movie review the lost city

The Lost City

“The Lost City” isn’t an especially unique film; its premise draws on “ Romancing the Stone ” and countless other adventure movies. Its punchlines are recognizable from a distance as the volcano dominating the remote island where most of the story takes place. This is a movie you can get a clear sense of from its opening moments, every beat clearly telegraphed.

There is, however, a significant amount of comfort and delight in all this familiarity. Directors and co-writers Adam and Aaron Nee understand exactly what their audience wants—much like a good romance novelist might—and deliver an undeniably charming (and refreshingly IP-free) romantic romp. This is a movie you watch in the theater, with popcorn, then again and again on streaming, with a glass of wine.

Loretta Sage ( Sandra Bullock ) is a burnt-out romance writer whose grief after the loss of her husband threatens to derail her career. Her disdain for her books is only matched by her dislike of their cover model, Alan ( Channing Tatum ), a seemingly dim beefcake who indulges her readers at signing events.

After an event promoting her latest book, Loretta is abducted by explorer/rich guy Abigail (it’s a gender-neutral name, apparently) Fairfax, played by Daniel Radcliffe . Fairfax knows that the lost city from Loretta’s book is real, and he wants her to translate some ancient writing that leads to a treasure before a volcano erupts and covers the whole thing. Alan mounts an ill-advised expedition to save Loretta, with help from his meditation guru, Jack ( Brad Pitt ), and Loretta’s beleaguered editor Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

Loretta and Alan’s eventual romance is unavoidable, but “The Lost City” does a great job exploring the mounting chemistry between Bullock and Tatum’s characters. In particular, the movie highlights Alan’s emotional intelligence and unwavering support. He may be the kind of guy who refers to Loretta as a “human mummy,” but he also knows she gets cranky without snacks, and that she could use a slightly more sensible pair of shoes traversing all that rocky terrain. Like many a beloved romantic hero, Alan is not only a gorgeous man, he’s a man who cares .

Tatum is great casting for a role like this on several levels; not only does he look like he belongs on the cover of a romance paperback, he’s also an actor who understands his own appeal and has proven time and again that he isn’t afraid to play it for laughs. Bullock is also more than happy to play into her character’s physical awkwardness and eventual shedding of her prickly exterior—it’s not exactly unfamiliar territory for her, either. Together, the pair exude fun and a sense of affection that’s easy to get caught up in.

Other members of the supporting cast, particularly a very welcome Patti Harrison as Loretta’s hysterically self-involved social media manager, add bright, bizarre punches of humor to a script that otherwise plays it by the numbers (oddly, this isn’t a criticism, “The Lost City” is working with an effective formula). Radcliffe is the only element of the movie that doesn’t work quite as well as the rest. His character is the one area where the film tries to change up established archetypes, and the result is that he feels out of place in a story where everyone else comfortably fits into their roles.

“The Lost City” may get dinged by some for being formulaic and silly, but it does many things well that are notable. It’s bright, both visually and atmospherically. It’s an original story, told by filmmakers who get what kind of movie this is. Most importantly, its central relationship displays a real understanding of the emotional sensitivity and vulnerability that make romance attractive as a genre. Ultimately, “The Lost City” is interested in hitting viewers’ expectations head on. It does so on a level that may seem obvious, but is done with an amount of care that’s sure to hold up to repeat viewings.

This review was filed from the SXSW Film Festival. The film opens on March 25th.

Abby Olcese

Abby Olcese is a film critic and writer based in Kansas City, where she is the film editor for The Pitch Magazine. Abby is a regular contributor to RogerEbert.com, Sojourners Magazine and Think Christian, where she writes about the intersection of popular culture and spirituality.

Sandra Bullock as Loretta Sage
Channing Tatum as Alan
Daniel Radcliffe as Fairfax
Brad Pitt as
Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Beth
Patti Harrison as
Oscar Nunez as
Raymond Lee as Officer Gomez
Thomas Forbes-Johnson as Julian
Craig Alpert

Cinematographer

Jonathan Sela
Pinar Toprak

Writer (story by)

Seth Gordon

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The Lost City Reviews

For a certain kind of mood, one filled with patience, forgiveness and the need to pass a few hours of time, The Lost City might almost be what the doctor ordered.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.75/5 | Oct 10, 2023

The Lost City is the perfect palate cleanser for those who are looking for a fresh twist on the comedy genre.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Sep 26, 2023

Laughing, smiling, & losing my shit! Hands down one of the best comedies I’ve seen in awhile. I need more Channing Tatum & Sandra Bullock now! + Brad Pitt was amazing! This is the perfect Adventure film for all!

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Despite billing itself as a return to the entertaining adventure-romance movies of the ’80s (it’s impossible not to think of Romancing the Stone), The Lost City was afraid to lose itself in eccentricity.

The Lost City is one of this year's surprises, managing to vary the well-known formulas of the genre in a creative, fun manner (...) a thematically rich ending compensates for any cliches. Definitely, a family viewing party recommendation.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 23, 2023

The Lost City is every bit the romantic adventure we didn’t know we needed and then some. It’s fun and hilarious, and its on-the-nose praise of the romance genre is something we’ll never tire of exploring.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2023

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum get blindsided by a wonky and aimless script better suited for the balls-to-the-wall performances of its side characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 21, 2023

Sandra Bullock’s return to light-hearted comedy is welcome. While not to be taken too seriously the film does throw in a few heartfelt moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 14, 2023

Ultimately, the The Lost City is relatively hollow with a somewhat uncharacteristic denouement that connects back to Bullock’s late husband and her inability to let him go.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 25, 2022

...the breezy chemistry with Sandra Bullock renders this a painless hijinx...

Full Review | Dec 22, 2022

The Lost City is at its best when it is light and silly, smoothing over some of the rougher edges where its jokes don't always land.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 23, 2022

The Lost City is a terrific throwback to studio romcoms of the 90s and 00s, with two true-blue movie star performances from Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

A story about the vicarious pleasures of romance fiction, and about the folly of either dismissing them as stupid or of taking them too seriously … The obviousness of the genre machinery isn’t really a flaw – it’s part of the fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 29, 2022

[Channing Tatum's] energetic and eager to please — virtues he shares with the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 24, 2022

The sort of bubbly, unchallenging studio plaything that some of us may receive gratefully in these harrowed times.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 24, 2022

Bullock is a solid anchor, Radcliffe gets a couple of humorous lines, and Tatum does his best. But it’s Pitt who steals the show. So much so that the drop-off is pretty significant whenever he’s not on screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2022

A word comes to mind that isn’t often used when describing movies lately. Thinking, thinking … oh, right! The word is “fun.” “The Lost City” is fun.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 15, 2022

An unofficial remake of 'Romancing the Stone' with a big movie star cameo. Dull, obvious and very familiar with a script that just pokes along.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 14, 2022

There are five writers sharing screenplay credit, but for me the writing of Bullock's character was the weakest element.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 9, 2022

The breezy pace is appreciated, but in two years, viewers won't recall any discernible differences between this, Uncharted, and Jungle Cruise.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 31, 2022

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‘The Lost City’ Review: Raiders of the 1980s Blockbusters

Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and a vamping Brad Pitt run around in a romantic adventure that you have seen before and will see again.

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By Manohla Dargis

If you don’t have a few hours to watch the cheerfully dumb comedy “The Lost City,” just stare at the poster. Almost everything you need to know about this nonsensical lark is crammed into the one sheet: the stars, the tropical location, the Bruckheimer-esque fireball. The poster is selling sex and violence and obvious laughs, with Sandra Bullock’s sequined purple onesie doing the heavy comic lifting. And while she and Channing Tatum are the headliners, the studio has hedged its bets by also cramming in a leering goat and a Fabio-ed Brad Pitt.

The goat and Pitt are among the high points of the movie, a high-concept romp about a widowed writer, Loretta Sage (Bullock), making a tortuous re-entrance into the world. A successful romance novelist, Loretta writes books featuring a hunky dreamboat and throbbing verbs. For strained reasons, she is kidnapped while on a promo tour with the cover model for her books, Alan (Tatum). He tries to rescue her and soon they’re joking through a jungle adventure featuring a lost treasure, and a deranged rich villain (Daniel Radcliffe) and his minions. Bullets and jokes fly, not always hitting their targets.

That’s more or less the movie, which is basically a vehicle for Bullock to play her most enduring role: Sandra Bullock, your supremely likable BFF. Genuine yet packaged, challenged but unsinkable, the Bullock BFF has been a mainstay for decades. She’s endured rough patches, as in “Speed 2,” but has always bounced back, buoyed by a shrewdly deployed, indomitable persona that’s wholesome, sardonic and goofy, though not (usually) insultingly so. Although she can handle a range of genres, she excels at comedy partly because she can play off a wide range of performers: Like all BFFs, she makes a generous double act.

That said, it takes a while for Bullock and Tatum to find their groove, in part because he isn’t as comfortable in his lunkhead role as he needs to be. He’s playing a conventional sweet dope, a cliché role he handles fluidly when in Alan’s exaggerated cover-model drag, complete with flowing hair and peekaboo waxed chest. But he is less facile when his character comes off as impossibly stupid, moments he plays by affecting a bit of a Mark Wahlberg whiny singsong. Is it homage, coincidence — who knows? Whatever the case, Tatum seems happier when his character fares better too, allowing him and Bullock to settle into a breezy intimacy.

For the most part, “The Lost City” delivers exactly what it promises: A couple of highly polished avatars quipping and hitting their marks while occasionally being upstaged by their second bananas (Da’Vine Joy Randolph included). There are some accommodations to contemporary mores. Tatum bares more skin than Bullock does, flashing his sculpted hindquarters in a scene that, like the movie overall, isn’t as sharp or as funny as it should be. But while Loretta isn’t as helpless as she might have been back in the old studio days, this is still about a man rescuing a woman whose eye makeup never runs even when she does.

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‘The Lost City’ Review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum Are Cute Together in Guilty-Pleasure Treasure Movie

Flipping the gender roles slightly, this ‘Romancing the Stone’ redux suggests you can have your beefcake and do whatever you want with it.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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You know studio movies are in a rut when, amid endless Spider-Bat sequels, you find yourself longing for the likes of such escapist 1980s offerings as “Romancing the Stone” and “King Solomon’s Mines.” I can’t be the only one who’s been craving a good old-fashioned treasure hunt, where the leads throw sparks and the ladies’ makeup never smudges, no matter how close to the volcano they get. After a long stretch without such a big-screen Hollywood adventure movie (at least, not one without ties to a video game or theme park ride), “ The Lost City ” makes for welcome counter-programming.

The story was producer Seth Gordon’s idea, but credit siblings Adam and Aaron Nee (who tested the waters with their Mark Twain-inspired “Band of Robbers”) for sprucing up the formula, while Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum supply the chemistry. Bullock plays brainy romance novelist Loretta Sage, who’s lost her inspiration since the death of her husband, an archaeologist who might have been onto something. Her once-scorching potboilers barely simmer these days, and she’s seriously thinking of killing off Dash, the long-haired, Fabio-looking Lothario who graces the covers of all her books.

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She can hardly stand Alan (Tatum), the dum-dum male model who embodies Dash, dismissing him as a mouth-breathing “body wash commercial.” But Alan’s a hit with the ladies at book-signing events, and lucky for her, he sorta-kinda likes Loretta — enough to go traipsing halfway across the Atlantic after she’s kidnapped by a wealthy weirdo named Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe). A billionaire with an insecurity complex, Fairfax is convinced that Loretta knows the location of the Crown of Fire, a long-lost diamond headdress described in her latest book, and he flies her to a remote tropical island to help him find it. Maybe then Daddy will love him.

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Alan, who isn’t the brightest, has the wisdom to enlist an old acquaintance, lethal ex-Navy SEAL Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), who typically works solo. But Alan insists on tagging along, and together these two dreamy dudes follow the signal from Loretta’s watch to the middle of the Atlantic, where Abigail has located the “Lost City of D.” To Alan’s chagrin, Loretta seems a lot more interested in Jack once she’s rescued, although the adventure’s only just begun. (Pitt, who provides the kind of scene-stealing cameo Tatum did in last summer’s “Free Guy,” doesn’t stick around for long.)

Free from captivity but still stuck on the island, Loretta realizes that maybe she could figure out where the Crown of Fire is hidden. Pursued by Abigail’s henchmen, she and Alan make their way through the jungle, navigating nearly all the usual pitfalls of the genre — minus bone-in-the-nose natives. “The Lost City” evokes movies that can seem outrageously insensitive when revisited today, while avoiding the most wince-inducing clichés. One reason I’ve been craving a fresh “Romancing the Stone”-like movie is that I happened to revisit the original during the early days of COVID and winced at the overtly racist stereotypes (not to mention the unconvincing Mexico-as-South-America locations).

“The Lost City” was shot in the Dominican Republic, and though there’s a whole lot of CG involved, it’s still great to see movie stars running around real jungles, especially after being cooped up indoors for two years. Even at the movie’s masks-on SXSW Film Festival premiere, “The Lost City” was a breath of fresh air: the kind of breezy two-hour getaway that doesn’t take itself too seriously, delivering screwball banter between Bullock and Tatum — a guilty-pleasure treasure hunt that pretends to be more progressive than it really is by alternating between who’s saving whom.

Loretta Sage is no feminist icon — she runs around the island in high heels and a glittering fuchsia jumpsuit — but at least the movie lets her keep her clothes on, whereas Alan’s constantly losing his. Ditching the usual bimbo-in-peril routine of movies like “Six Days, Seven Nights,” the movie focuses more on Dash’s cleavage than it does hers, and there’s even a gratuitous leech-removal scene that reveals more of the actor than “Magic Mike” did. Tatum knows what his fans want, and so does Bullock, leaning into the kind of physical comedy that’s been her forte since “Miss Congeniality.” A bit in which she’s wheelbarrowed through the jungle while strapped to a chair, as pyrotechnics go off around her, revives the goofiness factor that’s been missing from CG-dominated action movies.

“The Lost City” won’t be nominated for any Oscars, but it repeats what Spielberg and Lucas did for “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” mining a century-old genre for inspiration and polishing those tropes for a new generation. A subplot involving Loretta’s publisher Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) makes room for a few people of color (including Oscar Nuñez as an offbeat accomplice), and it’s a nice surprise to see Radcliffe playing against type, even if the movie doesn’t quite know how to wrap up the supporting characters’ stories. (A bonus scene tucked into the end credits essentially invalidates one of the movie’s best gags.) The result can feel a little rickety in places, but the Nee brothers — who share screenplay credit with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox — have punched it up with off-color jokes, looped over moments when the characters’ mouths are off-camera. In this and myriad other ways, “The Lost City” proves they do in fact make ’em like they used to.

Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (Headliners), March 12, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 112 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation of a Fortis Films, 3dot Prods., Exhibit A production. Producers: Liza Chasin, Sandra Bullock, Seth Gordon. Executive producers: JJ Hook, Dana Fox, Julia Gunn, Margaret Chernin.
Crew: Directors: Adam Nee, Aaron Nee. Screenplay: Oren Uziel, Dana Fox, Adam Nee & Aaron Nee; story: Seth Gordon. Camera: Jonathan Sela. Editor: Craig Alpert. Music: Pinar Toprak.
With: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar Nuñez, Patti Harrison, Bowen Yang.

