Godard said all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun, but did he ever really consider the cinematic possibilities of a sloth with a sword? The minds behind the horror-comedy Slotherhouse did, and we thank them for it.
As Golda Meir, Helen Mirren gives a showy but shallow impersonation, in a disappointing historical biopic more emotional than illuminating.
My choices for who will win, who should win, and who must not be allowed to win at the 96th Annual Academy Awards.
In which I look back on my preposterous (and predictably failed) attempt to write about every movie that opened this summer.
Denzel Washington eats, prays, loves, maims, mutilates, and murders in Anton Fuqua's The Equalizer 3 (2023), a dumb and dour action thriller that is both unpleasant to watch and bad for the world.
Featuring a ridiculously miscast Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, a shallow, subtlety-deaf screenplay that wants to be Brokeback Bureau, and a clunking directorial style that feels like a color-blind Douglas Sirk helming an episode of Dragnet, J. Edgar is just laughably, appallingly bad.
Four episodes in, and I'm starting to feel that the problem with "Boss" may be its main character. Because there's actually a really good show struggling to come together in the space around Thomas Kane.
I guess it was inevitable. When you start a show at the absolute border of tastelessness, believability, and cable network standards, it's hard to keep upping the ante week after week. Yeah, yeah, raw brain. What have you done for me lately, American Horror Story?
Stop me if you've heard this one: How many morons does it take to get a zombie out of a well?
I like to imagine the writers' room at Boss as a constant negotiation between the side of the room that wants to do serious political drama and the side of the room that just wants lots and lots of gratuitous sex. In short, the battle for this show's soul is being fought between Team Wonk and Team Wank.
Violet’s in the kitchen, worryin’ bout the 'sitch she’s in:
Rubberman’s behind her, but doesn’t seem to mind her.
The man with the burned face, hands out, pissed off,
Wants for Ben to pay him off for knockin’ little Hayden off…
I don't want to sound too much like a college sophomore trying to get laid here, but it's amusing me this week to think of The Walking Dead as a modern, ultra-violent version of Albert Camus' 1948 existentialist novel The Plague.
I ended my review of the first episode of Boss saying that this show's success would depend on its willingness to balance its more sophisticated elements with its more sensationalistic ones. I'm already worried that Boss is not really interested in fighting that battle, as "Reflex" hews much closer to the sleazier side of the street than the pilot did.
"I mean, that would require seriously expert surgical skills, and most of them had feet for hands. So…I don’t think it’s feasible. "
"Fuck this shit. I would just kill everybody, day one, and lock myself in a closet. 'Sorry, but somebody here is fucked up, and I know it’s not me, so everybody gotta go.'”
Two gay ghosts; two ginger ghosts; two appearances by a homicidal Rubberman; one ex-mistress returned from the grave; one dead woman euthanizing her elderly mama; one woman with Down's syndrome getting struck by a car while wearing a "pretty-girl" costume; one burned man pounding on the door; one doctor sewing his dismembered baby back together with animal parts; and a sonogram so frightening it makes medical professionals faint. What can I say? It was a slow week at the old Murder House.
"It's not cool to make your mama drink your hymen juice. That is not okay."
Am I asking too much? Is The Walking Dead really just well-made zombie porn, and should I just give up on anything resembling plot or character development?
In its pilot episode, "Boss" is doing many very ambitious things right, and has the potential to be one of the best new shows of the year.
If you put a group of horny 12-year old boys in a room, kept them awake for three straight weeks on pixie sticks, Mountain Dew, and methamphetamines, showed them every horror movie ever made, and then asked them to free-associate a TV show, they still wouldn't come up with the turgid, tortured mess that is American Horror Story.
Zombie Train is a really cool show, but have you noticed they never get anywhere? They just keep zombie-training.
Stupidly pretentious, embarrassingly unrestrained, and chaotically unfocused, this is a basic cable Hell for good actors who have made bad choices. It's a fiasco, but it's kind of fascinating, and way, way more fun that it has any right to be.
There's nothing wrong with The Ides of March but its screenplay—and, unfortunately, the screenplay is everything.
Sometimes, the most surprising place we can find ourselves is exactly where we expected to be. "The Wedding of River Song," the grand finale of the 2011 season of Doctor Who, is long on spectacle, but short on revelation. By its conclusion, however, we are well-positioned to move forward towards something very different indeed.
"Closing Time" provides a turning point for the season: instead of piling still more guilt on the Doctor, Moffat and Co. begin to shake off the cumulative darkness of the previous few episodes, and start moving us back towards a more joyous, edifying vision of the Doctor we know and love.
I had big hopes for "Terra Nova," which promised excellent production values, a decent cast, and a potentially-intriguing sci-fi premise. Unfortunately, the pilot episode spends two banal hours dumbing its potential down into lowest-common-demoninator television pap. It's not horrible: it's just not good.
This is the Doctor's fear: the people he likes that he cannot save; the people he loves but can't protect; the confrontation with his own limitations; the reminder that he is better off alone.
Beautifully directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, with a fascinatingly impenetrable performance by Ryan Gosling at its center, Drive has the feel of a dark fairy tale, a minimalist fable so simple that it achieves the romance and ambiguity of myth.
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