Marya E. Gates

Every episode of “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” is crafted with such precision and care that even a brief visit to its world proves itself to be a rich and rewarding experience.

Ultimately, “Willow” is an underdeveloped legacy sequel that somehow stretches the source material to its breaking point, while never reaching the same heights of good old-fashioned fun that a fantasy epic should have at its heart. By chopping up the story into tedious, overlong episodes, the magic has been bleached from its bones, leaving behind a rotting corpse that resembles its inspiration on the surface only.

Nothing remotely insightful has been said about the rich other than they’re terrible to the planet and to each other. At this point, it seems the show is mostly just interested in reveling in the spoils of the rich (there’s a particularly gorgeous villa featured in one episode) and that’s it.

Although the plot easily becomes mawkish, there is an intelligence and veracity wrapped within the show’s sleek and cozy shell.

Overall, this season of “Documentary Now!” is not only a loving, yet playful tribute to the documentaries of yore, it also reminded me why I love documentary cinema so much. The format of interrogating life through probing questions, through sifted memory, and through real-time recording is enthralling and can make the most ordinary subjects extraordinary. It can also be emotionally manipulative trash, which this season also reminds its viewers.

Swank and Dove are well worth watching, however, despite its good intentions, the first two episodes reveal “Alaska Daily” to be yet another run-of-the-mill drama.

Many of these actresses are doing the best they can with the material and deserve another swing, but as it stands now the show is no home run.

Filled with cheap emotions, faux progressivism, and a story that is somehow both alarmingly thin and endlessly complicated, “Paper Girls” is full of wasted potential.

[Ethan Hawke] expertly weaves footage from their films that, when paired with the memoir audio, takes on autobiographical layers, unearthing them like an archaeologist finding these layers hidden in plain sight. ... While the doc’s exploration of Newman’s superstardom in the 1960s is strong, Hawke’s careful examination of how motherhood affected Woodward’s stardom is raw and powerful.

While “The Summer I Turned Pretty” doesn’t exactly reinvent the breezy teen summer series, it’s a bit like an overly sweet icy pop. Not very nutritious, messy af, but fun while it lasts.

There is a sweetness here and naiveté. Falcone’s heart is clearly in the right place, but all his goodwill is undone by a narrative that is both too simple and overly convoluted, underdeveloped characters, and chintzy production design.

There’s a lot of pressure for a final season to wrap everything up in a manner that feels like a comprehensive story. Thankfully, “Love, Victor” does just that.

“Hacks” aims to examine the brutal side of the entertainment world it inhabits but fails to fully commit to a deeper criticism of it. Although there is still a real pleasure in seeing an actress as accomplished as Jean Smart getting a meaty role, this latest season of “Hacks” does not live up to the bar set by its superior debut season.

Too many threads are left unexplored to make this new season of “Russian Doll” as wholly satisfying as its dazzling debut. However, its exploration of how fruitless “what if” thinking is and the importance of taking agency in your own life despite your generational baggage builds wonderfully on the themes explored in the first season.

“Life & Beth” is clearly a very personal story for Schumer, but by shifting between workplace comedy, rom-com, and late-coming-of-age dramedy, it never quite focuses on how it wants to be what it wants to be. Despite its unfocused format, it is compulsively watchable and there is an offbeat charm to the whole thing that is hard to resist.

If it would just stop trying so hard to prove that it’s not like other girls, “Dollface” could be a fun, somewhat escapist show about the emotional growth of four relatively privileged Los Angeleno women who find strength in each other. Instead, it’s emblematic of every aspect of faux feminist girl power that it thinks it’s different from.

With its dark humor and excellent execution, “The House” offers a striking showcase for the singular talents of its directors and the limitless possibilities of stop motion animation.

With its ten-episode first season, “Harlem” manages to be both a breezy good time for those looking for some romance this holiday season and also a complex character study of four modern Black women chasing their dreams in the city that never sleeps.

While ‘Yellowjackets’ features strong performances from its leads and poses intriguing questions about human nature pushed to extremes, ultimately it feels crowded with too many plot points and characters. I’m hooked enough to want to find out what happens to them all in the latter half of the season, but I can’t help but think it would be stronger if the cast were pruned by half.

The cardinal sin of a mystery is to be not interesting enough to keep people wondering what’s going to happen next. You also have to be rooted in the struggles of these characters enough to care who is torturing them. Unfortunately, that’s the biggest problem with ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ the show: the only motivation for the audience to care who knows what these teens did last summer is so the show will finally end.

Like the pussy hat-wearing binders full of women, this brand of feminism feels woefully out of touch and in deep need of a crash course in intersectionality.

DuVernay and Kaepernick have crafted a hybrid docudrama limited series that is both personal and universal, educational and raw. It gets at the heart of how the general and the specific, family and country, obstacles and accomplishments all work together as the soil in which a person grows into themselves.

Tightly written and expertly cast, “The Chair” deftly weaves absurdist comedy gold from what happens when a calling and a profession morphs into an industry where neither progress nor passion can blossom.

Despite its game cast, some unique imagery, and plenty of gore, we’ve seen this story before and done better.

This latest season of “Modern Love” leaves its actors stranded in a barren wasteland bereft of anything remotely true.

Although we see how even upper-crust girls were stuck in gilt cages, the story never quite addresses this classicism and its characters’ privilege in a way that grocks with the contemporary feminist movement. So while the show is beautifully made, its message feels a few decades too late.