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User reviews

The Lost City

A reclusive romance novelist on a book tour with her cover model gets swept up in a kidnapping attempt that lands them both in a cutthroat jungle adventure. A reclusive romance novelist on a book tour with her cover model gets swept up in a kidnapping attempt that lands them both in a cutthroat jungle adventure. A reclusive romance novelist on a book tour with her cover model gets swept up in a kidnapping attempt that lands them both in a cutthroat jungle adventure.

Sandra Bullock
Channing Tatum
Daniel Radcliffe
1.1K User reviews
253 Critic reviews
60 Metascore
3 wins & 10 nominations

Top cast 37

Abigail Fairfax

Beth Hatten

Jack Trainer

Ray the Moderator

Fantasy Villain

Woman Singing in Village

Officer Sawyer

Officer Gomez

Limo Driver

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Ryan Reynolds was originally sought after for the lead male role, marking this a reunion with Sandra Bullock after The Proposal (2009) but a deal couldn't be reached.
Goofs After Loretta removes Alan's leeches, the wounds are immediately shown as dark circles. However, when leeches latch on they release an anti-coagulant to prevent blood clotting and make it easier to feed, so when a leech is removed, there would be profuse bleeding which would likely continue for hours.

Loretta : Why are you so handsome?

Jack Trainer : My father was a weatherman.

Crazy credits There is a short scene after the first part of the credits.
Connections Featured in Late Night with Seth Meyers: Holly Hunter/Patti Harrison/Catherine Cohen/Larnell Lewis (2022)
Soundtracks True Written by Gary Kemp Performed by Spandau Ballet Courtesy of Parlophone Records Limited By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing

User reviews 1.1K

Mar 24, 2022
How long is The Lost City? Powered by Alexa
March 25, 2022 (United States)
United States
Official Site
Official Site (Japan)
Thành Phố Mất Tích
Samana, Dominican Republic
Paramount Pictures
3dot productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$68,000,000 (estimated)
$105,344,029
$30,453,269
Mar 27, 2022
$192,907,684

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 52 minutes

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Pop Culture

'The Lost City' is silly, sexy, movie-star fun

Linda Holmes

There are so many Sandra Bullocks, and there are so many Channing Tatums.

Putting these two in a movie together could give you the gritty and dramatic, the glamorous, or the swooning and romantic version of both. But happily, The Lost City gives you their silly romantic-comedy version. I must admit: In both cases, I think it's my favorite.

Rom-com movies have evolved. But they still need these 3 simple elements

Bullock plays Loretta, who started out as an anthropologist and, after the death of her husband and collaborator, used that knowledge to write a hugely popular series of adventure romance novels featuring a hero named Dash. Tatum plays Alan, the cover model who represents Dash, whose Fabio-ish flowing locks have made him even more popular with Loretta's fans than she is. Loretta is ambivalent as she debuts her latest novel; she's in a rut with these characters, and to the dismay of her editor, Beth (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), she's thinking about just closing down the whole franchise. Among other things, she's sick of being forced to promote her books alongside Alan, whom she considers vain and dopey.

Loretta is in the middle of blowing up her book tour when she is grabbed by a couple of dudes who work for a rich jerk named Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), whose reason for kidnapping Loretta relates to her academic work rather than her novels. When Alan — who does like Loretta, even though she doesn't like him at all — realizes she's in trouble, he decides to try to rescue her. So it turns into an adventure-romcom, and of course they learn to like each other, and comedy ensues.

The obvious reference here is Romancing the Stone , the 1984 film in which Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist who gets swept up in an adventure with Michael Douglas' on-the-nose rugged adventure hero. But this is really an inversion of that idea, given that Alan is very much not Dash, and in a very funny sequence I really don't want to spoil, you get a chance to see him alongside a guy who is more like Dash, and the two could not be more different.

There's not much to this movie from a plot perspective, and few of the story beats are going to surprise anybody or say anything. (Although I do like the way that what threatens early on to become a distasteful caricature of romance writing gets some reconsideration as the film goes along.) The draw in The Lost City is simply the fabulous time everybody seems to be having, particularly Bullock and Tatum, who are delightful together, and both of whom capitalize very well on their skills in physical comedy.

Channing Tatum is one of the best of his generation at understanding his physical self and using it in interesting ways, from the dancing in Step Up and Magic Mike, to the unexpected action scenes in Haywire, to the stillness of the athlete he played in Foxcatcher, to his talent in comedy. He has not only a dancer's understanding of dance itself, but a dancer's understanding of his body and how it plays in different settings. Here, he takes a character who is introduced as a perfect specimen and finds the guy's inner doofus. And it's not just through pratfalls — it's through small, smart choices (how he runs, how he crouches, how he stands, what he looks like when he's scared) that strip away cover-model swagger and emphasize that an action hero is not just a guy who goes to the gym.

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This kind of being funny is also one of Sandra Bullock's strengths. She's always been good in comedies and in action movies with comedy elements, like Speed , in part because she understands not only how to deliver jokes, but how to look funny. Most of Miss Congeniality is about this; she is why it works. And there's a moment in While You Were Sleeping in which the great Jason Bernard, playing Bullock's boss, gives her a blunt assessment of her standing as the fake fiancée of a man in a coma, and she makes what might be the most inspired "yikes" face of the '90s. When people think of physical comedy, maybe it's more traditional to mean broad and big sequences, but these are both actors whose talent in comedy is closely connected with how well they understand what looks funny.

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Sandra bullock on playing an ex-con trying to reenter society after 20 years.

They're also both very good at turning on a dime; there's a scene in which they do get to dance together (if you're going to be in a romantic comedy with Channing Tatum, you should certainly get to dance with him), and as silly as the rest of the movie is, that scene is pretty sexy. And refreshingly, even though there's more than 15 years between Bullock and Tatum, nobody talks about it — just like they rarely talk about it when men in romantic films are significantly older than the women they played opposite.

The Lost City isn't up there with the brilliantly silly Paul Feig action comedies that it seems to be inspired by, like Spy and The Heat . It doesn't have the joke density they do, nor the multiplicity of inspired supporting performances. (It's possible the writing got a little scattershot — the screenplay is credited to the directors Adam and Aaron Nee, plus Dana Fox and Oren Uziel, from a story by Seth Gordon. The shaggy script may have had too many cooks.) And despite the fact that Loretta talks (and the movie talks) about how "artifact near a volcano" stories about white "adventurers" are adjacent to colonization, the fact remains that the movie still is calling on a lot of those tropes, even as it tries to critique them a bit.

Still, as a broadly goofy comedy featuring two enormously charismatic leads who are perfectly suited to each other, it scratches a particular itch very, very effectively.

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Entertainment

The Lost City finally fills in the very specific movie gap that The Mummy left behind

Channing Tatum, Sandra Bullock, and Daniel Radcliffe bring back the high-energy, high-stakes action-romance

by Rafael Motamayor

Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock look up with a waterfall behind them in the jungle in The Lost City

This review comes out of the 2022 media expo SXSW, where Polygon sent writers to look at the next wave of upcoming releases.

The adventure-romance genre has stood the test of time for a reason. At its best, it offers exotic, remote locations that don’t often show up in movies; a beautiful couple with good chemistry; and a compelling adventure with danger, a love story, and usually a solid sense of humor. After 1951’s The African Queen set the standard for adventure-romances by uniting its era’s biggest stars on a high-stakes trip, and 1984’s Romancing the Stone parlayed the same concept into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, many filmmakers have tried to replicate the formula. But they’ve found it surprisingly difficult to do well.

While the plot of The Lost City makes it sound notably similar to Romancing the Stone , it’s actually most successful as a successor to The Mummy , a film that found the comedy in the adventure-romance genre and inspired many competitors that failed to live up to it. The Lost City doesn’t have the most exciting or novel plot, and it doesn’t push action filmmaking forward. But it does feature two of the moment’s greatest movie stars coming in at the top of their rom-com game, mixing adventure and love. Filmmaking brothers Aaron Nee and Adam Nee ( The Last Romantic , Band of Robbers ) avoid many of the stereotypes these movies normally fall into, and along the way, they remind viewers that Channing Tatum is a perfect himbo, and Sandra Bullock is a long-standing rom-com queen.

Channing Tatum and Brad Pitt wheel Sandra Bullock away from a huge explosion in a wheelbarrow in The Lost City

Bullock stars as Loretta Sage, a former archaeologist who has discovered that people aren’t really interested in books about lost civilizations, but they will certainly read a romance novel featuring a hot adventurer going to faraway places. She’s channeled her knowledge into writing those novels, but after years of filling books with the same double-entendre jokes comparing lava flowing down a volcano to different fluids flowing down her fictional hero’s “volcano,” she’s become bitter and dissatisfied — especially over her sweet but dimwitted cover model Alan (Tatum), who seems to think he really is the Fabio-inspired star of her books.

After a string of bestsellers, Loretta wants nothing more than to stop writing novels, even if that means ruining her new book tour before it begins. She doesn’t much care about derailing it, since everyone seems to be there just to see Alan shirtless, not to hear about a book. But Loretta can’t drop her career so easily, because she gets abducted by Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), a rich guy who really wants her to know both that “Abigail” is a gender-neutral name, and that the lost city from Loretta’s new book is real and that it’s hiding an immense treasure. He wants her to translate some ancient writing and help him secure the treasure before a volcano eruption buries the whole thing. If he can use the discovery to finally get one up on his more successful brother, all the better.

Yes, the story is a not-so-hidden repeat of Romancing the Stone , with a novelist getting sucked into a treasure hunt in the Latin American jungle. But the cast makes The Lost City stand out. Bullock channels her Miss Congeniality comedic chops for a slapstick performance that shows she isn’t afraid of looking silly. Tatum shows why he’s one of this decade’s biggest movie stars: He excels at exploiting his looks and charisma for comedy. It’s worth watching the movie just to see him utterly fail at being an action hero, like when Loretta throws him a gun and he ducks instead of catching it.

Channing Tatum, in a frilly white shirt, points into the distance while standing with a white horse on a beach in The Lost City

Then there’s the scene-stealing supporting cast, including Brad Pitt channeling his cool, carefree character from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to play a true action-adventure hero with a magical head of hair. And of course, a good adventure film needs a good villain, and Radcliffe makes a welcome return to blockbusters with a performance that feels like he did a bump of Adderall in the bathroom before every scene.

There’s no question that the Nee brothers and their screenwriting partners Oren Uziel (of the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot ) and Dana Fox (a writer on Cruella ) consider the movie’s laughs more important than its big stunts. Taking some cues from The Mummy , they’ve clearly decided that they have a winning combination in a big, dumb action hero who looks just as cool beating up a bad guy as he does falling off a motorcycle like a doofus. And placing him next to a capable, smart woman who doesn’t really need saving can create some sparkling chemistry. Not since Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz has a movie like this exuded so much steamy hot chemistry. The Lost City gets a lot of mileage out of placing Bullock and Tatum in awkward but funny situations, as when she has to pull leeches off his butt.

As a treasure-hunting adventure film, like Jungle Cruise , National Treasure, or the recent Uncharted , The Lost City hits the usual notes: your standard puzzle-solving, your codexes, your crawling through very narrow cave openings, and so forth. But thankfully, the creators don’t try to cram in elaborate mechanisms that are hundreds of years old yet have never been found before, like Uncharted does . They also don’t go the Indiana Jones route, with artifacts that are actually magical.

Daniel Radcliffe in a white suit holds a cup of tea and stands over a desk in a tent in The Lost City

Instead, they offer up a grounded, clever roadmap to a supposed treasure that is simply blown out of proportion by unsuspecting white people who expect a big El Dorado-esque secret at the end of the journey. A big problem with adventure films like this is that they focus on stereotypes and on exoticizing other cultures until they’re unrecognizable. The Lost City dodges the issue by mostly ignoring the lore around the treasure in favor of the comedic hijinks between its leads, and by treating the local population with care. When Loretta and Alan arrive in a small town, there’s no special local festival with unusual traditions, no grand welcome for the white foreigners — just a town square where people hang out on a Saturday evening.

But while the filmmakers try to mitigate their use of a Latin American island as an exotic setting by having one of the henchmen be a local with a connection to the culture and the treasure, he’s somewhat left behind by the plot. And The Lost City does include one unfortunate stereotype: a sex-crazed Latin-lover character, who’s played for laughs without adding anything to the story.

In this and other ways, the team behind The Lost City isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel on the adventure-romance trope, so much as it’s trying to slightly update and revive a subgenre that’s faded into the background of cinema, along with theatrical rom-coms and big ensemble comedy movies. The Lost City is capable enough to step into the void and take advantage of the way films like The Mummy have become less common, but it isn’t so striking or memorable that it’s likely to usher in a new era of treasure-hunting capers. Still, Bullock and Tatum’s chemistry is a reminder of why this type of film used to occupy as much space as it did in theaters. It’s an old-school kind of screwball comedy, seemingly designed to ask a single question: Are filmgoers ready and excited for another Mummy yet?

The Lost City opens in theaters on March 24.

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‘The Lost City’ review: charming odd-couple comedy that’s surprisingly rare

Original characters in a blockbuster? And they aren't superheroes? Surely not

T he Lost City is a first-class adventure film of the type they don’t make much anymore. Sandra Bullock plays bored author Loretta, a woman who churns out novels full of excitement while her own life is devoid of it. Channing Tatum is Alan – a buff model found on the covers of Loretta’s books. Together they make a mismatched couple who get caught in a kidnap attempt that lands them in an enjoyable jungle romp. What makes this blockbuster special, though, is that neither of these characters are superheroes – or part of a massive franchise. Very un-2022.

At promotional readings, Alan is of more interest to Loretta’s fans than she is. After one particularly chaotic reading, the author is kidnapped by oddball billionaire Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe on deliciously creepy form) and taken to a tropical island. Abigail thinks Loretta can help him track down some treasure and more high-jinks ensue as Alan tries to save the day with the help of proper hero Jack (a scene-stealing turn from Brad Pitt). Charming yet dimwitted Alan and uptight Loretta must work together to escape Abigail and his henchmen. As you’d expect, things don’t go according to plan.

Both go on (slightly predictable) emotional journeys too. Alan is fed up with people thinking of him as a useless hunk – especially Loretta, who eventually learns to lighten up when the pair get to know each other. If it veers into cliché and relies on tropes from old movies shown on wet bank holiday weekends, that’s no huge problem. When you’ve got talent like this giving their all it’s hard not to have fun. Magic Mike superstar Tatum is always a treat, while Bullock still has the screen presence that made her a star in ‘90s hits such as Speed and Demolition Man . Da’Vine Joy Randolph (great in Dolemite Is My Name ) is a scream as Loretta’s publicist Beth, too.

The Lost City isn’t cutting-edge entertainment, but it is a decent action film boasting a great cast and some good jokes, without a superhero in sight. That alone is cause for recommendation.

Director: Aaron Nee, Adam Nee
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe
Release date: April 15

The Lost City review: A big screwball swing for old-school action-comedy

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are 'Lost' and on the loose in a breezy, patently ridiculous throwback to '80s romps.

Somewhere in the mists of time before IP and franchise, there used to be a lot more of a certain kind of sunny, modestly ambitious movie that might have been called a romp: blithe action comedies in which two pretty people fight and blunder and fall for each other, and maybe romance a few stones along the way.

Almost everything about The Lost City (in theaters March 25) feels familiar in that sense, and comforting, too: a cheerfully shambolic grab-bag of shenanigans and movie stars with enough screwball wit and self-awareness to drag it into 2022. It's also a fitting send-off for Sandra Bullock , who recently announced her retirement , or at least a furlough from acting, and was essentially forged in stuff like this. Here she's Loretta Sage, a woman who writes bestselling bodice-rippers she can barely stand; Channing Tatum is Dash, the genetically blessed himbo whose fame as the palomino-maned cover model for her novels have made the two of them synonymous, much to her chagrin.

