David Sims

6 days ago | theatlantic.com | David Sims

One of the rarest and most exhilarating types of horror films is what I call the switch-flip, in which a straightforward drama or thriller transforms halfway through into a pure fright-fest. The original (and best) example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; Takashi Miike’s Audition also stands out, as does Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, which sees a pair of fugitive bank robbers suddenly trapped in a saloon full of vampires.

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | David Sims

The director Alex Garland’s 2024 film, Civil War, was gritty, realistic, and often horrifying to watch, but it was fundamentally a flight of fantasy. One could debate just how fanciful its near-future depiction of America going to war with itself over a president who refused to leave office was, but for all that movie’s intense effort to depict combat realistically, Garland was only imagining the reasons for it.

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | David Sims

The best-selling video game of all time is magical in a way the film doesn’t capture. The first time I booted up the video game Minecraft, in 2011, it was still in its beta-testing infancy—just a hint of the multimedia, kid-friendly powerhouse it’d one day become. I tooled around with total ineptitude in the pixelated forest environment that my avatar had been dumped into, until the sun set and a zombie ate me.

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | David Sims

On the first episode of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Netflix’s new talk show, the comedian gathered a panel of 11 actors who have played Willy Loman, the tragic protagonist of the classic play Death of a Salesman. He lobbed queries at the group, which included recognizable stars (among them Christopher Lloyd) and fresh-faced students, asking them to answer in character—but not about their performances or the play itself.

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | David Sims

Medical dramas are like the old aphorism about pizza and sex: Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. Since the glory days of ER faded in the late ’90s, there have been plenty of TV series of varying quality set in hospitals. But the best ones have always taken a flashier storytelling approach: the elaborate mystery-solving of House, the soapy romance antics of Grey’s Anatomy, the early-20th-century grotesqueries of The Knick.