It wasn’t until some time after I saw The Bourne Ultimatum, the third film in the series about the amnesiac spy Jason Bourne, that it occurred to me to think about what the film was lacking. As the presumed end of a trilogy—while there’s no reason why the series can’t be continued, the mystery of Bourne’s past is revealed—the conclusion lacks the punch it seems to think it has, the punch we might have felt had we been brought more deeply into the character.

You can learn some pretty weird things when you’re researching a review on the Internet. For instance, did you know that Saturday Night Live is still on the air? Swear to god. It’s even on at the same time. When I first read that, I assumed that they had just brought it back, like they did a few years ago with WKBW-AM, but apparently it’s never actually gone away. And they still transmit it for free, so you can watch it without cable. Who knew?

For as troubled as race relations are in America, it can be astonishing to reflect on how far they have come in the past half century, a blip on the timeline of history. Talk to Me on its surface is a biopic about the Washington, D.C. radio host Petey Greene, but it resonates as a portrait of black America at a time of internal tension.