Except his real name is actually Alan, and the hair, like his life skills, is largely an illusion. He's only ever really had to play the hero on embossed paperbacks, so when Loretta is plucked from a book-tour event by unknown assailants and kidnapped, he feels compelled to prove that he can be that guy in real life. And when her Apple Watch pings somewhere over the Atlantic, her panicked publicist, Beth (Da'vine Joy Randolph), agrees to let him go ahead, largely because he's the only one with anything resembling an action plan.

That plan pretty much begins and ends with texting Jack Trainer ( Brad Pitt ), a freelance mercenary he met once at a meditation retreat. Jack is everything Alan isn't: combat expert, casual intellectual, man of substance and advanced sleeper holds. Thankfully, he also accepts crypto, and it doesn't take them long to track Loretta down on the remote tropical island where the black-sheep son of a media mogul called Abigail Fairfax ("It's a gender-neutral name!") has taken her in the hopes of using her knowledge of ancient cuneiforms to track down an ancient treasure known as the Crown of Fire.

In other words, it's all ridiculous, and everyone here, including directing duo Adam and Aaron Nee ( Band of Robbers ) knows it. But Fairfax is played by Daniel Radcliffe, who is clearly having more fun than most actors recently conscripted to represent today's favored screen bogeyman, the feckless tech-bro villain (See also: Free Guy , Old Guard , Venom , The Matrix Revolutions ). His Abigail is a perfect twerp, the peevish flipside to Pitt's Most Interesting Man in the World shtick. Randolph's harried, brutally honest Beth and Patti Harrison, as a daffy social-media manager, also regularly manage to steal their scenes from the margins.

But nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on. She's a trademark Bullock heroine, forever vacillating between serene self-assurance and high anxiety; he's like a happy Labrador, winning hearts and minds while heedlessly crashing into things. Their rapport feels both meticulously market-tested and somehow gratifyingly natural, and strong enough too to withstand a careening, unabashedly cartoonish plot (penned by Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon) whose into-the-sunset endgame is already guaranteed. They're just here to play with wigs and passports and pratfalls and for two breezy, anesthetizing hours, make the world outside disappear. Grade: B

‘The Lost City’ Review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum’s Chemistry Carries Charming Jungle Comedy

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In Adam and Aaron Nee’s “ The Lost City ,” a wild, careening screwball comedy set in the jungle, the stars are on full display — and they need to be. See, the directing duo are following a similar roadmap used by “Romancing the Stone,” the Indiana Jones franchise, and Tomb Raider: colossal big-budget adventures dependent upon the stars who lead them as much as the exotic locations they call home. Here, a quartet of marquee names carry a knowingly pastiche romp whose lightweight charm somehow impedes its path to rom-com success.

You can’t totally blame the Nees for leaning heavily on their ensemble. In a slapdash comedy filled with big punchlines — and even bigger explosions — they’ve assembled a couple of the best comedic personalities available in Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum . The pair portray noted romance novelist Loretta Sage and her steamy cover model Alan as her franchise’s Fabio-inspired champion, Dash. After a string of best sellers, the jaded Loretta would rather her storybook career just end. But in this broad script built upon menacing henchmen, an evil filthy rich villain compensating for being the wrong son, and a mythical legend concerning a lost treasure, the story can never end, only (hopefully) reinvent itself.

But the Nees aren’t terribly interested in fixing what’s not broken, sometimes to their own detriment. Instead, they drudge out formulaic tools to craft new thrills to varying results. Five years ago, Loretta lost her archeologist husband, John. We never learn how he died, just the ways it has left her in stasis. Her publicist Beth (a thankless Da’Vine Joy Randolph) wants to revitalize the author’s once-sterling career by planning a major book tour. She hires Allison (Patti Harrison), a no-filter, crass social media specialist who thinks in Shawn Mendes hashtags to run her Twitter account. Those people, unfortunately, can’t cheer Loretta’s still-grieving heart. A grief she often throws toward Alan, who soaks in his status as hulk cover model and romance hero. In Loretta and Alan’s fraught dynamic, the Nees find treasures rich enough to support their hilarious, albeit overly familiar, adventure flick.

To kick off “The Lost City,” Loretta is kidnapped by the obscenely wealthy Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe in a welcomed return to blockbuster filmmaking). Think of him as a vicious John Hammond. He’s been hunting for the fabled crown of fire, held in the lost city of D, possibly located on a remote island with an active volcano in the middle of the Atlantic. And he believes Loretta is the only person alive who can translate the tattered parchment that might lead him to the treasure. Good mysteries revolve around hard-won clues (take “Indiana Jones” using a golden medallion for guidance), but “The Lost City” crafts simplistic puzzles. That flatness heaps greater pressures on the stars’ shoulders, a responsibility DP Jonathan Sela increases by relying on one-shots and standard coverage to place individual actors front and center (it’s very obvious whenever an extra is used for blocking, and it happens often).

The film crafts indelible moments through its bevy of unforgettable personalities. To track down Loretta, for instance, Alan calls former Navy SEAL and meditation partner Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt in a breezy role similar to “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). Both actors wield their onscreen personas to devastating effect: Pitt swings across the screen as the swooning action star, while Tatum continues a run he began in the “Jump Street” movies as the bumbling, muscle-bound heart-throb with a heart of gold. In a physically uproarious scene, Alan and Jack infiltrate Fairfax’s archeological dig to rescue Loretta. Pitt moves swiftly, easily disabling a cadre of brooding henchmen while Tatum plays Alan with slapstick appeal by taking crushing pratfalls and leaning into a knowing bodily awkwardness. Tatum has always been a physically aware actor, often downplaying his brawny exterior for laughs, and he’s never been better here, employing a nervous nimbleness and hesitant daintiness for precise gags.

Once sprung from the clutches of Fairfax, the novelist and cover model oscillate between open hostility and a wellspring of flirtation. See, Alan desperately wants to be Loretta’s knight in shining armor, to be as intelligent as her, for he to see him as more than a dumb cover model. But he is, in a brilliant reversal, often the damsel in distress. Seeing Tatum and Bullock prance around the jungle, the latter in a sequin purple jumpsuit designed by Marlene Stewart, as a well-calibrated double-act makes one wish they were together more often, especially as they play off each other like popping ping pong balls. Amid the expected off-color gags, the heart of the film asks us to see people as more than their exteriors suggest, and to learn to live and love again.

The jungle as a setting, which should be rife with dread, is a mere backdrop as unimaginative as a cheap romance novel. The henchmen, well, are henchmen. The villain, Fairfax, well, is a villain. Apart from a backstory involving him losing his media empire to his brown-nosing brother, he exists without the necessary dimensions to impose any overt danger. Luckily, Radcliffe is capable of performing some heavy lifting to imbue the manic baddie with a blitzkrieg of enraged eyes and popping line deliveries. In a script where he’s often relegated to delivering eye-rolling punchlines, he’s a proper salesman. Other components fall by the wayside too: Beth is a Black Best Friend (though Randolph does admirably carve out a couple well-delivered one-liners). The mystical aspects surrounding the crown fizzles.

Whenever “The Lost City” seems in danger of falling prey to other big-time star-studded adventures, particularly those calculated by Netflix, the obvious chemistry between Tatum and Bullock saves the day. What’s always made the two actors such formidable stars isn’t just their wicked comedic timing, it’s their uncanny ability to impart real vulnerability and a down-to-earth vibe to their heroic characters. Only these stars could make peeling leeches off of Tatum’s buttock not only an exceptionally funny scenario, but also a promising first date. And as Alan and Loretta evade lava from a soon-to-erupt volcano, work to escape a crumbling tomb, and dance in the warm amber-colored sun, they discover a kind of love that transcends fairy tales.

“The Lost City” might not be as majestic or breathtaking as its loftier influences, but it is the swooning stuff that great romance novels are made of.

“The Lost City” premiered at the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. Paramount will release the film in theaters on Friday, March 25.

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Sandra bullock and channing tatum in ‘the lost city’: film review | sxsw 2022.

The stars share the screen with Brad Pitt in a 'Romancing the Stone'-inspired comedy-adventure directed by Adam and Aaron Nee.

By John DeFore

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A Romancing the Stone -like adventure featuring a more unlikely pair of lovers-to-be than Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Aaron and Adam Nee’s The Lost City follows a romance novelist ( Sandra Bullock ) as she’s caught up in a plot every bit as loony as those she has grown tired of inventing for her fans.

While it’s no longer surprising to see the sensitive and funny sides of costar Channing Tatum , his hunky character’s puppy-like devotion to Bullock’s dismissive damsel in distress serves the pic quite well, enlivening action that (after a winningly over-the-top kickoff) might otherwise grow too generic. A vastly bigger undertaking than The Last Romantic , the microbudget debut the directors brought to SXSW in 2006, it’s a thoroughly commercial film despite feeling only a little bit more of-the-moment than its 1984 inspiration.

Full credits

Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Headliners) Distributor: Paramount Pictures Production companies: 3dot productions, Exhibit A, Fortis Films Cast: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar Nuñez, Patti Harrison, Bowen Yang Directors: Adam Nee, Aaron Nee Screenwriters: Oren Uziel, Dana Fox, Adam Nee, Aaron Nee Producers: Liza Chasin, Sandra Bullock, Seth Gordon Executive Producers: JJ Hook, Dana Fox, Julia Gunn, Margaret Chernin Director of photography: Jonathan Sela Production designer: Jim Bissell Costume designer: Marlene Stewart Editor: Craig Alpert Composer: Pinar Toprak Casting directors: Miguel Fernandez, Tricia Wood

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The Lost City Review

13 Apr 2022

The Lost City

Death cannot stop true love; it can only delay it for a while. Or so The Princess Bride taught us. Sure enough, the much bally-hooed death of the big-screen romcom is beginning to look more like a hiatus, because here we are in 2022 with a crowd-pleasing, star-led romance in an exotic location. If much of directors Adam and Aaron Nee’s plot feels like a throwback to an earlier era, and in particular to Romancing The Stone , the humour here is entirely up-to-date and immensely fun.

The familiar bits first: Sandra Bullock steps into Kathleen Turner ’s shoes as a successful romance novelist whose personal life is a mess. But unlike Joan Wilder, Bullock’s Loretta is grieving a lost husband, and seems irritable at the success of her own books. In place of Michael Douglas ’ tough jungle guide we have Channing Tatum ’s gentle cover model Alan, who’s nursing both a crush on and a grudge against Loretta, the latter for her refusal to take her own books seriously. However, when she’s kidnapped by a media billionaire’s son, Abigail Fairfax ( Daniel Radcliffe ), Alan swings ineffectually into action, and soon our two heroes are lost in the jungle of a small island, bickering and perhaps bonding as they try to find safety.

None of this is particularly new, of course. Bullock has played the wary, uptight over-achiever before; Tatum’s given us previous variations on witless-yet-beautiful; even a bit with leeches has been done before. But the film finds nuance to season the archetypes. There’s more than lip service paid to Loretta’s grief and her dashed dreams of serious scholarship, and while she’s not immune to Alan’s looks, you can see  why he wouldn’t be on her radar. Tatum, meanwhile, gamely plays the bimbo role, but manages to inject just enough edge to suggest  that Alan’s brain is merely underutilised and not entirely absent.

This movie is like its star’s jumpsuit: sparkly, gorgeous and entirely frivolous.

With the stars carrying the film along, the Nees can add emotion and humour in the detail. They mine laughs from Alan’s phone contacts and Fairfax’s cheese board, while costume designer Marlene Stewart puts Bullock in a fuschia-coloured sequinned jumpsuit that plays well against the otherwise standard jungle aesthetics. Brad Pitt ’s hyper-capable survival trainer, Jack Trainer, is an awe-inspiring embodiment of the romance novel archetype who threatens even the usually laid-back Alan, while Da’Vine Joy Randolph does a lot with very little as Loretta’s editor. Radcliffe even comes close to saying something true about the entitlement and self-righteousness of the super-wealthy as a black-sheep billionaire.

Really, though, you have to want to find deeper meanings here. This movie is like its star’s jumpsuit: sparkly, gorgeous and entirely frivolous. It coasts by on charisma and comedic talent, on dancing and daring, on stunning locations (the Dominican jungle) and stakes that are high enough to hold the attention and not a millimetre higher. You will predict almost every beat before it arrives and welcome its arrival anyway, because the formula works. The romcom is dead; long live the romcom.

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The lost city.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 13 Reviews
Kids Say 27 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Bullock romcom adventure has cheeky moments, brief blood.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 13+?

One shocking, gruesome shooting with intense blood splatter (but no body shown o

Kiss. A character is naked during a long, comical scene that shows his bare back

Strong language includes "ass," "a--hole," "d--k," and "s--t." "Slut" is used as

Quite a few brands are notably displayed or mentioned, indicating product placem

Villains smoke cigars. Drinking throughout, including tequila, whiskey, champagn

Any Positive Content?

You are the author of your life story, so live life to the fullest. With a theme

Loretta is a smart woman who incorporates her research on ancient cultures into

Non-stereotypical gender representation. Loretta is smart and values substance o

Violence & Scariness

One shocking, gruesome shooting with intense blood splatter (but no body shown on camera, and there's a positive resolution). Additional action violence is clearly choreographed to the point of hilarity, with punches, kicks, and knocking people out with hard objects. Villains are armed and shoot guns but mostly miss. Falls that likely result in death. Positive characters are constantly in deep peril, including trapped under water or in a fiery enclosure. Lots of talk about those who potentially die, acknowledging respect for the sanctity of life, even for those with evil intent.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Kiss. A character is naked during a long, comical scene that shows his bare backside, with another character commenting extensively about the size of his penis (it's not shown). The main character is a romance novelist, and there's some innuendo and suggestiveness in regard to her writing. Some low-cut shirts. Romantic feelings.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes "ass," "a--hole," "d--k," and "s--t." "Slut" is used as a comical, misguided woman-to-woman term of endearment. "Jesus Christ!" said as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Quite a few brands are notably displayed or mentioned, indicating product placement, including Fiji water, Jamba Juice, and a Ram truck. Positive characters drink alcohol with the label of the beverage clearly seen, including Don Julio and Stella Artois.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Villains smoke cigars. Drinking throughout, including tequila, whiskey, champagne, wine, and beer. A character in her 20s appears to have had too much to drink.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

You are the author of your life story, so live life to the fullest. With a theme of moving on after loss, the message delivered several times is that life is "sweeter after difficulty." Themes include courage, curiosity, and teamwork.

Positive Role Models

Loretta is a smart woman who incorporates her research on ancient cultures into her work. Alan is honest, courageous, and loyal and steps out of his comfort zone to help Loretta. While both Loretta and Alan are ill-equipped to survive a jungle, they work together to overcome obstacles. Beth is a successful boss who prioritizes people over profits.

