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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are better than staying in on a Sunday afternoon and putting on a good movie—or two, or three. The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What is your favorite movie series to binge?

The Mission: Impossible series (streaming on Paramount+)

Watching seven whole movies may sound like a difficult binge, but marathoning the Mission: Impossible films is, well, a mission I’ll always accept. They’re pure popcorn entertainment, and watching them is a far easier task than anything Tom Cruise’s superspy character has had to do. Across the almost 30-year-old franchise—with another entry coming next year—Ethan Hunt has prevented a pandemic and a nuclear war, taken down multiple arms dealers and terrorist-organization leaders, and, in what remains my favorite gag, donned a series of ridiculous (and impressively realistic) masks.

Part of the joy of watching the Mission: Impossible movies in one sitting is seeing what each director does with the material: Brad Bird, known for his animation work, brings a delightfully kinetic energy to Ghost Protocol, while the Hong Kong auteur John Woo prefers hypnotic slow-motion shots in Mission: Impossible II. Of course, the biggest draw remains Cruise’s dedication to performing his own stunts, whether it’s leaping out of an airplane or dangling off the side of a skyscraper. Ethan Hunt may work to save the world, but Tom Cruise works to dazzle us. And in these movies, he never fails.

— Shirley Li, staff writer

***

The Back to the Future trilogy (streaming on FuboTV)

I’m going to cheat on this question slightly, because my favorite movies are almost entirely one-offs, and I usually save my binge-watching for sports. But as movie series go, a somewhat underappreciated one is Back to the Future. The original is a family classic—I watched it the first time at the theater, as a teenager, with my Boomer parents, precisely the generational targets for the movie’s time-travel humor.

The sequels probe the twisted psyche of Biff Tannen, a misogynistic oligarch in one of the alternate futures and one of my personal favorite movie villains. (Tannen was inspired by Donald Trump, according to the screenwriter Bob Gale. The actor, Tom Wilson, also later played a much more complex and sympathetic version of a bully as the gym teacher on Freaks and Geeks.) Tying together the films is a series of front-page stories in the Hill Valley Telegraph, a fictional paper with news judgment so strange that I once wrote a column analyzing it.

Although the sequels, like most sequels, pale against the original, they each explore the question “What would you do if you traveled back in time and possessed modern knowledge?” The answer is basically: invent things, gamble on sports, and try to score dates with Lea Thompson.

— Jonathan Chait, staff writer

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The Lord of the Rings trilogy (streaming on Max)

There’s no wrong time to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the winter holidays are the perfect time. These fantasy classics introduce you to the wonders of Middle-earth—replete with its own histories, languages, and mythologies—and J. R. R. Tolkien’s characters: Aragorn and his sharp pride, Frodo and his understated courage, Gimli and his uncouth charm. The books swept me away as a child, and Peter Jackson’s rendition more than does them justice.

That’s in part because the films run roughly three hours each (four if you watch the extended cuts, which I recommend). Jackson needed every minute to unfold a number of intertwining, tension-filled plots, battles, friendships, and romances. The movies’ lengths are something to luxuriate in, perfect for cozy December and January evenings—indeed, they each debuted in theaters on the third Wednesday of December. You could even tack on the more recent live-action Hobbit trilogy, but I’d actually opt for the much shorter 1977 animated version, which perfectly captures the novel’s appeal to children.

— Matteo Wong, staff writer

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The High School Musical trilogy (streaming on Disney+)

In the first installment of the High School Musical series, our protagonists—Troy, a 5-foot-8 basketball star, and Gabriella, a girl who is both pretty and good at math—accidentally audition for the school musical and destabilize their high school’s social order. The Disney plotline is predictably unrealistic, but real problems poke their way in: The high-school arts department is struggling! Troy’s dad can be mean. Figuring out who you are is hard when your classmates sing in unison about where you belong.

The sequel is an ultra-saturated fever dream. A group of high schoolers get summer jobs at a country club. Troy sings an anxious rock anthem while running across an entire golf course. No notes.

Then, the finale: I saw High School Musical 3 in theaters (the first two were made-for-TV releases) when I was 8. Years later, I still appreciate how the film captures the bittersweet celebration of senior year and the stress of figuring out what happens after the curtain falls. If you decide to make this series your next movie binge, watch for the nostalgia and stay for the standout musical numbers (everyone, say thank you to the director Kenny Ortega, who also choreographed Michael Jackson’s stage tours).

— Hana Kiros, assistant editor

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The Indiana Jones trilogy (streaming on Pluto TV and Prime Video)

I want to emphasize trilogy. The fourth Indiana Jones film suffers from too much Shia LaBeouf, and the fifth was an instantly forgettable CGI fest. But Raiders of the Lost Ark and its two sequels have retained their magic. Harrison Ford’s relentlessly physical performance deserves much of the credit. His Indiana Jones is a paragon of 20th-century American masculinity: He is a scholar, but not in an affected, European way. This is a man who can keep a lion at bay with a whip, outduel a tank on horseback, and land knockout punches on all manner of Nazis.

The movies are dated in their depictions of certain cultures—Temple of Doom, which follows Jones on an adventure in India, is marred by unseemly Orientalism—but they still offer viewers a powerful escapism. In just the first hour of Raiders, we’re whisked off to the Peruvian jungle, a snowy Himalayan saloon, and the sunbaked streets of Cairo. The ancient artifacts that Jones seeks add another layer of fantasy. They ask us to envision lost worlds, often through a mystical lens, and they do it all without slowing down the pace for a single second.

