In “Camera Man,” the critic Dana Stevens uses the biography of the great silent film clown as a lens to explore the early days of movies, the cultural forces that gave them birth and the social upheavals they in turn engendered.

The journey of most of the characters in “Station Eleven” is from self-protective emotional withdrawal to vulnerability and connection.

Can Black writers flourish in a marketplace dictated by white tastes?

What this quintessential stage musical needed, apparently, was a thoroughgoing cinematic makeover.

“Tick, Tick … Boom!” is also a soul-deep tribute by Lin-Manuel Miranda to an artist who inspired him at a formative age.

These shows shine an intimate, even glaring light on humanity in its less flattering manifestations.

The show’s true subject is nothing less than spiritual sickness, fueled by the existential dread of folks with no material wants who nevertheless don’t know what to do with their lives or how to spend them happily with each other.

Transcendent, communal moments like these, so long denied us by this still raging pandemic, have been worth the wait, and they are more than worth the trouble.

The series executes a breathtaking high-wire act, threading speculative fiction a history most of us still do not know well enough.

The highest tribute I can offer this biography is that it is not unlike a Nichols film itself: incisive, dense with detail yet somehow brisk.