Diverse Representations

Non-stereotypical gender representation. Loretta is smart and values substance over surface. Alan is emotionally vulnerable, sensitive, humble. Less positively, his beauty routine is a source of humor; there are a couple of laughs based on his supposed lack of intelligence. But his overall depiction is meant to show that a person's relative braininess is just one characteristic in what makes them unique. Eloquent words are used to describe something some see as "ugly" (a skin condition that leads to insecurity) as beautiful. A tough Navy SEAL is also a Buddhist yoga practitioner who quotes Taoist philosophy. Successful Black female publisher Beth is a fully expressed supporting character who brings (a little) body diversity to the film. Most other characters of color are depicted as villains, corrupt, unbalanced, or smarmy.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that The Lost City is a romcom action adventure starring Sandra Bullock , Channing Tatum , and Daniel Radcliffe . With a theme of moving on after loss, it has strong messages about being the author of your own story and that life is "sweeter after difficulty." While most of the violence is typical big-budget action fare, there's plenty of peril and one gruesome moment involving a shooting that appears to have been added for shock value (but ultimately has a reassuring resolution). Tatum's bare backside is seen extensively in a nonsexual scene that also has a lot of references to his penis (which isn't shown). Bullock's character writes steamy novels, so expect innuendo and racy language ("d--k," "s--t," etc.), as well as some creative writing tips -- e.g., a humorous dissertation on when the word "throbbing" can and can't be used. There's lots of product placement, particularly alcoholic beverages, which are poured and consumed throughout (villains also smoke cigars). Non-stereotypical portrayals include an intelligent romance novelist, a muscular model who's emotionally vulnerable, and a philosophical Navy SEAL who's into yoga. Although most characters of color are unfortunately portrayed as corrupt or unbalanced, supporting character Beth ( Da'Vine Joy Randolph ) is a great role model: She's a successful Black businessperson who works hard, cares about profits and people, and establishes and maintains boundaries. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (13)
Kids say (27)

Based on 13 parent reviews

Clean Hollywood movie. Thank you Sandra, Channing and Brad!

Very funny and entertaining, but not in the “family friendly” category, what's the story.

In THE LOST CITY, reclusive romance novelist Loretta Sage ( Sandra Bullock ) is starting the promotional tour for her latest work, The Lost City of D , accompanied by handsome cover model Alan ( Channing Tatum ). When Loretta is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire ( Daniel Radcliffe ) to help him find the lost city's lost treasure, Alan sets off to rescue her to prove he's just as much a hero as the one he portrays on Loretta's book covers.

Is It Any Good?

Treasure hunting + adventure + comedy + romance seems like a formula for cinematic success, and, indeed, Paramount Pictures has struck gold here. Giving off Romancing the Stone vibes, The Lost City has a hilarious script that's made even funnier with perfect casting. Bullock is the master of playing a relatably put-upon woman, and here she also gets to be the smartest person in the room and the jungle. It's a kick to see Tatum and co-star Brad Pitt play into their sex-symbol images, laughing along with the audience while simultaneously showing that the "ideal man" has the same insecurities and vulnerabilities as everyone else.

While the top-billed stars are national treasures, the real find in The Lost City is Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Loretta's publisher, Beth. She could have easily turned out as a typical romcom confidante, but Randolph offers a different take, evolving "the best friend" into a magnificent, three-dimensional, confident woman who is a boss by all definitions, literally going to the ends of the Earth for those she loves. While this isn't a perfect film, it's pretty great, and writer Seth Gordon puts plenty in it to love, including a strong message that it's the hard times that help us appreciate the good times.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence and peril in The Lost City. How did the movie use death both for comedy and to magnify the importance that the loss of any life, even that of a villain, is a tragedy? The characters are often in extreme peril: Were you ever worried? Why, or why not?

What do you think "sweeter after difficulty" means? Why might it be a good mantra to remember during rough times?

Do you think The Lost City is a romantic comedy? Why, or why not? How does it compare to other romcoms?

What is product placement, and how does it impact buying choices ? Did you notice certain brands?

Are smoking and drinking glamorized here? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 25, 2022
On DVD or streaming : July 26, 2022
Cast : Sandra Bullock , Channing Tatum , Daniel Radcliffe , Brad Pitt
Directors : Aaron Nee , Adam Nee
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : Adventures , Great Girl Role Models
Character Strengths : Courage , Curiosity , Teamwork
Run time : 92 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language
Award : Common Sense Selection
Last updated : April 6, 2024

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What to watch next.

Romancing the Stone

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Review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum go enjoyably neo-screwball in ‘The Lost City’

A woman and a man beside a waterfall in the movie "The Lost City."

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Midway through the tomb-raiding, car-crashing, butt-baring shenanigans of “The Lost City,” Channing Tatum pauses to remind Sandra Bullock not to judge a book by its cover. It’s an apt cliché: She plays Loretta Sage, the author of a series of popular romance novels; he’s Alan, the stud whose ripped chest and Fabio wig have helped sell her paperbacks to millions of happy readers. To Loretta, Alan is an incompetent himbo with delusions of grandeur and certainly the last fool she’d want to be stuck with on a wild and crazy jungle adventure. But like a lot of Tatum characters (see the “Magic Mike” and “21 Jump Street” movies — seriously), he turns out to be smarter, deeper and more genuinely heroic than she expects.

So sure, don’t judge a book by its cover. I should note, however, that I may have committed an equivalent offense when I opted to check out “The Lost City”: The poster made it look kind of fun, and lo and behold, it is. It helps that the pairing of Bullock and Tatum — now that sounds like a law firm I’d hire, or at least a hoity-toity restaurant I’d eat at — is as delightful as you’d expect from two actors of such goofy charm and combustible energy. It also helps that the directors, Aaron and Adam Nee ( “Band of Robbers” ), have tailored this unapologetically derivative vehicle to their stars’ easygoing chemistry, taking what might have been a strained, clanging excuse for a mainstream action-comedy and investing it with, if not big belly laughs, then at least a refreshing sweetness of spirit.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

This may sound like a strange thing to say about a movie in which the male lead gets spattered with human viscera and attacked by blood-sucking leeches (though not, thankfully, in the same scene). But I’m getting ahead of the plot, which is a pleasant mix of the familiar, the preposterous and the familiarly preposterous.

Along with their co-writers, Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, the brothers Nee have rearranged the sturdy bones of “Romancing the Stone,” Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 adventure starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Once again a pulp novelist finds herself lost in a distant jungle thanks to some treasure-hungry ne’er-do-wells, and once again a not-entirely-trustworthy man comes to her ostensible rescue. This variation on the formula has fewer crocodiles and more explosions; it also has a bonus extended cameo by Brad Pitt , briefly and amusingly sending up his own guy’s-guy nonchalance.

(L-R) Directors Adam Nee and Aaron Nee, Liza Chasin, Daniel Radcliffe and Sandra Bullock onstage at SXSW for "The Lost City"

Sandra Bullock makes ‘The Lost City’ feel like home at SXSW

The action-comedy ‘The Lost City,’ starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and Daniel Radcliffe, brought warm, friendly star power to Austin, Texas.

March 13, 2022

The two lead roles have also been deftly customized, both to reflect a more 21st-century gender dynamic and to accommodate the yin-yang mix of Bullock’s smarts and Tatum’s sensitivity. Loretta may be a popular writer, but she also despises her work and most of her readers; she’s a serious-minded archaeologist by trade (so, sniff, was her late husband) with a specialty in dead languages. This (sort of) explains why she’s suddenly kidnapped, mid-book tour, by Alistair Fairfax (a very good Daniel Radcliffe), a wealthy media baron with a Murdoch-scion complex who flies her to his heavily guarded compound on a distant island, where she and she alone can locate the whereabouts of some storied El Dorado.

And so even as she has to traipse through the jungle in an impractical sequined jumpsuit as purple as her prose, Loretta is hardly a damsel in distress. And Bullock, having already bested an exploding bus in “Speed,” a failing spacecraft in “Gravity” and a suicidal epidemic in “Bird Box,” regards this out-of-nowhere abduction as if it were merely an ill-timed holiday. Loretta is better prepared to survive a deadly tropical adventure than, say, Alan, who nonetheless touchingly chases after her, determined to live up to the chivalry and heroism of his fictional alter ego.

Daniel Radcliffe and Sandra Bullock in “The Lost City.”

And after a bumbling, grumbling fashion, he does. Alan isn’t much of a fighter, as we see in a few amusingly staged early action scenes, but his abiding sweetness gradually disarms Loretta, as does his habit of shedding clothing whenever narratively necessary (which is cheekily often). It also nudges “The Lost City” into a more pleasurably laid-back groove than you might expect. You wouldn’t call this movie understated, exactly: There are cars to crash, ancient treasures to uncover and bad men to incinerate, but Bullock and Tatum never seem in any particular hurry to get it all done.

They make an effortlessly watchable duo, whether they’re squeezing into a hammock or negotiating the gently bickersome neo-screwball rhythms of the dialogue. The other actors pick up nicely on their vibes, including Oscar Nuñez as a friendly guy with a goat and a terrific Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Loretta’s tirelessly loyal book agent, who knows all too well the value of romantic fantasies as shrewdly calculated as this one.

‘The Lost City’

Rated: PG-13, for violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes Playing: Starts March 25 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Dressed as a Solid Gold dancer, Loretta’s first stop on tour is a disaster. No one is there for her. They want to see Dash shirtless. After being annoyed by the ordeal, she leaves the event and is subsequently kidnapped and brought face to face with billionaire Abigail Fairfax ( Daniel Radcliffe ). He’s been searching for the lost city of D to find the crown of fire—both are things she’s written about in her books. Fairfax located the city but needs her to translate precisely where the crown is held and believes Loretta is the only one who can translate the map of its location. Alan is the only person who witnessed Loretta being taken by strange men and plans to rescue her by any means necessary.

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The Lost City takes a lot of its cues from films like Indiana Jones , Romancing the Stone, and every other movie of this type. It fails to stand on its own with so much being pulled from earlier creative works, but that’s not a bad thing. The Lost City is fun, and the sparks between the lead actors pump life into this film. Individually, Bullock and Tatum are incredibly charismatic as individuals, but as a duo, they create a rhythm of movement and sound that causes their dynamite chemistry to leap off-screen and smack you in the face.

They also aren’t afraid of slapstick or physical comedy. When Miss Congeniality premiered at SXSW in 2000, Bullock , for a time, was the reigning queen of comedy. After starring in Paul Feig’s The Heat , the actress starred in more serious roles and darker comedies, but with The Lost City , Bullock shows she’s still got it in her to fall and look silly for laughs. Tatum also has a résumé filled with primarily comedic roles, which he has honed and excels at. He takes pride in using his looks and charm, acting like a class clown.

The directors’ work isn’t remarkable in any way, but it’s certainly easy to tell they love what they do. Bullock and Tatum are the glue that holds this film together and are infinitely more interesting than what’s happening around them. Without them, The Lost City would not have sustained through its nearly two-hour run time. The duo is naturally funny and knows how to add levels of vulnerability to any role they tackle. Most of all, they know how to have a good time, and the energy they emit is infectious.

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Directed by Adam Nee and Aaron Nee from a screenplay they co-wrote with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, The Lost City feels like a film from the past (in a good way). The film doesn’t set out to do anything different, settling into the comforts certain tropes and story beats provide. However, that doesn’t make The Lost City any less fun than it aims to be. With the effortlessly charming and talented cast doing most of the heavy lifting, The Lost City makes for a highly entertaining, joyful adventure.

The Lost City follows best-selling romance author Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock), a widow who is trying her best to finish her latest book in time for a book tour her manager, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), put together. Loretta isn’t feeling it, though, especially when she realizes Alan (Channing Tatum), a model who portrays Dash, Loretta’s character, on the cover of all of her books, will be at the events. All Alan wants to do is please Loretta, but all the recluse wants to do is to go back home. However, her life takes an adventurous turn when she’s kidnapped by billionaire Abigail Fairfax ( Daniel Radcliffe ), who believes the Lost City of D the author wrote about — as well as the tomb containing a treasure he’s seeking — is real. Enter Alan who, despite not knowing at all what he’s doing, endeavors to go save her.

Related: Sandra Bullock Fought Studio Hard to Get The Lost City Movie Made

The Lost City has a lot going for it: a charming cast, genuinely funny moments, and some adrenaline-fueled adventure. The film harkens back to the days when such romcom adventures were more of a constant. Bullock and Tatum have the bickering down, but when things slow down between them, they’re able to understand each other a lot better than before. As a team, they work well and they’re the highlight of the film overall, with their comedic timing being especially worth noting. Tatum really delivers as a man who’s got his heart in the right place, even when he isn’t the most intelligent of people. His rapport with both Bullock and Brad Pitt — whose role as Jack Trainer is smaller than the trailers would have one believe — is fantastic. The frustrated energy Bullock puts out is fabulous and the physical humor employed by Tatum underlines his comedic abilities well.

If anything, The Lost City could have used a lot more heat between Bullock and Tatum, with only a couple of scenes making good use of their chemistry before the film moves on too quickly to the next thing. That said, the film is well-paced and, at one point, even surprising. Not all the humor lands, but it is so full with comedic moments that the audience will find themselves laughing more often than not at the antics and reactions of the characters. Tatum’s Alan, who has zero combat skills, takes to slapping Fairfax’s henchmen when they attack and it’s incredibly amusing to watch. Mostly, The Lost City is buoyed by Bullock and Tatum’s charisma, of which they have plenty. Radcliffe’s turn as the villain of the story really works, though he only gets a few moments to show off how truly menacing he can be.

The Lost City is an overall fun film. It’s engaging and full of humor that never feels forced for the sake of it. Aaron and Adam Nee have crafted a film that is never boring, maintaining its sense of intrigue and momentum throughout without falling flat. It’s rare for films these days to mix a bit of romance with the thrills of an adventure without crumbling under their own weight or lack of charm. However, The Lost City has plenty of each and, while obviously formulaic, audiences will find themselves entertained for the majority of the film’s runtime thanks to a story that understands what it’s supposed to be and the talents of a great cast.

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The Lost City is playing in theaters as of March 25, 2022. The film is 112 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language.

The Lost City

Originally titled The Lost City of D, The Lost City is a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum. Bullock stars as Loretta Sage, a novelist, as well as Dr. Angela Lovemore, the heroine of her successful romance series. Together they try to escape from a billionaire who is hell-bent on discovering an ancient burial chamber that is described in one of Sage's books.

Key Release Dates

The lost city of d.

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The Lost City Can’t Quite Capture That Old Movie-Star Magic

I have a confession to make: I have never warmed up to Sandra Bullock as a star. It isn’t that I haven’t enjoyed her presence onscreen. It’s just that on her own, she doesn’t feel like a supernova; she dims or brightens by virtue of whom she is acting against. When it’s Keanu Reeves? That’s when she truly shines, in movies like 1994’s Speed, where her determination and wit perfectly flirt with Reeves’s doting machismo. (I even have a soft spot for their dynamic in the admittedly weird 2006 romantic drama, The Lake House. ) She has the appropriate charm in Miss Congeniality , a 2000 film that again highlights her prickly steadfastness while giving her physical comedy alongside seasoned scene partners like Michael Caine and Candice Bergen. In 2013’s Gravity, her drive is so well-harnessed that the chemistry she cultivates with George Clooney persists long after he disappears. But as an unyielding matriarch in The Blind Side , a 2009 film built on baldly uncomfortable racial politics that garnered her a Best Actress Oscar, she fails to feel whole or engaging. As the supposed center of the film, she lacks any force beyond curdling white saviorism.

