accents, and old Hollywood fatalism. It’s still a comic-book story, complete with masks, villains, superpowers, and a hero trying to decide whether he can outrun the thing he was built to become, but its real trick is tonal. The series treats noir not as a costume ...

Following up on a cultural phenomenon like “Yellowstone” is no easy task. Any spin-off has to balance honoring what made the original series a hit while finding its own fresh ground. With “Dutton Ranch,” especially after the letdown of “Marshals,” that challenge falls on Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler, who leave Montana behind for Texas in hopes of building something new, only to discover that new b...

Some shows walk into the room with a genre label pinned neatly to their shirt. They wear it like a badge of honor and adhere to all rules therein. “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” kicks the door open, knocks over the lamp, checks its phone (Where's my phone?!), spirals emotionally, and somehow still has time to become a murder mystery. It's part divorce drama, part paranoid thriller, part loneliness comedy, and part &...

Be careful what you wish for, sure. But maybe be even more careful what you confuse for love, because Curry Barker’s “Obsession” takes one of horror’s oldest tricks and turns it into something queasy, funny, tragic, and deeply uncomfortable. It is the kind of movie that starts with a premise simple enough to fit on a cursed greeting card, then keeps tightening the rope until everyone in the room starts laugh...

The town on “From” has always felt less like a place and more like an emotional pressure cooker with monsters hiding in the walls. Every season cranks that pressure a little higher on the survivors, then asks them to keep pretending they can still function as leaders, parents, lovers, or even just regular people. Season 4 somehow makes all of that feel even more unstable. Hope is not dead in this show. It’s worse ...

Director Damian McCarthy really loves to hit that dread button, and in “Hokum,” he absolutely wears that thing out. Not with loud shocks or cheap jolts, but with the kind of slow, creeping unease that just sits there, staring back at you. The longer you watch, the more it feels like the movie isn’t escalating so much as tightening, quietly, deliberately, until there’s nowhere left to go. Then he slaps you ac...

Lots of action shows begin with some no-nonsense badass fully in charge of their faculties, but “Man On Fire” starts with a man who just plain isn’t. Before anything even happens in the story, Creasy is a suicidal, messy shell of his former peak CIA agent self. But, as with other iterations, that lack of stability is the hook. This isn’t "Reacher," and a muscular heroic soldier boy doesn't blow into town to ...

When networks spin off popular series, it's easy to come at them with arms folded and write them off as cash grabs. A "Stranger Things" animated spin-off really could have failed. A version of this show exists, in another reality, as something like a Saturday morning cartoon with “Stranger Things” as a disguise: bright colors, low stakes, perhaps Dustin and a sweet monster learning to be friends. Luckily, “Strange...

We’ve all probably been incredibly annoyed with our partner at one point or another, and thought (just for a second!) “I could kill them,” then went and made dinner as a perfectly functioning adult. The comedy thriller “Over Your Dead Body” from director Jorma Taccone (“Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” “Macgruber”) starring Jason Segel, Samara W...

Some films are just…films. Others feel as though a hugely skilled group of people were challenged to beautifully suffer in front of the camera. “Apex,” the new survival thriller on Netflix on April 24th, absolutely falls into that second category. It’s stark, pared-back, and wonderfully, not-so-slightly crazy. There are two people, a seriously awful predicament, and a huge number of bad choices about t...

The comedy “Balls Up” isn’t messing around. Yes, the title is a dick joke. The plot is a dick joke. And yes, the script is packed with dick jokes. It’s as immature and as dumb as they come, and yet, it oddly works because it just commits so hard and earnestly to the bit. Directed by Peter Farrelly—who knows a thing or two about immature, purile comedies with lots of dick jokes like “Dumb and...

Bob Odenkirk playing a small-town interim sheriff squaring off against the Yakuza is not a sentence that should make sense, let alone sell a movie. It sounds like a dare, or the kind of idea you giggle at before moving on. And yet, “Normal” takes that slightly absurd premise and treats it with just enough sincerity, grit, and tonal whiplash to make you lean in instead of check out (read our review).

The film, starring Bo...

What made the first season of “Beef” so good is that it refused to shrug off a ridiculously small thing, a little bit of road rage. It didn't let that incident seem small. Instead, it became a complete and total falling apart for two people. They just kept making a conflict that should have ended in a parking lot get bigger and bigger, until it was uncomfortably, painfully true to life. It flourished in specifics, being...

Adam McKay and Kevin Messick have spent the last decade-plus pinballing across genres with a kind of deliberate, morbid curiosity. One project dissects the financial system (“The Big Short”), another stares down extinction with a grin (“Don’t Look Up”), and another turns boardrooms into bloodsport (“Succession”). So no, a lean, camp-tinged shark thriller isn’t the obvious next stop. B...

“Pizza Movie” locks onto a very dumb, very specific crisis and rides it for all it’s worth. After one terrible drug-based decision, the night keeps getting weirder, louder, and more desperate, with pizza becoming the only objective that matters. It keeps escalating without losing the thread, which is what makes it work. For all the bodily chaos and ridiculous panic, the movie understands something real about being...

Yup, the wedding bells already rang, the in-laws already exploded, and somehow “Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come” still finds a way to make that universe feel even bigger, bloodier, funnier and a whole lot weirder. The sequel to the 2019 horror-comedy favorite picks up with Samara Weaving’s Grace still very much in the blast radius of her last marital disaster, only now the satanic board game has expanded. What was onc...

Grief rarely arrives quietly. In "The Madison", it detonates and leaves a family trying to rebuild their lives in the emotional rubble. The sweeping Paramount+ drama from Taylor Sheridan follows the Clyburn family after a devastating loss sends them from New York City to Montana, where grief, reinvention, and culture shock collide. The series stars Michelle Pfeiffer as matriarch Stacy Clyburn alongside Kurt Russell, Patrick J. Adam...