In 1954, a young David Attenborough made his début as the star of a new nature show called “Zoo Quest.” The docuseries, which ran for nearly a decade on the BBC, was a sensation that set Attenborough down the path of his life’s work: exposing viewers to our planet’s most miraculous creatures and landscapes from the comfort of their living rooms. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace Attenborough’s filmography from “Zoo Quest” to his program, “Mammals,” a six-part series on BBC America narrated by the now- ninety-eight-year-old presenter. In the seventy years since “Zoo Quest” first aired, the genre it helped create has had to reckon with the effects of the climate crisis—and to figure out how to address such hot-button issues onscreen. By highlighting conservation efforts that have been successful, the best of these programs affirm our continued agency in the planet’s future. “One thing I got from ‘Mammals’ was not pure doom,” Schwartz says. “There are some options here. We have choices to make.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Mammals” (2024)
“Zoo Quest” (1954-63)
“Are We Changing Planet Earth?” (2006)
“The Snow Leopard,” by Peter Matthiessen
“My Octopus Teacher” (2020)
“Life on Our Planet” (2023)
“I Like to Get High at Night and Think About Whales,” by Samantha Irby

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode originally aired on July 11, 2024.

Westward expansion has been mythologized onscreen for more than a century—and its depiction has always been entwined with the politics and anxieties of the era. In the 1939 film “Stagecoach,” John Wayne crystallized our image of the archetypal cowboy; decades later, he played another memorable frontiersman in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which questions how society is constructed. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the genre from these cinematic classics to its recent resurgence, marked by big-budget entries including “American Primeval,” which depicts nineteenth-century territorial conflicts in brutal, unsparing detail, and by the wild popularity of Taylor Sheridan’s “neo-Westerns,” which bring the time-honored form to the modern day. Sheridan’s series, namely “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” often center on a world-weary patriarch tasked with protecting land and property from outside forces waiting to seize it. Sometimes described as “red-state shows,” these works are deliberately slippery about their politics—but they pull in millions of viewers from across the ideological spectrum. What accounts for this success? “Whether or not we want to be living in a Western,” Schwartz says, “we very much still are.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Yellowstone” (2018–24)
“Landman” (2024—)
“Horizon: An American Epic” (2024)
“American Primeval” (2025—)
“Stagecoach” (1939)
“Dances with Wolves” (1990)
“Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman” (1993–98)
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962)
“Shōgun” (2024)
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948)
“Oppenheimer” (2023)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

The first person is a narrative style as old as storytelling itself—one that, at its best, allows us to experience the world through another person’s eyes. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace how the technique has been used across mediums throughout history. They discuss the ways in which fiction writers have played with the unstable triangulation between author, reader, and narrator, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” a book that adopts the perspective of a serial killer, and whose publication provoked public outcry. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys”—an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel—is a bold new attempt to deploy the first person onscreen. The film points to a larger question about the bounds of narrative, and of selfhood: Can we ever truly occupy someone else’s point of view? “The answer, in large part, is no,” Cunningham says. “But that impossibility is, for me, the actual promise: not the promise of a final mind meld but a confrontation, a negotiation with the fact that our perspectives really are our own.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Nickel Boys” (2024)
“The Nickel Boys,” by Colson Whitehead
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Meet the Director Who Reinvented the Act of Seeing,” by Salamishah Tillet (The New York Times)
“Great Books Don’t Make Great Films, but ‘Nickel Boys’ Is a Glorious Exception,” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
“Lady in the Lake” (1947)
“Dark Passage” (1947)
“Enter the Void” (2010)
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Doom (1993)
“The Berlin Stories,” by Christopher Isherwood
“American Psycho,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“The Adventures of Augie March,” by Saul Bellow
“Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby?” by Anonymous (The Cut)
“Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930” at the Guggenheim Museum

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Margaret Talbot, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, recounted that when animators at Pixar got stuck on a project they’d file into a screening room to watch a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Best known for works like “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” and “Spirited Away,” which received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, in 2002, he is considered by some to be the first true auteur of children’s entertainment. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the themes that have emerged across Miyazaki’s œuvre, from bittersweet depictions of late childhood to meditations on the attractions and dangers of technology. Miyazaki’s latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” is a semi-autobiographical story in which a young boy grieving his mother embarks on a quest through a magical realm as the Second World War rages in reality. The Japanese title, “How Do You Live?,” reveals the philosophical underpinnings of what may well be the filmmaker’s final work. “Wherever you are—whether it seems to be peaceful, whether things are scary—there’s something happening somewhere,” Cunningham says. “And you have to learn this as a child. There’s pain somewhere. And you have to learn how to live your life along multiple tracks.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989)
“My Neighbor Totoro” (1988)
“Old Enough!” (1991-present)
“Princess Mononoke” (1997)
“Spirited Away” (2001)
“The Boy and the Heron” (2023)
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis (1950)
“The Moomins series” by Tove Jansson (1945-70)
“The Wind Rises” (2013)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode originally aired on December 7, 2023.

