1094 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Greek

About 18 months ago, I praised a new AppleTV+ series for its “frequently elegiac and hypnotic” tone. With its return, I renew that compliment. Despite growing in scope and ambition, Silo Season 2 remains committed to its quiet, insular brand of sci-fi. That’s very much a positive. The decision to split the action this season between Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) in exile in the apparently ruined, abandoned Silo 17 and the rest of the cast back at home base is more of a mixed bag. The cross-cutting action isn’t new; Season 1 also bounced between characters, levels, and subplots. However, separating the show’s two most compelling characters—Juliette and head of IT/Mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins)—does deny the audience some great verbal sparring. That doesn’t mean Silo Season 2 lacks for great interactions for either, though. Juliette quickly discovers that 17 is not as abandoned as it seemed. A man, Solo (Steven Zahn), lives in that Silo’s IT vault and refuses to leave. Zahn’s vacillation between laid-back vibes and sharp temper matches Ferguson’s mix of resentment and buried empathy well. You know the performers are in the pocket when they can sell a version of the “How did you get the name Solo?” from that Star Wars spinoff with sincerity and sadness. Continue Reading →

Interior Chinatown looks great, features plenty of talent, and is rich with metatext as it explores the cliches of police procedurals and depictions of Asian Americans in media. And yet, it never quite comes together as a satisfyingly cohesive whole in the five episodes provided to critics. The overall plot, taken from showrunner Charles Yu’s novel of the same name, initially presents as reasonably straightforward. Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) grew up in his brother’s (Chris Pang) shadow and was largely happy to do so. However, his brother’s disappearance rocked the family and left Willis rudderless. Now, Willis works at his uncle’s restaurant with his friend Fatty (Ronny Chieng), and his ambitions only reach as high as being a witness to a crime. Chloe Bennet always seems to catch the breeze just right. (Mike Taing/Hulu) When he seemingly achieves just that—seeing the abduction of a woman on the sidewalk outside the restaurant—it drops him into an increasingly surreal world populated by TV-perfect cops Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy). He quickly leapfrogs from witness to a variety of cliched parts for Asian actors that double as episode titles, including “Tech Guy” and “Chinatown Expert,” teaming with Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet). Like Willis, she’s an outsider hoping for hero status. Unlike him, she’s in the game and far better at faking it til you make it. Continue Reading →

White Bird, currently in theatres (or just departed, depending on where you live), spins off from surprisingly well-done Wonder. However, the true 2024 heir to the warm and unusually honest 2017 family film arrives on Disney+ this week in the form of Out of My Mind. The “kids with a chronic condition” genre is challenging to navigate. Too far to one side and the work mires itself in cliché while elevating the lead to something like sainthood. Too far in the other direction, it becomes cruel, unpleasant, cynical, and possibly devoid of empathy. It is a credit to Out of My Mind that it navigates that tightrope without visible strain. Directed by Amber Sealey from a script by Daniel Stiepleman, it does right by the tart Sharon M. Draper novel without simply being an airless recreation. There are some stumbles regarding the villains and the film’s final note, but overall, it is a quick-on-its-feet family film that doesn’t wince away from the hardships of disability and being 12. It’s clear from the early moments that plenty of thought has gone into the feature. Because Melody’s (Phoebe-Rae Taylor) cerebral palsy affects her muscle control, including that of her tongue, she cannot communicate via her voice. She still has an inner monologue and, as she points out, can give that any voice she wants. So who does she choose? Who any 12-year-old girl in 2002 would. Jennifer Aniston, of course. And see Rachel Green herself gives Melody (and the film) her voice. Continue Reading →