The Lost City , released this weekend, is the kind of film meant to rest on the laurels of star power. Not just Bullock’s, but her immediate cast members’, too. The film — which scans as Romancing the Stone cosplay updated for the current moment — is the kind of romantic action-adventure caper we haven’t seen in decades. It doesn’t waste time. At a fleet 92 minutes, the film dives into a story about Loretta Sage (Bullock), a highly successful romance novelist whose life has been defined by loneliness since the death of her beloved husband. Her apparent knowledge of a lost city — reflected in her swooning recent book — gets her kidnapped by a madcap, disgruntled billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) who believes she can locate the priceless treasure he’s been spending oodles of cash to find. Loretta proves to be more capable than her captors realize, and she’s not alone — the sweet himbo who models on her covers, Alan (Channing Tatum), sets out to save her, leading to high jinks and, theoretically at least, romantic sparks set against the backdrop of a dangerous jungle on a forgotten island. “The movie comes with an additional set of stakes specific to Hollywood’s post-pandemic future,” the New York Times ’ Kyle Buchanan posits . “As the theatrical business constricts, will people still go see an old-fashioned comic adventure where the actors lack any superpowers besides A-list charisma?” Here’s the problem. The Lost City may have the A-listers, but it doesn’t possess the craft necessary to spotlight their skills. Audiences shouldn’t be blamed if they are cold to the film. How can we expect people to respond to adult movies like this if they lack the charm of the genres they’re plundering for inspiration?

The Lost City isn’t terrible, just aggressively mediocre. It is the kind of movie you put on in the background after coming across it on TBS while you fold laundry on a Sunday afternoon. If anything, The Lost City makes evident not a lack of stars, but a persistent inability on the part of contemporary Hollywood to know what to do with them . The idea to do a thinly masked Romancing the Stone revamp with an older actress (Bullock is a few years shy of 60) whose defining characteristic is her intelligence — who innately radiates warmth and romance and adventure — is a good one. But the makers of The Lost City think pointing a camera at her is enough. They forget Romancing the Stone had Robert Zemeckis shepherding into existence a script by Diane Thomas, a waitress turned screenwriter who died tragically and young. The Lost City has Adam and Aaron Nee helming a story by a bunch of men and Dana Fox. It’s romance by committee, and no one has any idea how to capture the heat necessary to make the pair work.

The Lost City aims to be quick-witted, giddy, a light delight. It’s mostly inoffensive, save for one arguably major problem: the weird colonialism lurking in the story and the patronizingly thin portrayal of the Indigenous people who inhabit the make-believe island on which the main action takes place. It’s an aspect not new to The Lost City, evident in these romance-adventure flicks focused on white folks finding love against a backdrop of so-called exoticism. Once you notice this grating aspect, you can’t help but squirm. The discomfort isn’t helped by the directors and cinematographer, who can’t capture the awe of natural surroundings or light the actors in ways that truly highlight the beauty of their bodies. Instead they are framed, lit, and blocked in ways that obscure their gorgeousness rather than put it on a pedestal. (A dramatic cave sequence near the end is so drab it’s embarrassing.)

But perhaps the most glaring issue is the lack of proper chemistry between Bullock and Tatum, who can’t manufacture the friction required of a destined romance. I can see why, on the page, Tatum and Bullock have allure. He’s inviting but not overbearing in his charm, and great at playing carefree men with an inner sweetness and a knack for dancing. She has a fierce sense of self and undaunted intellect. But there’s no “It” factor. You know what I mean: that undeniably potent fire between actors that makes us want to bask in their glow and also root for them to take their clothes off and fall into bed. For a film about a romance novelist that is trying to exist within a very specific canon of adventure films, there’s a stunning lack of sexiness. So when the two finally kiss at the very end of the film, it feels perfunctory — as if the film just remembered, “Oh yeah, sure, they should have some physical connection.” Bullock has a more intriguing connection with Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a former Navy SEAL and full-time badass who is introduced chomping on the innards of a coconut. Alan ropes him into helping save Loretta in a cameo that doesn’t last long but leaves the most intense impression. Pitt knows what this film needs and how to skewer his own image. (Has anyone in Hollywood leaned into the sensuality of his own consumption as much as this man?) His long blond hair cascades behind him as the bombs he’s planted go off, bringing a twinge of memories of his early-1990s heartthrob status in Legends of the Fall . His physicality (and that of his stuntmen) is spry, graceful. When Loretta flirts with him and asks why the hell is he so handsome, with a glint in his eye, he responds, “My father was a weatherman.” It’s the kind of specificity and élan the rest of the film lacks.

It’s clear the moment Pitt is onscreen what his fate will be, but it’s a brief ride I enjoyed being on. The remaining film is listless and tired. Sure, Radcliffe is aiming for gonzo intensity. As Loretta’s agent, Da’Vine Joy Randolph is trying her damndest to bring energy to the film, but all I was left feeling was disappointment that Hollywood can’t stop falling into the “Black best friend” trap. Everything in the story feels micromanaged, all the edges smoothed off. Even when Loretta and Alan witness a hidden tomb encased in verdant foliage, with the molten lava of a volcano framing the discovery, I felt neither curiosity nor wonder. I fixated instead on the smoothness and lack of texture of the scenario. In the end, The Lost City never trips the wire in the brain of pure pleasure — visual, emotional, or otherwise.

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The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

By Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

The thing that has always distinguished TV storytelling from its big-screen counterpart is the existence of individual episodes. We consume our series — even the ones that we binge — in distinct chunks, and the medium is at its best when it embraces this. The joy of watching an ongoing series comes as much from the separate steps on the journey as it does from the destination, if not more. Few pop-culture experiences are more satisfying than when your favorite show knocks it out of the park with a single chapter, whether it’s an episode that wildly deviates from the series’ norm, or just an incredibly well-executed version of the familiar formula.

Still, that episodic nature makes TV fundamentally inconsistent. The greatest drama ever made , The Sopranos , was occasionally capable of duds like the Columbus Day episode. And even mediocre shows can churn out a single episode at the level of much stronger overall series. For this Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time, we looked at both the peak installments of classic series, as well as examples of lesser shows that managed to briefly punch way above their weight class. We have episodes from the Fifties all the way through this year. We stuck with narrative dramas and comedies only — so, no news, no reality TV, no sketch comedy, talk shows, etc. In a few cases, there are two-part episodes, but we mostly picked solo entries. And while it’s largely made up of American shows (as watched by our American staff), a handful of international entries made the final cut.

Fargo, “Bisquik” (Season 5, Episode 10)

"FARGO" -- "Bisquik" -- Year 5, Episode 10 (Airs Jan 16) Pictured: Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon. CR: FX

Our list of classic episodes starts with its most recent entry, from a January 2024 installment of the great FX anthology drama inspired by the work of the Coen brothers. Fargo Season Five dealt with the growing sense of polarization in America, and the debts — both literal and figurative — that everyone feels they’re owed from everyone else. It all culminates in a long, surprising, utterly gorgeous scene where our firecracker of a heroine, Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) finds herself face-to-face with immortal sin-eater Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), who has come for a rematch of their clash in the season premiere. With her husband and daughter in the house with her, Dot declines to fight this terrifying man, and instead explains, patiently and with palpable kindness, that perhaps Ole Munch might prefer a world focused less on resentment and more on love. — Alan Sepinwall

The Cosby Show, “Theo’s Holiday” (Season 2, Episode 22)

THE COSBY SHOW -- "Theo's Holiday" Episode 22 -- Air Date 04/03/1986 -- Pictured: (l-r) Keshia Knight Pulliam as Rudy Huxtable (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

There’s a temptation with these lists to immediately disqualify anything associated with the true monsters like Bill Cosby. But his crimes shouldn’t erase from the history books the wonderful work of everyone else involved in “Theo’s Holiday,” in which the Huxtables get together for an elaborate role-playing exercise to teach Theo (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) a lesson about the economics of life in, as he puts it, “the real world.” All the actors throws themselves into these larger-than-life characters, like Clair (Phylicia Rashad) as a cheery restaurant owner as well as a fast-talking furniture saleslady, or little Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam) as a powerful businesswoman. The idea of the whole clan teaming up to both mock Theo and help him out is so intoxicating that even his best friend Cockroach (Carl Anthony Payne II) admits, “I wish they did this kind of stuff at my house!” — A.S.

South Park, “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (Season 5, Episode 4)

A show that features an anthropomorphized turd in a Christmas hat and at least one projectile vomit scene per episode, South Park has never been known as highbrow. Yet there are elements of “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” a Season Five episode focused on Cartman’s elaborate revenge plot against a high schooler who scammed him by selling his pubes, that are nothing less than virtuosic. There’s the plot itself, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which culminates (spoiler alert, I guess) with the protagonist forcing a woman to unwittingly eat her own children. There’s the exquisite cameo appearance by Radiohead, the culmination of Scott Tenorman’s debasement. And there’s Cartman’s classic taunt, “Charade you are, Scott Tenorman,” a reference to an obscure track of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have often referred to “Scott Tenorman Must Die” as the apex of Cartman’s villainy, marking the character’s transition from obnoxious troll to next-level sociopath. But really, the episode marks another transition entirely: that of Stone and Parker from poop joke purveyors to dark-comedy masters. — Ej Dickson

You’re the Worst, “There Is Not Currently a Problem” (Season 2, Episode 7)

YOU'RE THE WORST -- "There Is Not Currently A Problem" -- Episode 207 (Airs Wednesday, October 21, 10:30 pm e/p Pictured: (l-r) Chris Geere as Jimmy, Aya Cash as Gretchen. CR: Byron Cohen/FX

Here’s an odd but welcome trend: FX not only has an excellent track record with extremely niche half-hour comedies (some of which you’ll find higher on this list), but many of them manage to weave thoughtful, even dramatic, material about mental health issues into their usual humor. The hip-hop comedy Dave did it with a terrific episode where we learn that Lil Dicky’s hype man GaTa struggles with bipolar disorder. The final Reservation Dogs season revolved around a character who’d spent much of his life institutionalized. And You’re the Worst — a romantic comedy about two selfish, immature people who would be horrified to learn they were the main characters in a romantic comedy — found a new level with an episode revealing that Gretchen (Aya Cash) suffers from clinical depression. Much of “There Is Not Currently a Problem” is fairly comedic: a bottle episode where the gang is stuck together with Gretchen and Jimmy (Chris Geere) because a local marathon has caused a traffic jam in their neighborhood. But this forced closeness comes while Gretchen is trapped in her latest depressive episode, with no choice but to finally reveal her condition to Jimmy — and to admit that she’s less worried that he’ll reject her for it than that he’ll become the latest man convinced he can “fix” her. Cash conveys every bit of the pain and fear Gretchen is experiencing, in a way that enriches the laughter rather than undercutting it. — A.S.

In Treatment, “Alex: Week Eight” (Season 1, Episode 37)

Most episodes of this drama were presented as real-time therapy sessions between Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and one of his patients, or Paul visiting his own shrink. Occasionally, though, outsiders found their way into Paul’s office, like Alex Prince, Sr. (Glynn Turman), the father of one of Paul’s patients, seeking answers as to why his son committed suicide. Alex Jr. had spent most of his sessions to that point painting his dad as such a monster, it should have been impossible for any actor to both live up to those stories and not seem like a cartoon. Turman, in one of the best dramatic performances you will ever see on television, somehow did it, channeling both the bogeyman and the grieving father, in a riveting two-hander with Byrne. — A.S.

Bob’s Burgers, “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” (Season 3, Episode 7)

BOB'S BURGERS: Bob gives Tina her first try behind the wheel in the all-new "Tina-rannasaurus Wrecks" episode of BOB'S BURGERS airing Sunday, Dec. 2 (8:30-9:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. BOB'S BURGERS ô and © 2012 TCFFC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Bob’s Burgers loves puns, but “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” is a groaner of a title even for them. No matter, because the episode so expertly combines many of the series’ hallmarks into one tight, funny, awkward package. Once again, a well-meaning parenting gesture by Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) goes awry, when he lets Tina (Dan Mintz) drive the family station wagon in a nearly empty parking lot, and she somehow crashes into the only other car there. Once again, the Belchers find themselves on the verge of financial calamity, when the other car turns out to belong to Bob’s ruthless rival, Jimmy Pesto (Jay Johnston). Once again, the family gets mixed up in the plans of a lunatic, when insurance adjuster Chase (Bob Odenkirk) forces them to aid him in an insurance fraud scheme in order to get out of the mess with Jimmy. And, once again, Bob’s lovable but terrible children somehow prove surprisingly useful, when Tina uses her brother’s Casio keyboard to get incriminating evidence that frees them from Chase’s clutches. All’s well that ends… not necessarily well, but at least not substantially worse than usual. — A.S.

Enlightened, “Consider Helen” (Season 1, Episode 9)

Today, it seems almost obligatory for cable and streaming shows to devote one or two episodes a season to presenting the POV of a minor character. When future White Lotus creator Mike White did it with his first HBO series, Enlightened , it was still relatively rare. And in this case, the shifts in perspective came as a welcome, even necessary, relief from all the time spent in the head of the show’s fascinating but maddening main character, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a toxically narcissistic former executive trying to rebuild her life after a nervous breakdown. With “Consider Helen,” White moved the focus to Amy’s mother Helen (played by Dern’s real-life mom, the great Diane Ladd), to present a day in her life, to show what a chore it is to have to deal with such a pathologically needy child, and to make clear that Enlightened itself understood exactly how its audience would respond to Amy. — A.S.

Maude, “Maude’s Dilemma” (Season 1, Episodes 9 & 10)

MAUDE, Bea Arthur, Adrienne Barbeau, 1972-1978

This two-parter, in which Maude (Bea Arthur) is shocked to discover that she’s pregnant again at 47, and has to decide whether she wants to get an abortion, was so ahead of its time, even the original Supreme Court verdict on Roe v. Wade was two months away. Well after Maude decided to end her pregnancy, the rest of television shied away from the subject, often having pregnant characters suffer conveniently-timed miscarriages before they could make up their minds and potentially alienate viewers and sponsors. But “Maude’s Dilemma,” with a teleplay by future Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, ran toward the thorny subject, and handled it with both humor and grace. — A.S.

Scrubs, “My Screw Up” (Season 3, Episode 14)

SCRUBS -- "My Screw Up" Episode 14 -- Pictured: (l-r) John C. McGinley as Dr. Perry Cox, Brendan Fraser as Ben Sullivan -- (Photo by: Carin Baer/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

There are plenty of shows we call dramedies, even though they’re really just half-hour dramas, as well as lots of alleged comedies that aren’t particularly interested in making the audience laugh. The hospital show Scrubs , though, was remarkably comfortable at balancing silliness and sadness throughout its run, especially in “My Screw Up.” Brendan Fraser reprises his role as Ben, wisecracking brother-in-law to John C. McGinley’s bitterly sarcastic Dr. Cox. Ben’s leukemia appeared to be in remission when last we saw him, so there’s room for him to relentlessly tease J.D. (Zach Braff) about having made out with both of Ben’s sisters, as well as a lighthearted subplot where Turk (Donald Faison) tries to convince Carla (Judy Reyes) to take his name when they’re married, in exchange for having a mole she hates removed. But things also get plausibly serious, even before we get to the Sixth Sense -style twist: Ben was the patient whose death earlier in the episode caused a rift between Cox and J.D., and Cox has been in denial about it ever since. Even the revelation that Cox has been imagining conversations with his dead friend is reflective of the show’s juggling of comedy and drama — it’s the dark mirror of how Scrubs generates so much humor from taking us inside the highly-distractible mind of J.D. — A.S.

