Season 2, Episode 4: The Confessions

No witness has been more important to the prosecution's case against Curtis Flowers than Odell Hallmon. He testified in four trials that Flowers had confessed to him while the two men were in prison together. Hallmon has an astonishingly long criminal history that includes rep ...

Odell Hallmon, the state's key witness in the Curtis Flowers case, is serving three consecutive life sentences. We wondered what he might say now that there are no deals to cut, and he will spend the rest of his days in prison. Would he stick to his story that Flowers had conf ...

Over the course of his three-decade career, the director Paul Thomas Anderson has dramatized the nineteen-seventies porn industry (“Boogie Nights”), the Californian oil boom (“There Will Be Blood”), and a mid-century London fashion house (“Phantom Thread”). Now he’s trained hi ...

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 ...

In the early days of the Hollywood studio system, producers exerted far greater creative control than any individual director. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, a group of young French critics issued a cri du coeur that gave rise to the figure of the auteur: visiona ...

“Hit Man,” a new film directed by Richard Linklater, is not, in fact, about a hit man. The movie follows Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a mild-mannered philosophy professor who assists law enforcement in sting operations by posing as a contract killer—and playing on the expectati ...