I saw Gladiator II two days after election day. By then, the results had been certified, sinking the country’s liberals and leftists of the country into a pit of mourning, terror, and rage. As I vacillated between feeling like a live wire and nothing at all, watching a movie was both the only and the last thing I wanted to do. I needed to watch something. Simultaneously, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I watched anything, I might spontaneously combust, transforming into a Substance-like shower of viscera and sadness. But Ridley Scott’s historical epic would wait for no man. After about 15 or 20 minutes, I suddenly felt certain that actually? This is the only film I could have handled at that moment. In fact, maybe it’s the perfect film to counteract the feeling of dread sitting on all of our chests like a two-tonne rhino. Continue Reading →

Try as hard as one might, there is no objective evaluation of art. First, there are all the biases—conscious and unconscious—each person brings to the work. Then there are factors like mood, health, comfort, and company. Finally, there are current events. The latter is especially relevant to Joy, which chronicles the development of In vitro fertilization in 60s and 70s Britain. It’s hard not to think about the parallels to the current state of reproductive rights in America. On its own, Joy is a perfectly adequate film. Handsomely, if conventionally, shot under the direction of Ben Taylor, the film centers its point of view on nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie). The script, written by the husband-and-wife team of Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason from a story by Emma Gordon and Shaun Topp, is deliberate and methodical. It drops the occasional rhetorical flourish but mostly sticks to the facts and lets the actors do their thing. It’s the kind of film that is accurate enough to be shown in class and interesting enough not to bore the students to death. But Joy doesn’t exist on its own. It wasn’t released in 2021 or in June. It’s hitting theatres in the UK and Ireland a week and a half after the American Presidential election and Netflix streaming stateside a week after that. It’s impossible to view the film without that in the back of one’s head. And in that context, Joy has a bruised, rebellious heart beating in its chest. It doesn’t provide catharsis, per se, but a perhaps heartening reminder of the previous struggles and triumphs. Continue Reading →

When it comes to storytelling, especially when adapting a character that has starred in more than 30 novels and three films, it doesn’t matter if the plot relies on tropes. It matters how one utilizes those tropes. When it comes to the Ben Watkins-created Cross, there are few actors better suited to breathing new life into the Psychology PhD having Detective Alex Cross than Aldis Hodge. Hodge, an actor who engenders goodwill no matter where he pops up, is an excellent fit for the character. He gets the mix of intellect, self-righteous fury, and tendency towards self-destructive isolation just right. Unfortunately, he’s doing it in service of a series that isn’t close to the same level. The good news is he isn’t alone in playing above Cross’s level of quality. Isaiah Mustafa brings a gruff clarity to Alex’s lifelong best friend and current partner on the force, John Sampson. His Sampson seems to get that he’d be the hero in any other story, but as long as there’s Cross, he’ll always be second on life’s call sheet. The performance isn’t heavy with jealousy, though, but rather a frustration that his friend can’t stop making choices that hurt him and his family in the name of protecting them. Alona Tal, as the duo’s FBI contact Kayla Craig, is another standout. Her mix of “one of the boys” attitude and nonstop flirtation makes her a vibrant presence on-screen. That brings important moments of lightness to a show that too often confuses dourness as proof of serious storytelling. Who wouldn't trust Ryan Eggold? Nothing suspicious about his look. (Keri Anderson/Prime Video) As alluded to above, Cross isn’t an especially unique offering. Making the smart choice to tell an original story rather than adapt a specific novel does not lead to the show avoiding most of the genre’s trappings. There is a dangerous serial killer who’s in a cat-and-mouse game with Cross and his team. Like most pop culture serial killers—but very few real-life ones—he has a bizarre gimmick. In this case, he likes to pick victims that resemble executed convicted murderers and make them look almost exactly like killers through force-feeding, haircuts, cosmetic surgery, and more. When he achieves his vision, he murders them in the same manner their look-a-likes were executed. The police, inspiringly, call him Fanboy. Continue Reading →

