David Fear

David Fear is a senior editor and film and television critic at Rolling Stone. His coverage focuses on how movies and TV reflect larger shifts in pop culture, genre, and the business of entertainment. He brings a long-standing critic’s perspective, drawing on years of work across magazines, newspapers, and film publications to treat studio releases, cult titles, and restorations with the same serious attention.

‘Toy Story 5’ and franchise fatigue

In his piece on the announcement of Toy Story 5, Fear uses the franchise as a case study in how long-running series can be pushed past their natural endpoint.

He writes about the creative and emotional toll of extending a story that has already reached a satisfying conclusion, focusing on character arcs and thematic closure rather than box-office logic. The article balances close reading of the Toy Story films with a wider look at sequel and reboot culture, treating the fifth installment as a symptom of a broader industry pattern. It shows his tendency to frame individual projects inside a larger conversation about what repeated returns to familiar IP mean for audiences and the medium.

Anticipated releases and seasonal roundups

Fear regularly assembles forward-looking lists of upcoming films, including a ranking of the 50 most anticipated movies of fall 2026.

These pieces mix studio tentpoles, prestige dramas, and international or independent titles, giving equal space to blockbusters and smaller films likely to shape critical conversation. He situates each movie in terms of the director’s previous work, the cast, and the cultural or political context it enters, signaling which projects matter beyond their marketing campaigns.

The structure of these roundups - concise capsules tied to filmmakers, genres, and festivals - reflects a critic’s view of the release calendar rather than a promotional one.

Canon, cult cinema, and directors

Fear devotes substantial attention to canon and cult cinema, using directors and landmark films as anchors for deeper essays. In his “Pulp Fiction, A to Z” piece, he takes Quentin Tarantino’s breakout film and organizes its impact through a series of alphabetized entries, covering style, influences, performances, and the movie’s place in 1990s film culture. Elsewhere, he writes about a contemporary thriller with “a massive Tarantino fetish,” tracing how newer films imitate and remix Tarantino’s trademarks and what that says about influence and homage in genre filmmaking. His work on George Miller’s return to the Mad Max universe - focusing on the character who becomes the franchise’s savior - combines plot analysis with attention to Miller’s staging, action choreography, and mythmaking.

Across these pieces, his coverage treats directors as central creative forces while still foregrounding themes, structure, and the evolution of genre.

Reappraising classics and concert films

Fear writes often about restorations and reissues, especially concert films and music-related cinema.

His coverage of the 4K restoration of Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film, looks at why the movie still feels vital decades after its release and what the new restoration brings to contemporary audiences. He connects the film’s return to broader trends in reviving landmark music documentaries and performance films, framing them as part of the ongoing history of both cinema and popular music.

This strand of his work shows how he moves between entertainment coverage and criticism of visual style, performance, and sound, treating archival projects as live parts of the current cultural landscape.

Role at Rolling Stone and wider footprint

Within Rolling Stone’s TV and Movies coverage, Fear writes reviews, features, and lists, moving between current releases, retrospectives, and essays that link film history to what is in theaters and on streaming platforms now. His critic’s bio notes that he previously served as a film editor for a major city listings magazine and that his work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Esquire, Spin, and the New York Daily News, among others. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, reflecting his standing within the professional community of reviewers and essayists.

Across outlets, his writing maintains the same focus: treating film and television as art and industry at once, and using individual titles - from Toy Story and Tarantino pastiches to restored concert films - as entry points into the larger story of contemporary screen culture.