Watchmen, “This Extraordinary Being” (Episode 6)

Even for a series as sophisticated and layered as Watchmen , this episode is an acrobatic feat. In the most dramatic departure from the show’s source material, the 1980s comic of the same name, “This Extraordinary Being” tells the origin story of one of this world’s seminal vigilante superheroes, Hooded Justice (a man lionized in a modern-day TV show-within-the-show that kicks off the episode). Told almost entirely in black and white, it sees our current-day heroine Angela Abar (Regina King) — herself a vigilante who goes by Sister Night, when she’s not working her day job as a cop — sucked into the memories of her grandfather, Will Reeves, after swallowing a bottle of his “nostalgia pills.” Transported to 1930s New York, we watch Will (played as a young man by Jovan Adepo), and sometimes Angela-as-Will, join the NYPD, where he encounters racism so virulent, his fellow cops stage a near-lynching, covering him with a hood and briefly hanging him from a tree as a warning to stand down. The message he takes away, though, is that there is plenty of evil to fight in the world, even in his own precinct. He just has to do it undercover — appropriating for his costume the very hood and noose that had been used to terrorize him. With balletic camerawork, a period soundtrack of big band standards, and visceral performances from King and Adepo, the episode is a sweeping achievement that inverts a fundamental truth of the series’ world — this revered hero that everyone assumed was white is Black — and underscores one about ours: Justice often comes at a steep price. — Maria Fontoura

The Golden Girls, “Mrs. George Devereaux” (Season 6, Episode 9)

THE GOLDEN GIRLS -- "Mrs. George Devereaux" Episode 9 -- Aired 11/17/90 -- Pictured: (l-r) Bea Arthur as Dorothy Petrillo Zbornak, Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux, Betty White as Rose Nylund, Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo (Photo by Ron Tom/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

The Golden Girls experienced so many adventures together, as Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and Sophia (Estelle Getty) lived together as pals and confidantes. But “Mrs. George Devereaux” is a truly touching treatment of grief and loss. Blanche, the most frivolous of the Girls (and the funniest), opens the door and beholds a strange sight: her late husband George, telling her that he faked his death and now wants her back. The episode explores how all the characters live with their different kinds of grief — and how that grief is what brought them here together in the first place. It has the most emotional resonance of any Golden Girls episode, but it’s also the funniest in terms of pure farcical comedy, as Dorothy gets swept up in a bizarre love triangle with two 1970s heartthrobs, guest stars Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner. As usual, Blanche gets the best line, when she confronts Cher’s ex-husband with the command, “Sonny Bono, get off my lanai!” — Rob Sheffield

SpongeBob SquarePants, “Pizza Delivery” (Season 1, Episode 5)

The absurdist humor that made SpongeBob SquarePants beloved across multiple generations is already at full strength in this early episode. At the end of another shift at the Krusty Krab, a customer calls in to order a pizza to be delivered to his home. Never mind that the restaurant doesn’t make pizzas: Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) sees a few bucks to be earned, and somehow turns a Krabby Patty burger into a pizza, complete with box, then orders SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) to take it to its destination. Instead, SpongeBob’s usual difficulty with driving strands the odd couple far from Bikini Bottom, trying various bizarre methods to get home — all of them borrowed from the “pioneers,” like the idea of riding on giant rocks. In the end, we get one last, great punchline: The customer lives right next door to the Krusty Krab, and they could have just walked the pizza over to him. — A.S.

Roseanne, “War and Peace” (Season 5, Episode 14)

Both in its Nineties heyday and its modern reinvention as The Conners , Roseanne had a real knack for blending domestic comedy with candid material about poverty, addiction, sexuality, and more. In this terrific conclusion of a two-part story, Dan (John Goodman) gets hauled off to jail after beating up Fisher, the abusive boyfriend of Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), while Roseanne tends to her sister, and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) gets to briefly relish the sight of her disciplinarian father behind bars. “War and Peace” doesn’t hide from the horror of Jackie’s experience, but even its dark moments are flavored with sass, like when Roseanne warns Fisher, “If you ever come near her again, you’re gonna have to deal with me, and I am way more dangerous than Dan. I got a loose-meat restaurant. I know what to do with the body!” — A.S.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Never Bathe on Saturday” (Season 4, Episode 27)

LOS ANGELES - FEBRUARY 16: THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW episode: "Never Bathe on Saturday". Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie). Image dated February 16, 1965. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

Somehow, the best showcase for Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as one of TV’s all-time couples is in an episode where Moore is frequently off-camera. A romantic getaway for Rob and Laura goes horribly awry when Laura’s big toe gets stuck in a hotel bathtub faucet, the bathroom door gets locked, and Rob makes the ill-timed decision to draw a fake mustache on his upper lip that he can’t wipe off — leading every hotel worker who arrives to help assuming he’s up to no good. Written by Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, this installment keeps finding new and amusing ways to escalate the sticky situation, and to push the outer edge of the envelope of censorship circa 1965, with a story about the risk of other people seeing Laura naked. By this point in the series’ run, Reiner knew exactly how to use his leading man’s fluency with physical comedy, and how his leading lady’s voice on the other side of that locked door was all that was needed to sell Laura’s dismay at being trapped in such an embarrassing position. — A.S.

Black Mirror, “San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)

What would your ideal afterlife look like? Black Mirror — the British dystopian anthology series with a nihilistic approach to rapidly-developing technology — is known for being a show that doesn’t only answer questions about the future but depicts the worst possible alternative you’ve never even considered. Maybe that’s why, when fans were introduced to the couple at the heart of “San Junipero,” and found the answer of the ideal afterlife to be an Eighties beach town party that never ends, they responded so fondly. Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet on a night out and quickly fall into a romantic entanglement. But what begins as a love story about two lesbians finding each other in a heaven on earth is quickly revealed to be a virtual reality — one where the elderly and those who have died can be uploaded and then live on forever as their younger selves. The two — both dying in real life — must deal with whether or not the love they’ve found in pixels is enough for both of their forevers. It’s a touching love story that embodies Black Mirror at its very best. — CT Jones

Sex and the City, “My Motherboard, My Self” (Season 4, Episode 8)

Family is, arguably, everywhere in Sex and the City — from those the core four start with their partners to the ones they marry into (have there ever been more terrifying mothers-in-law than Frances Sternhagen or Anne Meara?) and the one they build just among themselves. But when it comes to the blood relations of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the show is surprisingly thin, which is what makes “My Motherboard, My Self” stand out so much. It’s not that the other subplots aren’t memorable — the endless physical comedy of Samantha losing her orgasm; Carrie’s Macintosh meltdown and trip to Manhattan 1990s mainstay Tekserve (R.I.P.), where technician Dmitri (a brilliantly dry Aasif Mandvi) rags on her for not “backing up” — but Miranda’s turn here feels different. As she attends her mother’s funeral in Philadelphia (where she is, apparently, from, and where she has, apparently, multiple siblings), we see a more human side of a character who until this point has largely maintained her station as “the analytical one.” (Though it’s notable that the most intimate moment she has in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t with a direct relation, but the fitting room attendant trying to sell her a bra.) While the show has been criticized for celebrating solipsistic behavior, this episode is a prime example of the four women grappling with their ability to be vulnerable. — Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Broad City, “Knockoffs” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Both stories in the stoner comedy’s most laugh-out-loud installment involve imitation products. In one, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and her mother Bobbi (Susie Essman) travel into the sewers of Manhattan to obtain counterfeit designer purses. In the other, Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) is shocked when her boyfriend Jeremy (Stephen Schneider) asks her to peg him with a strap-on — a development that so thrills Ilana, she does an upside-down twerk on her friend’s behalf — then has to scramble to find a reasonable facsimile after her dishwasher melts Jeremy’s custom-made dildo. In the end, the replacements prove shoddier than the real thing, but “Knockoffs” is so perfectly constructed, and so memorable, that when the friends met Hillary Clinton in a later episode later, among the first things a flustered Abbi can think to tell her is, “I pegged!” — A.S.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” (Season 4, Episode 24)

When The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air went on the air in 1990, Will Smith was such an inexperienced actor that he literally mouthed the lines of his co-stars while they spoke. But it didn’t take long for Smith to learn his craft and land roles in dramatic movies like Six Degrees of Separation . That’s why the creative team behind this series knew he was ready for a Season Four episode where Will reunites with his father (played by Ben Vereen) 14 years after he walked out on the family, only to see him leave once again after they reconciled. “I’ll be a better father than he ever was, and I sure as hell don’t need him for that, ’cause ain’t a damn thing he could ever teach me about how to love my kids!” Smith roars, before breaking down in the arms of Uncle Phil. “How come he don’t want me, man?” For anyone who grew up without a father, the moment cut deep. “I shed a tear til this day every time I see this episode,” LeBron James wrote on Instagram in 2015. “This hit home for me growing up and I couldn’t hold my tears in. Til this day they still coming out when this episode come on.” — Andy Greene

Doctor Who, “Blink” (Season 3, Episode 10)

The scariest, cleverest episode of the British sci-fi institution Doctor Who features monsters who are elegant in their simplicity: the Weeping Angels, predatory aliens who resemble stone statues of angels, and who can only move when you’re not looking at them. Writer Steven Moffat places these disturbing creatures in service of a story that barely features the Doctor (David Tennant) and his then-companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), instead focusing on a young Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow, a woman who keeps running afoul of the Weeping Angels. Her only hope of surviving the ordeal comes in the form of a DVD Easter Egg that creates the illusion of the Doctor having a conversation with her, and even the Time Lord himself struggles to adequately explain all the seeming paradoxes contained within Moffat’s tale. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he tells Sally, “but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Yet it all makes exciting sense by the end. — A.S.

Alias, “Truth Be Told” (Season 1, Episode 1)

64986_15_3 ALIAS - (Photo by via Getty Images) JENNIFER GARNER

Throughout his career, J.J. Abrams has struggled with endings, as anyone who sat through The Rise of Skywalker can tell you. Few, though, are better at beginnings, and the pilot episode of his spy drama Alias is so fantastic that it bought years of goodwill from viewers, no matter how nonsensical the plots grew as the show went along. While undercover agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is in Taiwan being interrogated by a torture expert, we flash back through the events that led her here, starting with her double life as a grad student by day, CIA agent by night. This turns out to be a triple life when Sydney discovers that she’s been tricked into working for a terrorist organization called SD-6, and that her father, Jack (Victor Garber), is secretly her co-worker. Oh, and Sydney’s fiancé gets murdered on the order of SD-6 boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), plus a half-dozen other characters have to be introduced, Sydney has to try on multiple hair colors and accents, and more. Between the fractured timeline and the multiple lies Sydney has to live at once, “Truth Be Told” should be absolute gibberish. But Abrams, in one of his earliest efforts as director as well as writer, keeps everything coherent and thrilling in an episode that made him into a star just as much as it did Jennifer Garner. — A.S.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Most of the time, the Paddy’s Pub gang aim to screw over other people but really just end up screwing themselves, and that’s just what happens in this crude, tangled adventure. When Frank (Danny DeVito) promotes Charlie (Charlie Day) from a sleazy janitor to manager of the bar, he sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events that puts each character’s Achilles’ heels on full display: Mac’s (Rob McElhenny) sensitivity, Frank’s lost youth, Dennis’ (Glenn Howerton) pride, Charlie’s unrequited love, and Dee’s (Kaitlin Olson) conniving impulses. In order to get out of the grunt work Charlie left behind, Dennis goes on a mission to sleep with the unnamed character the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), but ends up setting his sights on Mac’s mom (and later Charlie’s) when he finds out Mac banged his mom (and Frank’s ex-wife). Meanwhile, Charlie draws up a plan to finally bang the Waitress; Dennis’ sister Dee isn’t looking for sex, just power, as she plays the henchman to Charlie’s mastermind; and Frank just wants to bang any “young broad” who will give him the time of day. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mac says to Charlie after encouraging Mac to sleep with Dennis’ mom. Charlie’s response pretty much sums up the entire FX sitcom: “It doesn’t have to.” — Maya Georgi

Grey’s Anatomy, “It’s the End of the World/As We Know It” (Season 2, Episodes 16 & 17)

UNITED STATES - DECEMBER 13: GREY'S ANATOMY - "It's the End of the World (As We Know It)" (Photo by Peter "Hopper" Stone/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

Hearing main character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) refuse to get out of bed for fear that she’ll die at work should have been a clue that it wouldn’t be a good week. But viewers were still terrified when the series seemingly tried its hardest to make every main character (plus guest stars Christina Ricci and Kyle Chandler) have near-death experiences in this two-parter, which began airing after Super Bowl XL. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is in labor at the hospital waiting for her husband, who won’t answer his phone. Derek (Patrick Dempsey) can’t concentrate on saving his patient’s life while the man’s cell keeps going off (put two and two together here). And when a newbie paramedic shoves her hands into the chest cavity of a patient who’s bleeding out, it’s Meredith who learns that what’s currently killing him is unexploded ammunition that could go off at any minute, taking her and the entire O.R. with it. The bomb squad evacuates the floor, but if Derek leaves, Bailey’s husband dies. Meredith steps in for the paramedic, who’s had a panic attack, so now, if Meredith moves, she and Derek and Bailey’s husband die. Richard (James Pickens, Jr.) has a heart attack from the stress of the evacuation. Izzy (Katherine Heigl) and Alex (Justin Chambers) are off hooking up in a closet, which is also life-threatening if you consider Alex’s numerous confirmed STDs. And if Bailey, who is refusing to push without her husband being present, doesn’t give birth, she and the baby will die. It’s an all-in, melodramatic pivot for a series that has since become known for putting its main characters in life-threatening situations. And yet, in the midst of these increasingly heightened stakes, the standout scene remains George’s (T.J. Knight) gentle cajoling that finally convinces Bailey to push — and to name her son after him. “You’re Doctor Bailey,” he says, in a scene that remains one of the most tender of the entire series. “You don’t hide from a fight.” — CTJ

Girls, “American Bitch” (Season 6, Episode 3)

If ever Hannah Horvath was a voice of a generation, this was it. Airing just a few months before the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, this quiet cri de coeur — in which famous author Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys, nimble as ever) confronts Hannah (Lena Dunham) about a blog post she wrote slamming his alleged misconduct with several college girls — taps into every conversation we’re still having about power and consent. Chuck summons Hannah to his stately apartment, where she attempts to explain why taking advantage of his literary stature to hook up with young women is predatory, while he hurls every trick in the Bad Men Handbook at her: flattery (“You’re very bright”); faux honesty (“I’m a horny motherfucker with the impulse control of a toddler”); defensiveness (“These girls throw themselves at me!”); casual intimacy (“You’re more to me than just a pretty face”). With astonishing precision and economy, Dunham turns the tables such that by the end of the episode — that is, by the time Chuck and Hannah are lying clothed atop his bed, and he takes out his dick and flops it onto her thigh — Hannah has fallen prey to the very manipulations she was calling out. A hallmark moment in a show that will only age better with time. — M.F.

Everybody Loves Raymond, “Baggage” (Season 7, Episode 22)

Like Carl Reiner once did with The Dick Van Dyke Show , Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal liked to come up with stories by asking his writers what they’d been up to with their families lately. More often than not, there was a conflict that mapped pretty easily onto the Barone family, like an argument that writer Tucker Cawley had with his wife about who would put away the last suitcase left over from a recent vacation. The fictionalized version of it becomes a cold war of sorts between Ray (Ray Romano) and Debra (Patricia Heaton), even as Marie (Doris Roberts) compares the stalemate to a fight that once almost wrecked her marriage to Frank (Peter Boyle). (This leads to one of the great sitcom lines that makes zero sense out of context and seems absolutely logical in context: “Don’t let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.”) The whole thing culminates in a slapstick battle between the spouses, demonstrating the impressive physical-comedy chops that Romano and Heaton developed over the series’ run. — A.S.