There is objective good in this world, and it is possible to know it. That does not, however, mean that everything done in pursuit of that good is itself objectively reasonable. That’s the underlying message of so much of Say Nothing, a nine-episode look at the Troubles in Ireland predominantly through the eyes of former IRA soldier/terrorist Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew predominantly, Maxine Peake in middle age). For instance, it is objectively true that Ireland deserves to be united and free of British rule. Does it follow, then, that bombings in British downtown centers are objectively good? Regrettable but necessary? Acts of terrorism? Similarly, the series considers (although with admittedly less zeal) the idea that it is objectively true that British citizens deserve lives free of random acts of violence. Does that make all actions to crush the organization behind that violence acceptable? Does that extend to mistreatment of the people who live next to members of that organization, people who never made a bomb or even threw a rock but also don’t report their neighbors, friends, and family for the same? Continue Reading →

Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) have the kind of meet-cute that hits with a bang, forgive the pun. A rising chef and a techie for Weetabix, respectively, they meet when she strikes him with her car. Unaware that the reason Tobias was in the road was running to get a pen to finally sign his divorce papers, Altmut buys him dinner at a kind of Americana diner cousin to the one where All of Us Strangers set its glorious heart-ripper of a climax and then invites him and his wife to dinner at her much ritzier restaurant--as a two-part act of penance. He takes her up on the invitation. Solo. In short order, they get to connecting. Despite the guilt and the neck brace, they hit it off. There’s a spark, one they run with once it becomes clear that despite being unready to shed his wedding band, Tobias is single. That’s how We Live in Time starts, but it’s not where it starts. No, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) opens years into Almut and Tobias’ partnership. Instead of meeting Almut committing an act of near vehicular homicide, the audience first encounters her blending pleasure (a morning run) and business (gathering wild ingredients for a parfait recipe she’s been experimenting with). Pugh makes a strong first impression. She’s someone who stops to smell the flowers both for joy and utility. More importantly, she's found a balance between the two that brings happiness. Continue Reading →

Like a good cop, Eli (Billy Crystal) is sure at the start of Before that if he solves this one last case, he can retire happily. The difference is Eli is a psychiatrist, not a cop. And the case isn’t some unsolved murder or wild heist. It’s a little boy, Noah (Jacobi Jupe). Noah is a child in the foster system living with Denise (Rosie Perez). He has selective mutism. When Noah speaks, he occasionally does so in a no longer used Dutch dialect. He experiences visual and auditory hallucinations that often lead to violent outbursts. He also seems to know Eli somehow and, more disconcertingly, Eli’s recently deceased wife, Lynn (Judith Light). The more Eli connects to the case, the worse it seems to get for both doctor and client. Before long, the audience, and indeed the doctor himself, must contemplate the limits of science and medicine. Is Noah mentally ill, or is there some strange and potentially dangerous supernatural force exerting a hold on him? While the concept of “mental illness or supernatural intervention” came into vogue with The Exorcist(if not sooner), the rather risible idea experienced a kind of zenith in the late 90s and early 2000s. The most common form was an aging but still bankable male star (Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, to name a couple) as a psychologist, psychiatrist, or social worker—Hollywood frequently doesn’t know the difference—working with a young actress poised for stardom (Brittany Murphy, Dakota Fanning) in films with fairly generic names (Don’t Say a Word, Hide and Seek). There were other variations on theme, mixing gender, age, occupation, and so on. But at their core was the same driving question: is all this wild stuff the audience seeing caused by an evil otherworldly entity or the unfortunate result of an untreated or treated improperly mental illness? Before belongs to this “proud” tradition. Continue Reading →