This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty million dollars to make—and brought in less than ten per cent of that at the box office. And what was Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump but a fiasco of the highest order? On this episode of Critics at Large, recorded live at Condé Nast’s offices at One World Trade Center, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz pronounce 2024 “the year of the flop,” and draw on a range of recent examples—from the Yankees’ disappointing performance at the World Series to Katy Perry’s near-universally mocked music video for “Woman’s World”—to anatomize the phenomenon. What are the constituent parts of a flop, and what might these missteps reveal about the relationship between audiences and public figures today? The hosts also consider the surprising upsides to such categorical failures. “In some ways, always succeeding for an artist is a problem . . . because I think you retain fear,” Schwartz says. “If you can get through it, there really can be something on the other side.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

HBO’s “Industry” (2020–)
The 2024 World Series
The 2024 Election
“Megalopolis” (2024)
“Woman’s World,” by Katy Perry
“ ‘Woman’s World’ Track Review,” by Shaad D’Souza (Pitchfork)
“Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and the Unstable Hierarchy of Pop” (The New Yorker)
“Tarot, Tech, and Our Age of Magical Thinking” (The New Yorker)
“Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and the Benefits of Beef” (The New Yorker)
“Am I Racist?” (2024)
“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1” (2024)
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Madame Web” (2024)
“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fugees
“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville
“NYC Prep” (2009)
“Princesses: Long Island” (2013)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and far between. Meanwhile, one of the biggest films of the season is Jon M. Chu’s earnest (and lengthy) adaptation of “Wicked,” the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West that first premièred on the Great White Way nearly twenty years ago—and has been a smash hit ever since. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss why “Wicked” is resonating with audiences in 2024. They consider it alongside other recent movie musicals, such as “Emilia Pérez,” which centers on the transgender leader of a Mexican cartel, and Todd Phillips’s follow-up to “Joker,” the confounding “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Then they step back to trace the evolution of the musical, from the first shows to marry song and story in the nineteen-twenties to the seventies-era innovations of figures like Stephen Sondheim. Amid the massive commercial, technological, and aesthetic shifts of the last century, how has the form changed, and why has it endured? “People who don’t like musicals will often criticize their artificiality,” Schwartz says. “Some things in life are so heightened . . . yet they’re part of the real. Why not put them to music and have singing be part of it?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Wicked” (2024)
“The Animals That Made It All Worth It,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“Ben Shapiro Reviews ‘Wicked’ ”
“Frozen” (2013)
“Emilia Pérez” (2024)
“Joker: Folie à Deux” (2024)
“ ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Make ’Em Laugh (and Yawn),” by Manohla Dargis (the New York Times)
“Hair” (1979)
“The Sound of Music” (1965)
“Anything Goes” (1934)
“Show Boat” (1927)
“Oklahoma” (1943)
“Mean Girls” (2017)
“Hamilton” (2015)
“Wicked” (2003)
“A Strange Loop” (2019)
“Teeth” (2024)
“Kimberly Akimbo” (2021)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Artists owe a great debt to ancient Rome. Over the years, it’s provided a backdrop for countless films and novels, each of which has put forward its own vision of the Empire and what it stood for. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the latest entry in that canon, Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” which has drawn massive audiences and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. The hosts also consider other texts that use the same setting, from the religious epic “Ben-Hur” to Sondheim’s farcical sword-and-sandal parody, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Recently, figures from across the political spectrum have leapt to lay claim to antiquity, even as new translations of Homer have underscored how little we really understand about these civilizations. “Make ancient Rome strange again. Take away the analogies,” Schwartz says. “Maybe that’s the appeal of the classics: to try to keep returning and understanding, even as we can’t help holding them up as a mirror.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Gladiator II” (2024)
“I, Claudius” (1976)
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966)
“The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988)
“Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979)
“Cleopatra” (1963)
“Spartacus” (1960)
“Ben-Hur” (1959)
“Gladiator” (2000)
“The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama
“I, Claudius,” by Robert Graves
“I Hate to Say This, But Men Deserve Better Than Gladiator II,” by Alison Wilmore (Vulture)
“On Creating a Usable Past,” by Van Wyck Brook (The Dial)
Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In her new FX docuseries “Social Studies,” the artist and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield delves into the post-pandemic lives—and phones—of a group of L.A. teens. Screen recordings of the kids’ social-media use reveal how these platforms have reshaped their experience of the world in alarming ways. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the show paints a vivid, empathetic portrait of modern adolescence while also tapping into the long tradition of fretting about what the youths of the day are up to. The hosts consider moral panics throughout history, from the 1971 book “Go Ask Alice,” which was first marketed as the true story of a drug-addicted girl’s downfall in a bid to scare kids straight, to the hand-wringing that surrounded trends like rock and roll and the postwar comic-book craze. Anxieties around social-media use, by contrast, are warranted. Mounting research shows how screen time correlates with spikes in depression, loneliness, and suicide among teens. It’s a problem that has come to define all our lives, not just those of the youth. “This whole crust of society—people joining trade unions and other kinds of things, lodges and guilds, having hobbies,” Cunningham says, “that layer of society is shrinking. And parallel to our crusade against the ills of social media is, how do we rebuild that sector of society?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Social Studies” (2024)
“Into the Phones of Teens,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
“Generation Wealth” (2018)
Marilyn Manson
“Reviving Ophelia,” by Mary Pipher
“Go Ask Alice,” by Beatrice Sparks
“Forrest Gump” (1994)
“The Rules of Attraction,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“Less Than Zero,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Seduction of the Innocent,” by Fredric Wertham
“Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?,” by Andrew Solomon (The New Yorker)
“The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt
“Bowling Alone,” by Robert D. Putnam

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.