King of the Hill, “Bobby Goes Nuts” (Season 6, Episode 1)

Some episodes made this list because they do innovative things with episodic structure, or because they have something deep to say about the human condition. This one’s here because Bobby Hill (Pamela Adlon) kicks a bunch of guys in the groin. Well, no. This one’s here because he learns to do this from taking a women’s self-defense class at the Y — at the unwitting urging of Hank (Mike Judge), who just wants his son to learn how to stand up to bullies — and incorporates not only the crotch attacks, but a high-pitched screech of, “THAT’S MY PURSE! I DON’T KNOW YOU!” every time he does it, just like he and his middle-aged, female classmates were taught. Sometimes, you just have to cherish the little things, you know? — A.S.

Insecure, “High-Like” (Season 3, Episode 5)

The struggling women of Insecure can’t even catch a break when they head to Coachella to see Beyoncé headline. Newly unemployed Issa (Rae) needs everything to go perfectly for the group’s last hurrah before Tiffany (Amanda Seales) gives birth, while Molly (Yvonne Orji) is preoccupied with work, and Keli (Natasha Rothwell) just wants to have a good time. The girls (minus Tiffany, or so we thought…) take edibles and pop so much MDMA they are forced to miss Bey, instead finding themselves in a drug-fueled frenzy that makes the chaos and humor feel like they’re seeping through the screen. Keli takes “Beyoncé or bust” too far and pisses herself after getting Tasered by festival security. Tiffany cries in a closet and tells her husband, “It’s our weed, baby” after admitting to “one bite” of a pot brownie. Molly bugs out and types nonsense on her work laptop, while Issa insists the mess of the night is all her fault. For an episode that starts with a silly Thug Yoda appearance and ends with the abrupt, emotionally-charged return of Issa’s ex-boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), it packs in one hell of a trip. — M.G.

Game of Thrones, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (Season 8, Episode 2)

Because Game of Thrones presented spectacle on a scale never before seen on television, it’s easy to forget that the series first became beloved when its budget was much smaller and it couldn’t afford to depict massive battles, dragon attacks, or ice zombie hordes. That stuff, when it came with frequency, was icing on the cake that was the deep roster of memorable characters George R.R. Martin had created, who the GoT writers brought to such vivid life. Even in its later, more epic seasons, the show was still most potent when it placed people first and carnage second. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place the evening before a coalition of heroes from across Westeros will face the Night King and his undead army. It’s almost all talking, as the characters have the kinds of conversations you’d expect when they don’t believe they’ll survive the next day. The most powerful of these is the moment that provides the episode with its title, as Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) realizes that, by the laws of Westeros, he can fulfill the dreams of his old friend Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) and grant her the knighthood she spent her whole life believing her gender disqualified her from achieving. The actual battle with the Night King winds up being the most visually underwhelming episode of the series, but writer Bryan Cogman’s love letter to these characters still resonates years later. — A.S.

The Good Place, “Michael’s Gambit” (Season 1, Episode 13)

THE GOOD PLACE -- "Michael's Gambit" Episode 113 -- Pictured: (l-r) Ted Danson as Michael, Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop -- (Photo by: Vivian Zink/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

TV has a mixed track record with twist endings. For every Twilight Zone , it seems there are a half-dozen disasters like the Dexter season where Edward James Olmos was a ghost, or the Westworld season where Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson were playing the same character — both ideas that fans sniffed out long before those series’ producers expected them to. But then there is the marvelous conclusion to the first season of the metaphysical comedy The Good Place . For the previous 12 episodes, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and her friends had struggled to figure out why the seemingly perfect afterlife in which they found themselves had so many obvious flaws. In the end, it’s dum-dum Eleanor who’s the only one smart enough to see through the genial exterior of their host, Michael (Ted Danson), and recognize that, for all their worry of ending up in the Bad Place, “ This is the Bad Place!” In hindsight, the idea was clearly seeded; some viewers did guess it in advance, but not so many that it ruined the surprise for everyone else. Rather than undercut everything that happened before, the twist is in keeping with the show’s basic premise about heaven being not all it’s cracked up to be. And it set the series off in new, increasingly wild directions, rather than repeating the same jokes about fro-yo for years on end. — A.S.

Star Trek, “City on the Edge of Forever” (Season 1, Episode 28)

LOS ANGELES - APRIL 6: Star Trek, The Original Series, episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" first broadcast on April 6, 1967. From left, Joan Collins (as Edith Keeler) and William Shatner (as Captain James T. Kirk) in year 1930. Image is a screen grab. (CBS via Getty Images)

This episode, written by author Harlan Ellison, offers one time-travel tragedy to rule them all. When a deliriously ill Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) staggers through a time portal on a mysterious planet, he somehow alters history enough that the Enterprise is no longer in orbit above the away team. It’s up to Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to follow their friend, winding up in Depression-era New York, where interplanetary lothario Jim Kirk finds himself falling hard for do-gooder Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). Unfortunately, Spock figures out that Edith is a pivot point for the future of humanity, where her life will ironically lead to centuries of pain and misery, while her death will lead to the timeline our heroes know well. Torn between his duty to the galaxy and the desires of his own heart, Kirk allows Edith to be fatally struck by a car, in a tearjerker ending that wound up echoing throughout the future of TV science fiction. — A.S.

My So-Called Life, ”Pilot” (Episode 1)

UNITED STATES - AUGUST 25: MY SO-CALLED LIFE - pilot - 8/25/94, Claire Danes (pictured) played Angela Chase, a 15-year-old who wanted to break out of the mold as a strait-laced teen-ager and straight-A student. , (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

Meet Angela Chase, a high school sophomore who offers us a look into her life in a mundane suburb of Pittsburgh. She has a major crush on Jordan Catalano (“I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great”) and is quite possibly the only person in history to be jealous of Anne Frank (“She was stuck in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked”). My So-Called Life premiered 30 years ago, giving teens a much more realistic portrayal of what it’s like to endure the “battlefield” that is high school over primetime soap operas like 90210. And the pilot lays that groundwork perfectly, with Angela (Claire Danes) narrating as she navigates her strained relationship with her mom, outgrows her best friend and abandons her for two cool, kindred spirits, and, yes, watches Jordan (Jared Leto) excel at leaning. A battlefield indeed. — Angie Martoccio

Master of None, “Thanksgiving” (Season 2, Episode 8)

Though Aziz Ansari was star, frequent writer, and occasional director of his series about an actor named Dev trying to find meaning in his life, he periodically turned over episodes from the first two seasons to other characters, demonstrating that their stories had just as much richness as Dev’s, if not more. “Thanksgiving” tracks many years of the holiday, as Dev’s best friend Denise (Lena Waithe, who co-wrote the episode with Ansari) gradually comes out to her family, slowly but surely wearing down the resistance of her mother (Angela Bassett), aunt (Kym Whitley), and grandmother (Venida Evans). Partly inspired by Waithe’s own coming-out story, the warm and knowing episode was such a creative success that when the series finally returned for a third season four years later, it was built entirely around Denise’s marriage, with Dev now a minor figure in what was once his own show. — A.S.

For All Mankind, “The Grey” (Season 2, Episode 10)

The second season of this sci-fi drama, set in an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat America to the moon, triggering a never-ending space race, is the platonic ideal of the intensely serialized, “10-hour Movie” approach so much of dramatic television has taken in the years since The Wire , and that so few shows actually do well. Everything that happens throughout Season Two, even the parts that seem slow and pointless when you first watch them, have thrilling payoffs in the finale , where Earth seems on the verge of nuclear Armageddon, while American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts wage war on and around the moon. All the earlier subplots matter, like Gordo (Michael Dorman) putting his new devotion to jogging to good use when he and ex-wife Tracy (Sarah Jones) have to run across the lunar surface, clad only in spacesuits jury-rigged out of duct tape, to prevent a nuclear meltdown. — A.S.

St. Elsewhere, “Time Heals” (Season 4, Episodes 17 & 18)

ST. ELSEWHERE -- "Time Heals: Part 1" Episode 17 -- Pictured: (l-r) Christina Pickles as Nurse Helen Rosenthal, Ed Flanders as Dr. Donald Westphall, Norman Lloyd as Dr. Daniel Auschlander -- Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

This innovative hospital drama pushed the boundaries of its format throughout its run. One episode was set largely in the afterlife. Another told a quartet of stories about the stages of life from birth through death. The most audacious, and satisfying, of these, is the two-part “Time Heals,” which aired over consecutive nights. As St. Eligius prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, we get glimpses of the hospital across the decades, and see how Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), Dr. Craig (William Daniels), and the other senior members of the staff each came to work there. Beyond all the backstory — including a great guest turn by Edward Hermann as Father McCabe, the priest who founded the hospital and helped raise the orphaned Westphall — “Time Heals” impresses because each vignette from the past is presented in the style of movies (or, in some cases, television) of that period: Scenes in the 1930s are in black and white, ones in the Sixties are much more brightly lit, and so on. — A.S.

Larry Sanders, “Flip” (Season 6, Episode 12)

“You could sense there would never be another show like that again,” The Larry Sanders Show actress Ileana Douglas said of the show’s final scene. “And there hasn’t been.” As Rip Torn, Jeffrey Tambor, and show creator Garry Shandling group-hug in an empty studio, a poignant sadness infuses the acerbic wit that Shandling’s revolutionary series displayed for six seasons. Set around Larry’s final show, the Peabody Award-winning episode features gags that remain timeless: Jim Carrey serenading Larry on-air while excoriating him off-air, Tom Petty telling Clint Black to “quiet down, cowpoke” before getting into a fistfight with Greg Kinnear, and Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres catching Larry in a lie that destroys both the show-within-the-show itself and Larry’s glass-fragile ego. It’s a brilliant ending that balances pathos (“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do without you,” Larry says to his audience before choking up. “God bless you. You may now flip”) with the series’ trademark send-up of Hollywood phoniness (Torn instinctively telling a bumped Bruno Kirby on the last show that “we’ll have you on another time.”) The show that invented the modern sitcom and stuck the landing perfectly. — Jason Newman

Orange Is the New Black, “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again” (Season 4, Episode 13)

The Netflix prison series is the only show in Emmy history to be reclassified from the comedy categories to the drama ones, in part because its tone was so elusive, even to the people making it. But when Orange wanted to get totally serious, it was incredible, like in this episode set in the aftermath of the shocking death of beloved inmate Poussey at the hands of a guard. As Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and the other women grieve the loss of Poussey, then fume at the realization that the guard will go unpunished while most of them are stuck behind bars for much lesser crimes, their pain and rage boils over into a prison riot that will take up the entire following season. — A.S.

The Andy Griffith Show, “Opie the Birdman” (Season 4, Episode 1)

LOS ANGELES - AUGUST 19: The Andy Griffith Show, episode 'Opie The Birdman'. (From left) Andy Griffith (as Andy Taylor)' and Ron Howard (as Opie) appear on the "Opie the Birdman" episode of The Andy Griffith Show on August 19, 1963. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

The Andy Griffith Show set the template for broad, light, homespun small-town humor, but the best episode of the long-running 1960s show is as raw as a modern prestige TV feelings-fest. Gifted a slingshot by Don Knots’ iconically bumbling deputy Barney Fife, a young Opie Taylor (played by a nine-year-old Ron Howard) accidentally kills a bird, orphaning its three young offspring. “You gonna give me a whippin’?” Opie asks his father, Sheriff Andy Taylor, played by the show’s star, Andy Griffith. Not this time. Instead, TV’s all-time cool-headed dad simply opens Opie’s window so his boy can listen to the newly motherless baby birds in the tree outside, filling the Mayberry night with their desolate emo chirps. Howard later said the tears he cried in the scene where he kills the bird were real, because he was thinking of his recently deceased dog. The episode doesn’t have any big laughs, a bold move considering it was a season-opener. But by breaking with formula, they made a heartbreaking classic. — Jon Dolan

Good Times, “The I.Q. Test” (Season 2, Episode 7)

As the Seventies sitcom’s iconic gospel theme song noted, there was a lot of scratchin’ and survivin’ to do for the Evans family in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. And the Maude spinoff was so smart in illustrating the many ways the deck was stacked against Florida (Esther Rolle), James (John Amos), and their kids. In “The I.Q. Test,” everyone is shocked when gifted youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) flunks a school standardized test, until Michael explains that he refused to finish after recognizing that the test is racially biased, with questions geared towards the experience of reasonably well-off white children. The episode nimbly addresses systemic problems in a way that few shows were even thinking about at the time, much less willing to incorporate into their scripts. And it does it while still having some fun with the situation, through the obliviousness of the white test proctor. — A.S.

Moonlighting, “Atomic Shakespeare” (Season 3, Episode 7)

UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 25: MOONLIGHTING - "Atomic Shakespeare" -Season Three - 11/25/86, A schoolboy hoping to watch "Moonlighting" but forced to study Shakespeare, daydreams about the cast performing their own version of "The Taming of the Shrew" with Dave (Bruce Willis) as Petruchio and Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) as Kate., (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

At the point “Atomic Shakespeare” rolled around in the third season of Moonlighting , the private detective comedy had already established two things: 1) that the onscreen chemistry of co-stars Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was as scorching as any couple — even an unconsummated one like this — ever put on television; and 2) that the show’s writers didn’t feel in any way bound by the conventions of genre or era, as they had already done a black-and-white film noir tribute, as well as put Willis’ David into a musical number helmed by Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen. So it felt wholly natural to translate the familiar David and Maddie dynamic back to Shakespearean times, with a postmodern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew , with Willis and Shepherd playing David and Maddie-flavored versions of Petrucchio and Kate, and that at various points features ninjas, a horse wearing sunglasses, and wannabe blues singer Willis wailing on the classic rock hit “Good Lovin’.” The episode even gets away with rewriting the Bard: Instead of Kate submitting to Petrucchio’s insistence that the sun is in fact the moon, as a way of humoring her new husband, she instead stands her ground and gets him to admit that, “My wife hath called it: ’Tis the sun, and not the moon at all!” — A.S.

Severance, “The We We Are” (Season 1, Episode 9)

By the time we reach the Season One finale of the satirical workplace thriller Severance , the employees of the macrodata refinement department of Lumon Industries have reached their boiling point. Part of a cohort who volunteered for a surgical procedure that separates their work selves, called “Innies,” from their personal selves, called “Outies,” they all live bifurcated lives, where one half has no clue what the other half does. But now, the Innies, sure they’re getting the short end of the deal, are fed up. With the help of Dylan (Zach Cherry), who hacks into a control room, Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), and Irving (John Turturro) find a way to inhabit their Outie personas — and, as a result, learn all kinds of things about themselves that they aren’t fully prepared to know. Mark faces his wife’s death in a car accident. Irving tries to reignite his workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken), who retired his Innie self. And Helly is shocked to discover she’s descended from the family that championed Lumon’s severance procedure. A master class in building and maintaining tension, the episode reaches a heart-racing crescendo before an abrupt, cliffhanger ending. Premiering two years after the pandemic, as many employees returned to the office with shifted priorities and revamped notions of “work-life balance,” the Dan Erickson-created, Ben Stiller -directed series captures something essential about our modern malaise. But as the mirror maze of this episode shows, completely severing work and home may not be the fix we think it would. — Kalia Richardson

Review With Forrest MacNeil, “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes” (Season 1, Episode 3)

In this cult comedy, Andy Daly plays Forrest MacNeil, a pompous fool who has committed himself to the self-destructive task of undergoing and reviewing whatever life experiences his viewers ask him to. Installments prior to this one saw Forrest becoming addicted to cocaine, acting racist, and trying to make a sex tape. But the true folly of the exercise doesn’t hit until the third episode, where two different binge-eating assignments are wrapped around Forrest having to divorce his wife, without even being allowed to explain to her why he’s doing it. It’s a classic case of a joke building and building, until we get a traumatized Forrest declaring to his awful audience, “Perhaps I simply understood, from the darkest corner of my soul, that these pancakes couldn’t kill me, because I was already dead.” — A.S.