Shrinking Season 2 picks up a bit down the road from where Season 1 ended in time, but it immediately reconnects with its final moments. That is when Jimmy’s (Jason Segel) client Grace (Heidi Gardner) took his guidance a bit too much to heart and violently interrupted the negative patterns in her communication with her husband. Speaking of picking up right where things left off, when I last reviewed the show? I was almost certainly a bit too harsh. Overall I recommended the series. Still, I spent much of the review vocalizing about the ways it didn’t get mental health concerns or therapy right. It can be hard to review something that revolves around your job. That’s why so many podcasters reviewing Nobody Wants This spend a considerable portion of their reviews talking about how unrealistic the show’s depiction of podcasting is. (That show’s depiction of Judaism is another matter, one I should’ve been a little more on top of, perhaps. But that’s a discussion for another day.) As I had just stopped being a therapist—perhaps for good—to write full-time, I think I was especially activated by the show’s rather…flippant depiction of the field. Jessica Williams and Christa Miller spend time in the most chaotic, best appointed therapist office ever. (AppleTV+) In Shrinking Season 2, several consequences of Jimmy’s “psychological vigilantism” come home to roost, not just with Grace. That helps refine my perspective. Additionally, with distance, the depiction of Jimmy’s rock bottom, briefly glimpsed at the beginning of Season 1, feels more honest. For once, it seems as though “tell, not show” was the better avenue to capturing his downward spiral of addiction, self-hatred, parental abdication, and general interpersonal awfulness. Continue Reading →

If you’ve seen or read enough stories about vengeance, chances are good you’ve encountered the saying, “He who seeks revenge digs two graves,” or some variation. Likely misattributed to Confucius, its meaning nonetheless carries weight. The new drama Disclaimer wrestles with the adage far more seriously than most other takes on the act of seeking catharsis through reprisal. Teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) has just finished self-destructively barreling into his own firing, quite the fall for a former Teacher of the Year. He’s alone, a widower, his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) dead after a protracted time with cancer. However, in many ways, he’s been alone since their son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) died about two decades earlier. That’s when his wife began to pull away from him and didn’t stop until her death. With his newfound time, he begins to clean out the closets and wardrobes left unused since her passing. Among the debris, he discovers a series of objects that lead to a manuscript. In its pages, Nancy lays out their son’s final days in Italy. More importantly, she places the blame for his death firmly at the feet of Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett). Catherine is now a highly successful documentary filmmaker married to financier Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) with an adult son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Continue Reading →

In description, It’s What’s Inside reads like a cousin to two great recent films. First, there's the “friends get together for a reunion and it goes very wrong” Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Then, there the “through a devilishly simple device, people tap into something they rapidly lose control of” Talk to Me. If you have a longer memory, Flatliners may even come mind. It fails to achieve the heights of any of those movies. Nonetheless, writer-director Greg Jardin’s first feature effort boasts an intriguing premise and enough visual flair to make it worth a watch. On the night before Reuben’s (Devon Terrell) wedding, the soon-to-be groom brings together his old college running crew. Most important among them (for the film) are Cyrus (James Morosini) and Shelby (Brittany O’Grady). They've been together so long their friends repeatedly assume they're married. They are not and there's no nuptials on the horizon. Additionally, they’re the kind of couple in their 20s that says things like, “I thought we agreed we’d save our sexual energy for each other.” while trying to jumpstart their largely dormant sex life with wigs and nodding towards roleplaying as their friends. David Thompson wants to know if you'd like to try this new competitive card game. (Netflix) Surprising everyone, Forbes (David Thompson) is also on the guest list. Even more unexpected is that he shows up. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since he got kicked out of college for an incident involving trust fund lothario Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) and Forbes’ underage sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport). Hilariously, none of the other friends seem to know what exactly happened or why Forbes got kicked out, despite them all being present for the events and at least a couple of them later giving testimony to the administration afterward. Continue Reading →

