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“Selling the O.C.” has always distinguished itself from its older, cooler sister “Selling Sunset” by being slightly worse in almost every respect: the fashion, the characters, the politics, the drama. In season 3, that continues. The “Love Island”-inspired, Shein-designed outfits, the flatly unpleasant people, the thinly veiled bigotries, and the warmed-over storylines make for an uninspiring season. Still worse, the biggest central stories now seem irrelevant, given how many key characters have left the show since this season filmed.

The first and only time I met filmmaker Steven S. DeKnight in person, he grabbed me and wrapped his arms around me just before he plunged into a packed screening of a documentary he was featured in. The reason for this embrace was he’d just heard the name of a person I was working with - a person he had…er…strong feelings about. Basically, he knew I needed a hug. The man wasn’t wrong.

The Beekeeper Dir. David Ayer 105 min. Action movies often struggle to find villainous organizations that don’t edge into racism—the Eurotrash plotters of Die Hard and the Taken movies tend to be the safest bet—but The Beekeeper, a January-as-hell Jason Statham vehicle, comes up with the most loathsome modern adversary possible: the phishing scammer. When Statham turns up at a sleek, multistory call center with two five-gallon cans of gasoline and announces bluntly that he’s going to burn the place to the ground, you may find yourself padding your pockets instinctively, looking for a book of matches.

Minding the Gaps is a recurring feature in which Keith Phipps watches and writes about a movie he’s never seen before as selected at random by the app he uses to catalog a DVD and Blu-ray collection accumulated over the course of the last 20+ years. It’s an attempt to fill in the gaps in his film knowledge while removing the horrifying burden of choice. This is the third entry. “Marlene watches from the wall

The Little Mermaid Dir: Rob Marshall 135 min. On the drive home from the new “live-action”—the scariest of scare quotes there—version of The Little Mermaid, I found myself in Reasonable Critic mode, considering the positives of one of my least favorite directors making one of my least favorite kinds of movies. As Ariel, the defiant young mermaid who bargains away her tail for human legs, Hallie Bailey is arresting and of fine voice, adding a little more Broadway oomph to Jodi Benson’s Ariel from the 1989 animated version.

Happy Sunday! We’re here again with the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the game plan: 1 — exploring a gorgeous, classic TV series from Hungary. 2 — animation news around the world. 3 — the week’s loose ends. 4 — retro Czech stop-motion. New here? We publish Sundays and Thursdays. It’s free to sign up for our Sunday issues — get them right in your inbox each week: All good?

I’m moving at a glacial pace today, after staying up until 12am to stream Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD). I’ve given the initial release, and the 2am drop of 15 additional songs, a few listens through—and I have this overwhelming feeling that I’ve just stumbled across Swift’s secret diary and clandestinely read the passages. She claims the album was written over two years, which evidently encompassed the unraveling of her 6-year relationship with “London Boy” Joe Alwyn—and her subsequent situationship with the frontman of The 1975, Matty Healy.

Welcome back! It’s a new Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Today, we’re happy to report that The Unofficial Art of Coraline is online again. A quick recap. Earlier in November, we released a free PDF to collect and organize the art behind Coraline, our favorite project by Laika. It’s an unofficial, educational resource for anyone who’s ever loved Laika’s stop-motion films. Normally, there’d be no reason to make something like this — what modern animated movie doesn’t already have an art book?

Something I’ve noticed in storytelling is that someone, say a writer or a director, clearly had a brainwave, an astute reflection that needed to be brought to life. They mistakenly believe think pieces and well-crafted tales are synonymous and that creating something with a noble mission statement is a substitute for a good narrative. Ruben Östlund, the writer and director of the ‘Triangle of Sadness’, didn’t get this memo when making his anti-capitalist flick.