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It’s understandable to feel resentful of the abrupt denial of closure. It’s also the point.

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When the world ends in the early autumn of 2003, Bill (Nick Offerman) feels like a man whose moment has finally come. He’s been preparing for this moment (though we’ll later learn he prefers the word “survivalist” to “prepper”). He has a bunker full of guns, security cameras trained on all corners of his property (a lovely two-story house not far from Boston), and all the supplies he needs to get by. Bill knows just what to do. When the electricity gives out at the power station, his first reaction isn’t “Oh shit!” but “That was fast.” Then he takes the necessary steps to keep the power running. Bill was made for these times.

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A critical look back at the iconic sitcom.

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There’s still a whole lot of TBD ahead, but also some definitive promise of great things to come.

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Turns out the plot of Christopher Nolan’s new movie is also a mystery to people who have seen it. The plot of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has been one of 2020’s most intriguing mysteries. But with the film making its belated arrival on U.S. shores this week, it’s one that has gone unresolved: Turns out the plot of Tenet is also a mystery to people who have seen Tenet. Thanks to frenetic cinematography, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it editing, and a reliance on verbal exposition that’s marred by the movie’s muffled sound mix, even those who like the film have to admit they have no idea what’s going on half the time. So as a helpful reference for viewers looking to make sense of what they just saw (plus people who don’t feel comfortable braving a multiplex just yet but are still curious), I’ve created this beat-by-beat explanation of exactly what happens in Tenet. This is not an easy task if you’ve seen the film just once, and I’m grateful to all the theorists over at Reddit for their diagrams and summaries. (Note: Because this movie does silly stuff like call its main character “the Protagonist,” I’ll be avoiding character names altogether.)

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A list of the best new streaming movies and TV shows available on your favorite platforms, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, and Hulu. This post is updated several times a month.

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Jason Mitchell and Hong Chau guest star in a standout episode that shifts the focus away from the series’ leads.

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No one could yell quite like George’s dad did on Seinfeld.

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A look back at a genre that has inspired a century of cinema.

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Early in development, studio executives wondered: Does Todd Phillips’s movie even need to be about the Batman villain?

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Whether you’re a new listener or are looking for your next obsession, here are ones to entertain you, edify you, or help you understand the medium.

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The origin story of comic books isn’t flashy. No radioactive spider bite, atomic explosion, or shadowy experiment granted the medium the sort of ability that would have allowed it to arrive on early-20th-century drugstore racks as glossy, fully formed vehicles for sophisticated entertainment. Rather, it took a steady progression over the course of more than 75 years for the form to fully understand, and then harness, its powers. When the first comics arrived on newsstands in the early 1930s, they were a cynical attempt to put old wine in new bottles by reprinting popular newspaper comic strips. Cheaply printed and barely edited, those pamphlets were not what a critic at the time would have called high art. Yet today, the medium is flourishing in ways its ancestors could never have imagined. From floppy single issues of superhero sagas to hefty graphic novels, harrowing comic-book memoirs to YA fare about queer adventurers, readers can tap into a dizzying array of what the great cartoonist Will Eisner famously termed “sequential art.” And, as evidenced by the sheer number of adaptations in film, television, and even on the Broadway stage, the rest of the entertainment industry has grown wise to what fans have long known: There’s a special alchemy that comes when you tell a story with pictures. Printed images — and the comic book medium’s unique presentation of them — are at the heart of this feature. We have set out to trace the evolution of American comics by looking at 100 pages that altered the course of the field’s history. We chose to focus on individual pages rather than complete works, single panels, or specific narrative moments because the page is the fundamental unit of a comic book. It is where multiple images can allow your eye to play around in time and space simultaneously, or where a single, full-page image can instantly sear itself into your brain. If there are words, they become elements of the image itself, thanks to the carefully chosen economy of the writer and the thoughtful graphic design of the letterer. In the best pages, one is torn between staring endlessly at what’s in front of you or excitedly turning to the next one to see where the story is going. When comics have moved in new directions, the pivot points come in a page. To assemble our list of 100, we assembled a brain trust of comics professionals, critics, historians, and journalists. Our criteria were as follows: A page had to have either changed the way creators approach making comics, or it had to expertly distill a change that had just begun. In some cases, there were multiple pages that could be used to represent a particular innovation; we’ve noted those instances. We didn’t necessarily pick the 100 best pages — there are many amazing specimens we didn’t include because they didn’t have a significant influence on the craft of comics. These are also not the only 100 pages that have shaped comic books, but each, in its own way, has had a profound impact on the form as we know it. And, this being comics, we had to get a little nitpicky: We’re only dealing with comics first published by North American publishing houses, and we’re not including newspaper comic strips, webcomics, or reprints thereof.

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