It’s not uncommon to see critics waxing nostalgic for the so-called good old days of network TV. Long seasons, filler episodes, a certain Law & Order je nais se quoi. I generally don’t go in for this line of thinking. You turn on CBS or ABC any night of the week, you’ll see plenty of that kind of crap pouring seemingly without end from the corporate spigot. Lawyer shows, police procedurals, monster of the week sci-fi, and of course the ever-popular medical drama. Gray’s Anatomy has been on the air since 2005, and I don’t think ...
2025-04-11 19:53:24 +0000 UTC
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“How dark are you willing to go?” aging businessman Karsh (Vincent Cassel) asks his date in the opening scene of The Shrouds. “Not terribly” appears to be the film’s answer. From its flat outdoor digital photography to its heavy reliance on various shades of terrible CGI, the whole production — originally intended as a limited series for Netflix — feels lifeless. It’s appropriate, given the themes Cronenberg is playing with, and I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he’s making a series of intentional ...
2025-04-10 22:00:36 +0000 UTC
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“No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have,” drawls Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) with the particular flavor of self-satisfied tranquility only upper-class pill addicts can conjure. “Not even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all the billions of people who dream they can live like we do.” It’s a perverse justification for hoarding wealth, the kind of thing capitalist parasites not only need to believe, but need to have constantly...
2025-04-07 03:56:46 +0000 UTC
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“Stupid and mean,” turns out to be the register in which Osgood Perkins goes, for me, from a talentless tryhard auteur to a straightforwardly enjoyable, if not particularly inspired, B-movie gross-out guy. The Monkey is dumb, nasty, and often pretty funny, a far cry from the airless, overwritten sludge of his previous films. Its sense of humor is straightforward. The smash cut to a funeral photograph every time something goes wrong may be a fairly shopworn gag, but Perkins executes it repeatedly and with relish. The flat irreverence of e...
2025-04-06 04:40:21 +0000 UTC
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Black Bag is gorgeous. Its forced-perspective long shots of sterile, barren offices and exquisite modern dining rooms are a feast, its palette of gentle golds, browns, creams, and grays so obviously chosen with the same meticulous attention to detail with which the film’s protagonists, married couple George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), conduct themselves in their work with MI6. Fassbender is soft-spoken and methodical in the role, a kind of polite middle-class Terminator, while Blanchett plays a lit...
2025-04-06 01:16:09 +0000 UTC
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“This whole country is one big strip club,” says dancer and con artist Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez) to the officers interrogating her. In the words of my great uncle, she’s blowing smoke, but the smoke ain’t wrong. Set in the economic and social wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis, Hustlers depicts a world in which work, even skilled and rigorous work, is no longer enough. The American economy as we knew it at the turn of the millennium is effectively over, and a new economy of gig labor, fraud, banditry, and constant hustling stru...
2025-04-01 02:07:07 +0000 UTC
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“Very student film,” Noah (Martin Henderson) quips upon seeing the haunted tape at the heart of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. He’s right, in a way. Like the darkly prophetic scribblings created by Noah’s eight-year-old son, Aiden (David Dorfman), the tape is the work of a child. It’s a child’s attempt to make sense of things beyond her comprehension, to express her feelings over her betrayal and murder by her adoptive mother, her neglect by her adoptive father, her institutionalization and torture via isolation. Squirming maggots ...
2025-03-30 20:48:25 +0000 UTC
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“Grief transcends value,” says the nameless Jefe (Rubén Blades) of the drug cartel pursuing the titular Counselor (Michael Fassbender). “A man would trade whole nations for one more hour with his beloved, but he can get nothing for his grief, because grief is worthless.” The discursive, philosophical conversation between the drug lord and the lawyer is characteristic of McCarthy’s screenwriting. It’s The Counselor’s greatest strength, this commitment to literary language, with the straightforward deal gone wrong crime plot ser...
2025-03-30 03:18:49 +0000 UTC
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It’s pretty revealing that English-speaking countries chose to market Bertrand Bonello’s 2011 drama about the workers of a Parisian brothel at the turn of the 19th century under the alternate title House of Pleasures. This is not a titillating film about the secret lives of sex workers. It’s not a leering look at young, nubile bodies contorting for the pleasure of their clients. The term “house of tolerance” is a half-joking industry term these women use to refer to their own labor, to the endurance required to cater to tastes bana...
2025-03-26 19:00:30 +0000 UTC
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There’s a postcard quality to much of Guadagnino’s framing in Queer, everything cleanly set apart, shadow and light contrasted thoughtfully, sometimes a single element out of place, just to draw attention. A stray dog sniffing at the dirt in an empty street. The moon seen smeared and rippled through dirty glass. There’s a David Hockney-esque quality to these images, an evocation of desolation through the presence of clean lines, soft pastel colors, and mild urban decay. Guadagnino pays evident attention to the play of light on skin, to...
