Radhika Menon

Spoilers below.
HBO’s House of the Dragon concluded its second season on Sunday with little bloodshed (except, of course, for the innocents in Sharp Point that Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) obliterated). Despite the fan speculation and hype, there was no big battle scene in the finale—a twist that left some viewers disappointed. Director Geeta Vasant Patel doesn’t typically read those types of reactions, though. “I obviously can’t give them something that’s not on the page, so I think that’s why I p...

You’ve probably seen it on TikTok by now: An image of a blonde woman donning a vermilion-colored floor-length dress with a matching sheer shawl scrunched at her neck, the two ends falling gracefully behind her and over both shoulders. In a separate shot, two women are descending a staircase, one sporting a casually open-draped scarf across her chest and shoulders. Then there's another woman's head, hovering over the photos, offeri...

Minor spoilers for Bridgerton season 3 below.
Dearest gentle readers, it’s time to return to the ‘ton for the latest social season. But while season 3 of Bridgerton will focus on Penelope Featherington’s secret crush on her best friend Colin Bridgerton and her quest for a husband, the scene stealer this (and every) season is Golda Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte. Stern, intimidating, and often bored by the pomp and circumstance of a woman’s debut, Charlotte is ultimately responsible for making or...

Spoilers below for The Sympathizer.
“In America, it’s called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, it’s called the American War,” reads an opening title card on the first episode of HBO’s new limited series The Sympathizer. It’s an immediate reminder to Western audiences of the perspectives on global conflicts outside of their own, and teases that this series, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, will challenge that long-held American (and Hollywood) mythology. Set just prio...

Megan Suri is cagey about revealing her current favorite movies. She’s comfortable naming childhood go-tos, like Shrek, and rattles off the Bollywood classics Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Mohabbatein, but as we talk over coffee on a rainy LA afternoon, she’s invested in keeping some things for herself. “[That’s a] vulnerable thing,” she says, choosing not to name any one title in particular. “That’s letting people into who you really are.”

Motherhood is the central thread in Expats, the new Prime Video series helmed by Lulu Wang (The Farewell) and based on the novel by Janice Y.K. Lee. Whether characters are already moms, want to become moms, take care of other people’s children, or reject the title entirely, the series is laser-focused on how this sometimes fraught identity shapes womanhood by following three American women in Hong Kong after an incident that irrevocably changes them all.
When Margar...

When you first catch a glimpse of Avantika in the official Mean Girls trailer, it’s impossible to look away. Her long black curls, tall stature, and brown skin stand out amongst a sea of blonde, but it’s not just her beauty that commands attention: near the end of the teaser, she delivers her first lines as Karen, one of the “Plastics” in Regina George’s gang.

I was 29 when I got the sex talk for the first time. My mom sat at one end of the couch looking at her phone while I sat in the opposite corner scrolling through mine, a shared blanket between us. Suddenly she interrogated me, glasses perched at the tip of her nose. “Is Anil* coming to Saugatuck with you?”
It was the week before Valentine’s Day and I planned a getaway to the west side of Michigan with my new boyfriend, whom I started dating just four months...

The third installment of Deepa Mehta’s elemental film trilogy, 2005’s Water, opens with a verse from the Laws of Manu of the Dharmashastras, a sacred Hindu text. “A widow should be long suffering until death, self-restrained and chaste. A virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes to heaven. A woman who is unfaithful to her husband is reborn in the womb of a jackal,” the text reads on screen.
What follows is a harrowing tale of a young girl, first forced into child marria...

When Shantaram’s Lin Ford (Charlie Hunnam) makes his way to India after escaping from an Australian prison in broad daylight, the first thing he notices is how it smells. “It was the smell of hope,” Hunnam drawls, setting up Lin’s journey to redemption on the streets of 1980s Mumbai.

Cristina Spiridakis and Courtney Wheeler knew exactly what the Original Beef of Chicagoland uniform needed to look like: white shirt, black pants, and comfortable shoes. “That’s a real thing we saw in kitchens,” Spiridakis said. “It’s not a concept we invented.” For FX on Hulu’s word-of-mouth hit The Bear, which follows the kitchen staff of an Italian beef joint rocked by tragedy, the costume-design duo (Spiridakis designed for the pilot and Wheeler took on episodes two through eight) toured ...

Spoilers below.
Netflix’s One Day is the second adaptation of the 2009 David Nicholls novel of the same name, this time in the form of a limited series starring Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall. Over 14 half-hour episodes, the series charts the friendship and underlying romance between best friends Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew over 20 years, and is by and large a much richer and more engrossing version of the story than the 2011 film that starred Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.

Minor spoilers below.
In the new Hulu limited series Tiny Beautiful Things, Clare (played by Kathryn Hahn) is a mess, coping with the fallout of her decisions. Our first introduction to her is while she’s wasted in the back of an Uber on her way to break into the home her husband has exiled her from. Suddenly homeless, Clare camps out at her hospice care job where she is routinely reprimanded for bad behavior; she makes impulse romantic decisions; and she’s still carrying the festering grief ...

In March 2005, ABC premiered a medical procedural as a midseason replacement for “Boston Legal.” It featured no huge names and wasn’t helmed by an auteur writer: “Grey’s Anatomy” came out of nowhere to become a primetime phenomenon. The series about a group of surgical interns learning their craft, falling in and out of love, and working at a hospital that is a hotbed for large-scale crises has been on the air for 19 seasons and i...

The “Grey” in Grey’s Anatomy officially hung up her scrubs. After 19 seasons, Ellen Pompeo exited the series that shot her to stardom and made her one of the highest-paid TV actresses, where she played the titular “dark and twisty” surgical intern turned Chief of Surgery Meredith Grey. Pompeo’s Meredith has anchored the long-running ABC drama through love triangles, major catastrophes, and a revolving door of cast members. Meredith is literally the voice of the show, with a voice-over that gu...