The pleasures of the romantic comedy are well-documented. When they work, they make for the best kind of fantasy. The ones where our all too numerous flaws may stall but never derail us. Of course, their failures are similarly well documented, making the ups and downs of lust and love feel like products. Moving the genre from its typical medium—film—to television with the new series Nobody Wants This carries the threat to magnify those shortcomings until they blot out anything else. And then there’s that title. Oof. If ever there was a juicy fastball down the middle for critics looking for an easy headline dunk, it’s that one. It’s more than a relief then to find that blowing out rom-com tropes from an under two-hour film to a 10-episode season helps, not harms, the storytelling. Nobody Wants This isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it plays the hits well. It makes a thing you’ve seen a hundred permutations of feel fresh and lively. Sorry, lovers of ironically mean-spirited headlines. The story is a tale of mismatched lovers. Joanne (Kristen Bell) cohosts a podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) dedicated to their love life’s successes and failures—mostly failures. Her producer Ashley (Sherry Cola) has her over for a small gathering, warning Joanne there’s a rabbi in the house. Joanne jokes with another guest, Noah (Adam Brody), about it, their chemistry immediate. When Noah blesses dinner, Joanne realizes her error. Continue Reading →

A word of warning: this is a slightly different kind of review. I took my son, a massive fan of The Wild Robot book series, to see an advance screening of the film with me. So, there will be a paragraph with his reaction to include a 10-year-old kid’s perspective on this family feature. The rating and rest of the text are mine, though. Sorry, you have to deal with my usual nonsense to get the real opinion that matters. Sometime in the future, a robot awakens on a beach. “She’s” surrounded by broken crates and other debris makes it clear that this was not an intended destination. Programmed to be of service, she attempts to get any of the island’s denizens, all animals, to give her a task. Even after an intense software update gives her the ability to understand and speak the language of the animals, none of them will give her something to do. Soon, though, an accident provides the task. After falling down a hill, thanks to the animals’ cruelty, the robot crushes all but one goose egg in a nest. Unaware of what the eggs are or the process of imprinting, she unintentionally is in the right place, at the right time, to become the newly hatched gosling’s defacto mother. Now she has a task, one that she has no programming for and only the vaguest idea of what to do. Like all new moms. Or parents, for that matter. Continue Reading →

Some movies are just good enough. And that’s ok. There’s something to be said for a little better than mediocre film animated by star power. Wolfs is such a picture. At the start, the film feels serious. A tough-on-crime District Attorney (Amy Ryan) takes a much younger man (Austin Abrams) upstairs at an expensive hotel for a furtive romantic enough. Unfortunately, secret fun turns to tragedy when the Kid falls off the bed and into a glass bar cart, seemingly dying. In desperation, she reaches out to a cleaner (George Clooney). As he drives to her, writer-director Jon Watts and cinematographer Larkin Seiple give the scene an almost Michael Mann quality. Well, Mann with less interesting lighting and a firmly adult contemporary soundtrack. When Brad Pitt shows up as the hotel’s designated fixer, however, that serious to admittedly self-serious tone goes away. In its place, the film embraces a sort of low-level Odd Couple grumbling comedy. The dueling cleaners try to assert their superiority over each other, all while trying to hide their signs of aging from each other. To Wolfs’ credit, they don’t go to the well of bad backs, eroding vision, and barely contained yawns too often. On the other hand, when they do, the gags land with a smile or, at most, a gentle chuckle. If you were planning to watch the movie for a few hearty guffaws, you’d do well to look elsewhere. Continue Reading →