2025-03-25 01:37:33 +0000 UTC
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Control Freak is not a perfect movie. Far from it. Its symbolic and thematic languages are unwieldy, getting tripped up on themselves as it struggles to make a coherent story out of the lingering horror of the Vietnam War, immigrant mental health struggles, and assimilationist rejection of one’s culture of origin. The color grading is drab, the framing competent but seldom more than that (when director Shal Ngo hits on something really brilliant, a nightmarishly stressful pitched and zoomed-out shot from the back of Val Nguyen’s...
2025-03-16 18:04:19 +0000 UTC
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Stephen Graham manages to make “Eat your cornflakes” sound like a doctor giving a five-year-old’s parent their child’s cancer diagnosis before clearing his throat and saying it again in a tone of forced cheer. It’s fitting. His world is over. His teenage son is a murderer, a girl is dead, and his family has been stretched to the breaking point by guilt, horror, and outside pressure. Adolescence has perhaps the clearest line of anything I’ve seen on the particular ways in which school-aged children disgust and te...
2025-03-15 16:12:25 +0000 UTC
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Wes Anderson was my very first Favorite Director. Watching The Royal Tenenbaums at the age of thirteen did as much to kindle my love of film as any other single event in my life, and for the next decade I watched and re-watched it along with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Bottle Rocket, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. In my twenties I began to tire of his work, put off by the increasingly self-conscious preciousness of his compositions, the twee tone of his actors’ dea...
2025-03-08 21:20:36 +0000 UTC
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It’s not writer/director Bong Joon-ho’s tightest movie, or the best collection of performances he’s managed to get out of a cast. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette skew a little too broad in the roles of dictatorial expedition commander Kenneth Marshall and his wife, Ylfa, rendering Bong’s satire of the current global moment’s plague of dictatorial vanity, stupidity, and reckless strongman politicking a little tepid on occasion. Their placeless upper-class accents, the film’s muddled politics around cops and law enforcement; there ar...
2025-03-08 07:24:25 +0000 UTC
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It’s about Trump. Born Again makes no bones whatsoever about this, and it’s better for it, charging out of the gate in a wave of ‘Fisk Can Fix It’ baseball caps and scumbags talking approvingly about how newly inaugurated mayor Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) “gets shit done”. Again and again we watch people look on aghast as the onetime crime lord ascends to high office, paralyzed by the weight of watching a known criminal and murderer take up the reins of government. We all know what that feels like. We know what it’s lik...
2025-03-05 05:57:45 +0000 UTC
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Was there a funnier scene in film last year than Anora (Mikey Madison) fighting like an irate rattlesnake against three full-grown men as they try to manhandle, browbeat, and threaten her into agreeing to get an annulment in her husband’s parents’ living room? If there was, I didn’t see it. In fact the entire comedy of errors that begins at the mansion of Vanya’s oligarch parents (Mark Eydelshteyn) and ends at HQ, the strip joint where Anora used to work, is a masterpiece of Coen-esque disaster comedy. None of it would work without T...
2025-03-05 03:13:06 +0000 UTC
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There’s something so beautiful about playing the classics straight with real craft and skill to back it up. Fair maidens and unicorns, demonic lords of darkness brooding on their thrones. This stuff is as shopworn as it gets, so fundamental to fantasy as a genre that it can feel like the idea of a story more than the thing itself, but when you dig into it, when you texture those hoary old pieces of iconography with care and attention to detail, they can come alive like you’re seeing them for the very first time. Ridley Scott’s Lege...
2025-03-03 06:33:08 +0000 UTC
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In almost every film I’ve ever reviewed, no matter how dismal, I’ve found some scintilla of beauty or vision, some idiosyncratic touch worthy of dissection or appreciation. You can spend half a review talking about a single genuine moment, a single beautiful shot or brilliantly realized effect. In A Knight’s War, Matthew Ninaber’s directorial debut, there is no such thread to cling to. Everything, every last trivial element, is not just bad, but executed with such a perplexing lack of both natural ability and professional ac...
2025-03-02 07:18:33 +0000 UTC
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There’s a little too much of the currently omnipresent orange and blue color scheme at play in Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows, and that’s about the harshest thing I can find to say about it. The rest is a real delight, and the first thing since Deadwood to really foreground the “community” in “criminal community” in a way both naturalistic and compelling, placing its largely dirt-poor characters in a context where their conflicts feel nightmarishly high-stakes due to their necessary interdependence. The wome...
2025-02-26 21:10:16 +0000 UTC
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“Is there a better description of a cube than its own construction?” asks László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in one of his first conversations with his mercurial, selfish soon-to-be patron, the millionaire businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pierce). It’s a haunting thought. When in the film’s final moments we learn that László’s masterpiece, the Van Buren Institute, was built to mirror Dachau, the concentration camp László survived during the war, we find it echoed on an epic scale. What could express the horror of having come thro...
