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I’m Thinking of Ending Things is acclaimed writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s first film since 2015’s Oscar-nominated stop-motion romance Anomalisa. Certainly fans of his earlier work like Synecdoche, New York; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Adaptation; and Being John Malkovich have been eagerly anticipating his return. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which landed on Netflix on Friday, plays around with many familiar Kaufman concepts like dual identities, dream-like realities, and frustrated, lonely men and the women they hope will save them. But even though one would never call any one of Kaufman’s films simple or direct, I’m Thinking of Ending Things might be his most purposefully inscrutable work. Thankfully, there’s help in the form of the novel that the film is based on. Iain Reid’s novel of the same name—though plenty complicated in its own right—clarifies the central premise of Kaufman’s adaptation and illuminates its abstract ending. What follows is an attempt to unpack Kaufman’s film with the help of both Reid’s book and one very famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Spoilers, obviously, to follow.

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Scorsese’s and Tarantino’s movies have subtle things to say about how much we should mourn the kind of men onscreen. Will it be enough to win one of them best picture?

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After four decades, Star Wars is drawing to its epic conclusion. Lev Grossman goes behind the scenes with director J.J. Abrams and the cast for the inside scoop on The Rise of Skywalker. With exclusive photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

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The conclusion of this Breaking Bad spin-off would feel like the end of an era for the network.

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To paraphrase veteran television critic Alan Sepinwall, TV’s greatest strength is time. Novels end, movies elbow their way through an awards season or two, but television keeps going, year in and year out, pacing its story to match the slow unspooling of our own lives. This romantic notion is a little less true in the mushrooming of Peak TV, where time is often measured in seasons instead of episodes—and in an era of film franchising so extensive that the movies, too, become a place to visit the worlds and the characters you love. But the sheer pleasure of watching Season 4 of Better Call Saul is a reminder that the maxim is still true, even if much of the television industry seems to have moved on from the model of telling an ongoing story in hour-long increments. The events of Better Call Saul are set slightly before those of its predecessor, Breaking Bad, placing this season’s sepia tones and flip phones in 2004 and 2005. It’s an era that contains very little to be nostalgic about, and yet in the hands of show-runners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, New Mexico’s harsh, flat landscapes are strangely welcoming. Like the desert it’s shot in, Better Call Saul is a show that knows how to make emptiness staggeringly dramatic. Somehow the show is both boring and utterly sad, like the morning-after pall following a night of carousing. The hangover is not from alcohol; it’s the after-effects of being intoxicated on optimism.

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Radcliffe stars opposite Paul Dano in easily one of the most bizarre films the Sundance Film Festival has ever seen.

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As she put it in Wishful Drinking: “I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”

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