Reel life

Would would Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw do? Watch season finale of Girls — and be proud

It’s time for a completely unsurprising confession: I love Girls. Lena Dunham’s Girls, that is. The highly polarizing HBO comedy, which has its season finale tonight with reruns throughout this week, has made a fan out of me, despite instigating hatred in many others. And instigated, has it ever. Scores of articles are published on a daily basis lamenting Dunham and her cohorts for being too privileged, too naked, too whiny.

If Sex and the City represents the glitz and glamour of being a single woman in the city, Girls is the hair you pull from the drain after one too many updo s.

Yet for every hater among us lives a girl who sees a sliver of herself in the characters of this awkward group of Brooklynites. There’s free spirit Jessa, quirky Hannah, uptight Marnie, and the oddly relatable and undersexed Shoshanna. And it reminds me of something…

A teenager raised with the spoils of premium cable, I lapped up Sex and the City voraciously, albeit age inappropriately. I learned about waxing from Samantha, read Vogue along with Carrie, fought the feminism fight with Miranda, and even dreamed about Mr. Right with Charlotte. Yet when Carrie et al. said their final goodbye, so did I, closing the book on the big city lifestyle I knew even then was unattainable.

And then I went to college. In between classes, girls would stay home and marathon the show in syndication. They bought the DVDs. They had theme parties. They went on tours of New York. But most notably, they identified themselves by how they related to the show.

Sexually adventurous and outspoken? You’re a total Samantha. The best-dressed articulate friend? Carrie, to a T. Prudish? Charlotte. Duh. I was once reluctantly pegged as 75 percent Miranda, with a touch of Carrie and a dash of Madga. The maid. Clearly I wasn’t winning this game.

Yet women were making relationship decisions based on the age-old WWCD, mentality. What would Carrie do? She’d do nothing. She’s fictional.

Conveniently also a property of the Home Box Office, Girls is giving women a whole new set of archetypes in which to fit their personalities — grungier, more spendthrift archetypes. I’ll put it this way: If Sex and the City represents the glitz and glamour of being a single woman in the city, Girls is the hair you pull from the drain after one too many updos. Or at the very least, the mascara under your eyes after a long night out.

Regardless of the often cringe-tastic nature of the Judd Apatow-produced comedy, there’s something real about the way these women live.

Dunham’s Hannah Horvath is awkward. She possesses a more typical body type, and she most certainly isn’t afraid to show it on screen. Sure, she gets financial support from her parents, and doesn’t take kindly to having it relinquished, but she lives in a totally feasible apartment in a neighborhood not inhabited solely by socialites. She wears normal, even dumpy, clothes. She wore a sleeping bag and a mesh muscle tank all in a two-week span for god’s sake.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with the show. Though free-spirited, self-centered Jessa is a jetsetter without a care in the world who marries an investment banker after denying him a threesome. Marnie is uptight and unlovable, even when she’s completely down. Shoshanna, the JAP virgin, oddly becomes the most relatable, even when she sexts via emoji and oogles her Sex and the City poster. The irony’s not lost there. And Hannah's proclamation that she's the voice of her generation is enough to make this writer gag at times.

Regardless of the often cringe-tastic nature of the Judd Apatow-produced comedy, there’s something real about the way these women live. And if a college student five years from now purges the DVDs and decides she wants to have a gay roommate and wear Urban Outfitters clearance rack fare, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

In fact, I think Carrie would be proud. It’s not responsible to go into debt to support a shoe habit. At least Hannah spends her money on cupcakes.

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Movie Review

How to Rob a Bank turns viral YouTube culture into messy crime caper

Photo by Megan Schoenbachler

Nicholas Hoult in How to Rob a Bank.

YouTube culture has made its way onto movie screens in a big way in 2026, with several content creators — most notably Kane Parson with Backrooms and Curry Barker with Obsession — making waves. So it’s only natural for movies to integrate the idea of YouTube content into their stories, as is the case in How to Rob a Bank.

The film throws the audience right into the action as Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), Emi (Anna Sawai), Vince (Pete Davidson), Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz), and other people wearing various animal masks commit their latest bank robbery, recording everything they do for their video channel. The hyper-stylized way in which they edit the videos is designed for maximum engagement, but also as a way to give the middle finger to authorities who have yet to catch them.

FBI Agent John West (John C. Reilly) is at a loss as to how to stop the group until he discovers an algorithm used by Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz) that can comb social media and other things on the internet to triangulate anyone’s location. The cat-and-mouse game plays out as the criminal group tries to accomplish their mission of exposing banks and corporations for their corruption.

Directed by David Leitch (The Fall Guy) and written by Mark Bianculli, the film has a timely message that never quite lands. The rollicking nature of the robberies, their accompanying videos, and the fact that they give away some of the money to charity puts the audience on the side of the criminals. But when the film starts to delve into their maudlin personal stories, the shift in tones is jarring and not convincing.

Leitch and Bianculli also have difficulty figuring out how much to showcase certain characters. The robbers are composed of four main members, but there are at least two more of them who fade in and out of the story without explanation. Reagan is made to seem like an important character, but the technology she made is barely explained, and she too gets sidelined in a way that feels like the filmmakers left much of her story on the cutting room floor.

The filmmakers short circuit their own storytelling by trying to get the point too quickly. Instead of following the standard cops-and-robbers playbook that is unoriginal but still satisfying, they arrive at the usual end well before the movie finishes, and have to find ways to fill the time afterward. The film is much too long at 122 minutes, with much of the fun washed away by unnecessary digressions.

Hoult is a fine actor who should be a much bigger star by this point in his career. He’s convincing as the leader of this particular gang, but he never elevates the role. Reilly has his moments as an FBI agent, but he can’t seem to decide whether he wants to be serious or funny. Kravitz is not given much to do in her role, while Davidson is miscast in his. Lesser-knowns like Sawai and Feliz give good performances, but are overshadowed by the stars.

How to Rob a Bank works best when it leans into the anarchic nature of its main group, as the viral nature of the videos they create is solid commentary on both YouTube as a medium and the righteous anger many feel toward an unjust system. But Leitch and Bianculli can’t find a grip on the deeper parts of the story, leading to an up-and-mostly-down experience.

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How to Rob a Bank opens in theaters on November 13.

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