2025-02-22 04:57:24 +0000 UTC
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When congressman Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schrieber) sees his one-time girlfriend Jocelyn Jordan (Vera Farmiga) at a political event at the Botanical Gardens, she’s so luminous she’s almost bleeding color onto the film. Her eyes are a wild electric blue, her skin glowing, as though she and she alone has been painted with some divine brush. With only lighting and color grading, director Jonathan Demme sets us up to understand that Jocelyn is one of only two things ever to change the direction of Raymond’s life. The second, of course,...
2025-02-15 08:10:33 +0000 UTC
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Things fall apart. Yeats said it, but the Safdie Brothers have made a career out of depicting it on film. Watching Good Time feels like standing in the shadow of a collapsing skyscraper, five hundred thousand tons of rebar and concrete cascading toward you, dust flooding the streets in a choking wave. To say things begin to go wrong at the jump and only get worse is a nearly biblical understatement, and there’s a hypnotic quality to the speed and consistency with which it happens that’s very much on the same wavelength as Oneoht...
2025-02-11 06:26:39 +0000 UTC
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Starving Arctic fishermen on a lethally beautiful sweep of stone and ice, a nightmarish shipwreck, a gruesome revenant limping out of Norse folklore and into reality — The Damned has a lot going for it, at least on a conceptual level. The minute Ragnar (Rory McCann) goes into the water, though, cracks start to open up in that facade. Odessa Young is haunted but grossly underwritten as protagonist Eva, and Joe Cole has even less to offer as fisherman Daniel. There are some good faces in the supporting cast, especially McCann’s, a...
2025-02-09 19:48:40 +0000 UTC
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The house of Ula Se Barat was not grand by Gujirati standards, but its gardens deserved every word of praise Hathi had ever heard for them. Willows trailed their branches over ornamental ponds where lotus blossoms drifted on the water and segmented scolopedes and golden carp swam leisurely among their roots, passing in and out of shadow. Reeds waved in the humid wind blowing down the hills, all stepped with rice paddies where the rani’s peasants toiled. It would have calmed Hathi greatly, perhaps eased some of the pain of his last four yea...
2025-02-07 07:32:12 +0000 UTC
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My old friend the TV critic Sean T. Collins once said that one mark of genius in writing is when a sudden reversal feels shocking in the moment and inevitable in hindsight. That’s ‘Shut the Door, Have a Seat’ in a nutshell, an episode that takes a season’s worth of bickering, friction, and economic maneuvering and snaps it all instantly into a new context with a single brilliant line. “Fire us.” Lane’s professional discontent with being volleyed between branches of Putnam Powell and Lowe, Don’s terse contract negotiations, th...
2025-02-06 05:29:06 +0000 UTC
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“That’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary's running you over with a lawn mower.” Absurdity is the word of the day in ‘Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency’, a mid-season showstopper in which Don, Joan, Roger, Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), and Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) attend their own funeral in the form of a top-down reorganization of their entire firm by their British owners Putnam Powell and Lowe, only to have the whole thing go sideways in a spray of garish red arterial blood. Perpetual...
2025-02-05 22:36:39 +0000 UTC
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana said that in 1905, and people have been misquoting it ever since. ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ invites us to remember our own past in the light of people incapable of remembering theirs. Watching Roger Sterling serenade his child bride, Jane (Peyton List), in blackface, heedless of the world changing around them, is profoundly revolting. When he leans in to plant a kiss on Jane, he smears her face with bootblack, leaving her looking like she’s daubed her ch...
2025-02-05 21:32:40 +0000 UTC
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“If I don’t go into that office every day,” says Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray), “who am I?” It’s a question Don is clearly asking himself about his own absence from his household following his separation from Betty. What defines a person when routine falls away? Look at Betty, drifting listlessly through her own house, hair unstyled, clothes hanging from her slumped frame. Look at Don in his lonely hotel room, or Mona (Talia Balsam) after Roger abruptly ends their marriage of over thirty years. Work and family give these formless p...
2025-02-05 03:30:52 +0000 UTC
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Slava hated her camel. She had named him Fjardin, after her least favorite uncle, owing to their shared love of spitting, their foul smell, and their bushy eyebrows. He in turn bore her no affection, attempting to bite her whenever she dismounted, kicking out at her with his huge padded feet whenever she passed too close behind him, stubbornly ignoring both reins and stick. Things only grew worse after the column left the ring of farms, quarries, clay pits, and fisheries surrounding Amnh and passed onto the forest road. Fjardin wandered off ...
2025-02-04 21:58:42 +0000 UTC
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Rupa knelt outside her mistress’s bedchamber, listening to the sound of the emperor making love. It had been months since the Most High had visited the Third Consort, and still longer between that visit and the one before. Rupa didn’t know what had brought him flying through the palace halls to leap atop her mistress; one moment Sima had been her usual anxious self, calling for her soothsayer for the dozenth time that week, and then a scant hour later, the sound of running footsteps swelled from a pattering stream to a mighty river as eu...
2025-02-04 21:56:06 +0000 UTC
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