Homeland, “Q&A” (Season 2, Episode 5)

Damian Lewis as Nicholas "Nick" Brody and Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland (Season 2, Episode 9). - Photo: Kent Smith/SHOWTIME - Photo ID: Homeland_ 209_0616

When this spy thriller about domestic terrorism ended its first season without brainwashed double agent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) going through with a planned suicide bombing, it felt like a failure of nerve from the creators of a show that would have been best served as a one-and-done. But the first half of Season Two, featuring an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Brody and CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), was excellent, and led to the series’ single-best episode, where Brody gets arrested and Carrie is given a limited window to interrogate him in the hopes of turning him into an asset. Danes and Lewis put on a mesmerizing acting duet, so potent it’s easy to ignore a silly subplot about Brody’s daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) and her boyfriend Finn (a young Timothée Chalamet) getting into a hit-and-run incident. It was largely downhill for Homeland from here, at least until the producers were finally willing to kill off Brody for real, but that takes nothing from “Q&A.” — A.S.

China Beach, “Hello Goodbye” (Season 4, Episode 16)

CHINA BEACH - "Hello-Goodbye" - Airdate: July 22, 1991. (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
DANA DELANY

Long before cable and streaming dramas began to experiment with fractured timelines, there was the final season of this wildly underrated series about the staff of a U.S. Army hospital base during the Vietnam War. Episodes bounced back and forth between events at various points in the war and in the lives of nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) and her surviving colleagues throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Much of the series finale takes place in 1988, as recovering alcoholic McMurphy warily attends a China Beach reunion event, then joins her pals in an impromptu (and incredibly poignant) visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But “Hello Goodbye” also takes us back to China Beach one last time, to show us McMurphy caring for a dying soldier she knows she can’t save, as a closing reminder of the costs of war, whether or not you fight in them. — A.S.

The Jeffersons, “Sorry, Wrong Meeting” (Season 7, Episode 14)

All in the Family , the parent show of The Jeffersons , had already done a story about the Ku Klux Klan four years prior to the KKK-themed “Sorry, Wrong Meeting.” But the very nature of the spinoff and its leading man made the latter episode feel anything like a rehash. A racist neighbor decides that he can’t tolerate the presence of Black tenants like George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and hosts a Klan rally to drive this undesirable element out of the building. But he invites the supremely WASPy Tom Willis (Franklin Cover), not realizing that Tom is best friends with George. Tom mistakenly assumes that the meeting will be about a recent spate of break-ins, and later suggests George attend with him. It’s a perfect set-up for both comedy and drama, as an oblivious George enters and cheers on what he thinks is rhetoric aimed solely at low-class criminals, rather than an upstanding businessman like himself, while the meeting’s vile host is shocked by his presence. But then some earlier business about CPR training leads to a great, dramatic climax: This spectacle agitates the Klan leader into a heart attack, and George turns out to be the only one in the room capable of saving the life of someone who thinks of him as less than human. — A.S.

What We Do in the Shadows, “On the Run” (Season 2, Episode 6)

For a show that specializes in absurdist, nonsensical humor, creator Jemaine Clement and company take it next-level with “On the Run.” The episode plucks pompous vampire Laszlo ( Matt Berry , who in July finally got an Emmy nomination for his work on this show) out of Staten Island, where he lives with four roommates — his undead wife Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Prosch), 760-year-old Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Nandor’s familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — and relocates him to small-town Pennsylvania, where he’s hoping to escape an old friend (Mark Hamill) who’s come to collect on a nearly two-century-old debt of unpaid rent. A stranger in a strange land, Laszlo goes undercover as a “regular human bartender” named Jackie Daytona and, naturally, becomes an avid supporter of the local girls’ volleyball team. His disguise of dark-wash jeans and a toothpick is enough to fool his pursuer… until a mirror (and the removal of the toothpick from his mouth) exposes his true identity. Fully withdrawn from the show’s usual despondent setting, “On the Run” humorously plays Laszlo’s macabre nature against his desire to help 14-year-old girls make it to their state championship. What more could you want from a small-town, salt-of-the-earth bloodsucker? — CTJ

Friday Night Lights, “Mud Bowl” (Season 1, Episode 20)

When a train derailment near the school forces the relocation of a crucial playoff game, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), seeking a neutral battleground, opts for the most retro possible site: a cow pasture that turns into a swampy mess after a downpour starts during the contest. While everyone else thinks the coach has lost his mind by eschewing a modern facility, he sees it as a back-to-basics location that will allow himself, his players, and the Dillon High School fans to reconnect with the pure essence of the sport, rather than all of the usual cynical distractions. In the same way, “Mud Bowl” provides the most concentrated blast of emotions that this most heart-tugging of all dramas ever provided: the joy of seeing the Panthers have fun and play well despite the weather conditions, and the horror of Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) barely fighting off a rapist while skipping the game to study. — A.S.

Better Things, “Batceañera” (Season 4, Episode 9)

BETTER THINGS "Batceñera” Episode 9 (Airs Thursday, April 23) -- Pictured: Hannah Alligood as Frankie. CR: Suzanne Tenner/FX

Pamela Adlon’s stunning, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about Sam Fox, a single mom-slash-actress raising three daughters, is packed with installments that feel worthy of being called the best, but “Batceñera” brilliantly captures what makes this underrated gem of a show so special. It opens with a surprise: Frankie (Hannah Alligood), Sam’s headstrong middle daughter, perfectly reenacting a Jerry Lewis bit from Who’s Minding the Store? set to composer Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter.” The heart of the episode is the blending of a bat mitzvah and a quinceañera for 15-year-old Frankie and her friend Reinita, respectively. The episode has everything: carnitas and knishes, a replica of Frida Kahlo’s suit, an all-female mariachi band, great needle-drops, poignant mother-daughter exchanges with each girl, Sam’s ex finally feeling a bit of proper shame for not being there for his kids, and much, much more. It’s a batceañera you never want to end. — Lisa Tozzi

The Honeymooners, “The Man From Space” (Episode 14)

For fans of The Honeymooners , it’s impossible to choose an all-time favorite episode, but like Jackie Gleason himself, “The Man From Space” is one of the greats. Originally airing on New Year’s Eve 1955, it pit Gleason’s blustering Ralph Kramden against his dimwitted pal o’ mine Ed Norton (Art Carney) in the Raccoon Lodge costume contest. Norton rents his outfit — a foppish French getup that’s supposed to evoke the engineer who built the sewers of Paris — while Ralph aims to prove he can do better by making a costume out of everyday items: a flashlight, the ice-box door, a kitchen pot as a helmet. His vision is “the man from space,” but neither his long-suffering wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) nor Norton take it that way. When the live audience finally sees Ralph emerge in all his resplendent glory, their reaction is unhinged, even as pieces of his spacesuit unexpectedly fall to the floor, teeing up a classic Gleason ad lib: “Let me have that,” he barks at Alice, “that’s my denaturizer.” The final scene at the costume party, with Norton barging in from his shift in the sewer in a gas mask, is one for the ages. — Joseph Hudak

Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting” (Season 5, Episode 12)

Alan Ball’s HBO drama usually kicked off its episodes with a grisly and/or highly ironic death. For the series finale, however, the showrunner opted for something a little different: He’d begin the last chapter of the Fisher family and their associates not with a life being snuffed out, but with a birth — and then he’d end the show not with one death, but a dozen. Having spent the bulk of its swan song tying up all of its loose narrative ends, Six Feet Under then shows us how every one of its surviving main characters would eventually shuffle off this mortal coil: Matriarch Ruth Fisher will die of old age with her family around her; Federico has a heart attack on a cruise ship; David’s security-guard husband Keith is murdered during a robbery, etc. Set to the Sia song “Breathe,” this justly praised montage doubles as a full-frontal assault on your tear ducts. It saves Claire’s passing for last, and before she takes her last breath at age 102, we see evidence of friends, loved ones, professional accolades, and personal memories all around her. For a series so devoted to sudden death, it goes out with a tribute to a long life well-lived. — David Fear

Columbo, “Etude in Black” (Season 2, Episode 1)

As rumpled homicide detective Lt. Columbo, Peter Falk was so superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob. But the iconic mystery series was at its best whenever Falk had a strong foil. This episode, with the dogged cop trying to prove a famous orchestra conductor murdered his mistress, has a home-field advantage in this regard, as the bad guy is played by Falk’s close friend and frequent collaborator John Cassavetes. Beyond the actors’ ease around one another, the dynamic crackles because the Columbo formula depends on the killers being too arrogant to assume this mumbling schnook could possibly outsmart them — and Cassavetes had a gift for playing smug and irritated. — A.S.

Friends, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” (Season 5, Episode 14)

FRIENDS -- "The One Where Everybody Finds Out" Episode 14 -- Air Date 02/11/1999 -- Pictured: (l-r) Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

The best Friends moments come from full-ensemble episodes (Season Three’s “ The One Where No One’s Ready ,” Season Seven’s “ The One With Monica’s Thunder ”) where all six buds join forces and create a killing floor of comedy. The result is always a propulsive 22 minutes that doesn’t have a single dull moment, and “ The One Where Everybody Finds Out ” is this dynamic at its best. Secret’s out: Everyone has found out about Monica and Chandler’s relationship (OK, maybe Ross is a little late), and the gang play a game of chicken, one-upping each other to see who cracks first. Phoebe’s line, “They don’t know that we know they know we know!” embodies everything great about this episode, and the wit and wordplay that make the series a classic. No surprise it was nominated for three Emmys. — A.M.

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COMMENTS

The Lost City movie review & film summary (2022)
Loretta and Alan's eventual romance is unavoidable, but "The Lost City" does a great job exploring the mounting chemistry between Bullock and Tatum's characters. In particular, the movie highlights Alan's emotional intelligence and unwavering support. He may be the kind of guy who refers to Loretta as a "human mummy," but he also ...
The Lost City
Edward Porter Times (UK) [Channing Tatum's] energetic and eager to please — virtues he shares with the film. Rated: 3/5 Aug 24, 2022 Full Review Wenlei Ma News.com.au The Lost City is exactly ...
The Lost City
The Lost City is a terrific throwback to studio romcoms of the 90s and 00s, with two true-blue movie star performances from Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum. Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 ...
'The Lost City' Review: Raiders of the 1980s Blockbusters
Everything looks bright and in focus, and there are moments when the physical comedy pops, mostly when Pitt swashbuckles in. It's clear that someone involved in the making of this movie is a fan ...
'The Lost City' Review: Sandra Bullock's Guilty-Pleasure ...
'The Lost City' Review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum Are Cute Together in Guilty-Pleasure Treasure Movie Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (Headliners), March 12, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13.
The Lost City (2022)
The Lost City: Directed by Aaron Nee, Adam Nee. With Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph. A reclusive romance novelist on a book tour with her cover model gets swept up in a kidnapping attempt that lands them both in a cutthroat jungle adventure.
The Lost City Movie Review (2022): Sandra Bullock & Channing ...
The Lost City has all the hallmarks of a star-studded, blowout, blockbuster-style caper with chases, explosions, escapes, scuffles and merry, B-movie self-awareness.
'The Lost City' is silly, sexy, movie-star fun
'The Lost City' review: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum are both sexy and silly The Lost City is mostly a chance to watch Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum be charming and silly together.That turns ...
The Lost City finally fills in the very specific movie gap that The
Reviews. The Lost City has widely been compared to 1984's adventure rom-com Romancing the Stone, especially given the similarity of their stories. But Lost City is more like The Mummy, with high ...
'The Lost City' review: charming odd-couple comedy that's surprisingly rare
16th April 2022. The Lost City is a first-class adventure film of the type they don't make much anymore. Sandra Bullock plays bored author Loretta, a woman who churns out novels full of ...
The Lost City review: A big screwball swing for old-school action-comedy
The Lost City review: A big screwball swing for old-school action-comedy. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are 'Lost' and on the loose in a breezy, patently ridiculous throwback to '80s romps.
'The Lost City' Review: Starpower Saves Formulaic Screwball Comedy
March 13, 2022 12:09 am. "The Lost City". Paramount. In Adam and Aaron Nee's " The Lost City ," a wild, careening screwball comedy set in the jungle, the stars are on full display — and ...
The Lost City Review
The Lost City Review. The Lost City will hit theaters on March 25, 2022. The Lost City scratches that particular Channing Tatum itch, the same one satisfied by his directorial debut Dog, where he ...
'The Lost City' Review: Sandra Bullock & Channing Tatum in SXSW Comedy
The Lost City. The Bottom Line An enjoyable throwback. Release date: March 25 (Paramount Pictures) Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Headliners) Cast: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da ...
The Lost City Review
13 Apr 2022. Original Title: The Lost City. Death cannot stop true love; it can only delay it for a while. Or so The Princess Bride taught us. Sure enough, the much bally-hooed death of the big ...
The Lost City Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 13 ): Kids say ( 27 ): Treasure hunting + adventure + comedy + romance seems like a formula for cinematic success, and, indeed, Paramount Pictures has struck gold here. Giving off Romancing the Stone vibes, The Lost City has a hilarious script that's made even funnier with perfect casting.
'The Lost City' review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum charm
March 24, 2022 1:46 PM PT. Midway through the tomb-raiding, car-crashing, butt-baring shenanigans of "The Lost City," Channing Tatum pauses to remind Sandra Bullock not to judge a book by its ...
'The Lost City' review: Sandra Bullock ...
Movie review. How charming is "The Lost City"? So charming that the villain is played by Daniel Radcliffe. So charming that it leaves you wondering why nobody has asked Sandra Bullock and ...
'The Lost City' Review: Sandra Bullock And Channing Tatum Adventure Movie
The Lost City takes a lot of its cues from films like Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, and every other movie of this type. It fails to stand on its own with so much being pulled from earlier ...
The Lost City Review: Bullock & Tatum Charm In Fun Old-School Adventure
The Lost City has a lot going for it: a charming cast, genuinely funny moments, and some adrenaline-fueled adventure. The film harkens back to the days when such romcom adventures were more of a constant. Bullock and Tatum have the bickering down, but when things slow down between them, they're able to understand each other a lot better than before.
The Lost City (2022 film)
The Lost City is a 2022 American action-adventure comedy film directed by Aaron and Adam Nee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, based on a story by Seth Gordon. [5] Starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Brad Pitt, the film follows a romance novelist and her cover model, who must escape a billionaire who wants her to find a ...
The Lost City
Brilliant, but reclusive author Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) has spent her career writing about exotic places in her popular romance-adventure novels featuring handsome cover model Alan (Channing Tatum), who has dedicated his life to embodying the hero character, "Dash." While on tour promoting her new book with Alan, Loretta is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) who ...
The Lost City Review: It Can't Quite Capture Old Movie Magic
The Lost City, released this weekend, is the kind of film meant to rest on the laurels of star power. Not just Bullock's, but her immediate cast members', too. The film — which scans as ...
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
When Frank (Danny DeVito) promotes Charlie (Charlie Day) from a sleazy janitor to manager of the bar, he sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events that puts each character's Achilles' heels ...

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Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (Headliners), March 12, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 112 MIN.

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