— Ross Andersen, staff writer

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The Before trilogy (available to rent on YouTube)

My favorite movie series is also the only movie series I’ve seen: Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. I’m not a huge fan of romance movies, but these three magical films stand apart from others with near-identical premises. I watched the first, Before Sunrise, during a boring weekend in my 20s, which turned out to be the perfect time to watch a movie about two adrift 20-somethings, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, wandering around Vienna and falling in love.

I followed that up soon afterward with the second, Before Sunset, which features … the same exact actors, this time as 30-somethings, wandering around Paris and re-falling in love. For some reason, merely swapping the cities and ages works so well.

Not long after that, in 2013, Linklater released the final installment, Before Midnight, which I saw in theaters. This one had a harder edge—the two main characters, now a couple, wrestle with parenting, career woes, and other adult concerns. But it’s still impossible to take your eyes off them.

What is it that makes these five hours of two people talking so captivating? Is it Linklater’s gift for realistic dialogue, or is it that we all wish we had met our husband on a European train in 1994? It’s hard to say but very easy to watch.

— Olga Khazan, staff writer

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

America needs to radically rethink what it means to be old. The 13 best TV shows of 2024 America’s most watched bishop

The Week Ahead

Mufasa: The Lion King, a musical prequel and sequel to The Lion King that follows Mufasa, an orphan who is adopted by Prince Taka’s family (in theaters Friday) Laid, a dark-comedy series about a woman who realizes that her exes are mysteriously dying (premiering on Peacock on Thursday) Sonic the Hedgehog 3, an animated film about the emergence of a powerful villain, Shadow, voiced by Keanu Reeves (out Friday)

Essay

Brendan George Ko

The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back

By Adrienne LaFrance

At the edge of a forest on the island of O‘ahu, through two massive metal gates—if you can convince someone to let you in—you will find yourself inside the compound of the self-appointed president of the Nation of Hawai‘i.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

Decivilization may already be under way. Trump is about to betray his rural supporters. Anne Applebaum: The Syrian regime collapsed gradually—and then suddenly.

Photo Album

Coins are left behind by visitors at the Chicago Rat Hole, a rat-shaped impression on a sidewalk in Illinois. (Scott Olson / Getty)

As the end of the year approaches, take a look back at some of the major news moments from the first months of 2024.

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Donald Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span. He’s chosen a Fox News host with a sordid personal history to lead the Pentagon, an apologist for dictators in Russia and Syria to be the director of national intelligence, and an anti-vax, anti-science activist to be the nation’s top health official.

Trump has now added yet another dangerous nomination to this list. In a Saturday-night post on his social-media site, Truth Social, he announced that he is nominating Kash Patel, a former federal prosecutor, to serve as the director of the FBI. A Patel nomination to some position in the law-enforcement or intelligence spheres has always been lurking out there as a possibility, and Trump may have held off announcing it until he felt he had protracted enough outrage (and exhaustion) with his other nominations.

Patel’s nomination is shocking in many ways, not least because the FBI already has a director, Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed to a 10-year term only seven years ago and whom he would have to fire almost immediately to make way for Patel. Worse, Patel is a conspiracy theorist even by the standards of MAGA world. Like other senior Trump nominees, his primary qualification for the job appears to be his willingness to do Trump’s bidding without hesitation. Patel will likely face a difficult path to confirmation in the Senate.

For Trump, naming Patel to the post serves several purposes. First, Trump is taking his razor-thin election win as a mandate to rule as he pleases, and Patel is the perfect nominee to prove that he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. Even knowing what they know, Americans chose to return Trump to office, and he has taken their decision as a license to do whatever he wants—including giving immense power to someone like Patel.

Second, Trump wants to show that the objections of senior elected Republicans are of no consequence to him, and that he can politically flatten them at will. Some of his nominations seem like a trollish flex, a way to display his power by naming people to posts and daring others to stop him. Trump has always thought of the GOP as his fiefdom and GOP leaders as his vassals—and if the Senate folds on Patel and others, he may be proved right on both counts.

This approach backfired when Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general flamed out quickly in the face of likely defeat in the Senate, but Trump seems confident that he can get most of his other picks across the finish line, even nominees who would have stood little chance of confirmation in previous administrations. And Trump always keeps pushing limits: In place of Gaetz, he sent forward the more competent but equally committed MAGA loyalist Pam Bondi, who has aroused far less opposition.

Trump has made clear how much he hates the FBI, and he has convinced his MAGA base that it’s a nest of political corruption. In a stunning reversal of political polarity, a significant part of the law-and-order GOP now regards the men and women of federal law enforcement with contempt and paranoia. If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee. Some senior officials would likely resign rather than serve under Patel, which would probably suit Trump just fine.  

Of course, this means the FBI would struggle to do the things it’s supposed to be doing, including fighting crime and conducting counterintelligence work against America’s enemies. But it would become an excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy—which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.

The Russians speak of “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution.

If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.

The early-20th-century Peruvian strongman Óscar R. Benavides once stated a simple principle that Trump now appears to be pursuing when he said: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” It falls now to the Republican members of the Senate to decide whether Trump can impose this formula on the United States.