The difficulty in reviewing television is, often, critics only receive a fraction of the season’s episodes. As a result, one sometimes has to offer a full review on a partial product. Frequently, that’s fine. Shows often tell you who they are, if you will, fairly early on. A character or a twist that changes things might show up in an episode down the road. Even then, though, such things often don’t change the bedrock quality of the endeavor. Sharing all of this is by way of a disclaimer because, after the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, it remains unclear what kind of show it will be. Some aspects of the tone are clear from the start. It’s obviously playing with a healthy dose of irreverence. It’s clever. Kathryn Hahn slips back into Agnes/Agatha Harkness like a second skin, quickly giving her depth without erasing the villainousness of her turn in WandaVision. The supporting characters, including Teen (Joe Locke), Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), and Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone?!), can hold the screen despite Hahn’s charisma bombardment. Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal even gives Agatha a run for her money in the charm department with a frighteningly sexual/sexually frightening turn. She carries the conclusion of episode 1 with three or four sentences that are…very intense. Debra Jo Rupp, Ali Ahn, Patti LuPone, and Sasheer Zamata support women's rights and women's wrongs. (Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Television) But is the show a drama? A comedy? A horror-drama? Horror-comedy? Horror-dramedy? One’s guess is as good as another. Episode 1, “Seekest Thou the Road,” is almost entirely a parody/homage episode, taking WandaVision’s sitcom-trappings storytelling approach and applying it to the crime-thriller limited series genre, specifically Mare of Easttown with a dollop of The Killing thrown in via the opening credits. It’s an interesting idea, a nod to the Agatha All Along’s parent series with a parallel storytelling technique. More importantly, it gives the series room enough to be more than just a reinvention of the wheel. And the show seemingly ditches it by the episode’s end. Continue Reading →

Fight Club is still one of the peak cinematic explorations of toxic masculinity. Now, we may finally have a true female equivalent in The Substance. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a former Oscar darling whose career has stalled out, stranding her in a Jane Fonda-esque workout show. When she overhears her producer demanding they replace her with someone younger and hotter, she’s desperate to do whatever it takes to stay in the limelight. Enter The Substance. She’s handed a mysterious ad that promises to create a better version of herself — literally. In this case, her alter ego is the sexy, youthful Sue (Margaret Qualley). It’s not long before Sue and Elisabeth begin fighting to the death for the right to exist. Continue Reading →

Back in the aughts and early teens, television discovered a kind of alchemy. Take a murder. First, assign some good but overly serious cops to it. Then, team them up with an unusual consultant. Voila! TV magic. In no time, the subgenre spread like wildfire over network and basic cable. Anyone could be a quirky consultant, including a former cop overwhelmed by mental illness (Monk), a mystery writer (Castle), a fake psychic (The Mentalist, Psych), mathematicians (Numb3rs), and time-traveling revolutionary war soldiers (Sleepy Hollow). Sure, they weren’t high art, but they frequently provided a great time in front of your big screen. High Potential, the American remake of a French series, delightfully transports audiences back to that breezy era. Developed by Drew Goddard, the series revolves around Morgan (Kaitlin Olson). A single mom of three, she struggles with interpersonal and professional relationships. The cause, in part, is her off-the-charts IQ, which gives her insomnia, an intolerance for authority, and difficulty dealing with anything that isn’t “right.” Those same features lead her to rework an evidence board at the Los Angeles police precinct where she’s working her latest gig as a cleaning lady. When head detective Selena (Judy Reyes) traces the changes back to Morgan, she offers her a job, much to the frustration of Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata), Major Crime’s go-to investigator. Judy Reyes and Daniel Sunjata enjoy that classic morning pairing. Coffee and crime scene photos. (Disney/David Bukach) Javicia Leslie and Deniz Akdeniz, and Garret Dillahunt round the police side of the cast as two younger and more welcoming members of Major Crimes and a gambling-addicted head of Robbery/Homicide, respectively. At home, Taran Killam plays Ludo, Morgan’s most recent ex and father to her two youngest children including Matthew Lamb as Elliot, inheritor of Morgan’s IQ and love of random facts, but not yet her attitude. Her oldest daughter, Ava (Amirah J), seems more like her father, who disappeared when Ava was still in diapers. She believes he abandoned the family, while Morgan insists he’d never. Continue Reading →

In the future of Uglies, adapted from the YA series by Scott Westerfeld, humanity has survived death by its own hands. First, a vaguely defined but elite corps of scientists developed a new, apparently infinitely renewable energy source. That cured us of our dependence on fossil fuels. (Sidenote: it’s hilarious that the only way people can quit fossil fuels is by developing something else to consume instead of, you know, wind, water, or solar power.) However, humanity’s natural tendency towards tribalism continued to raise its ugly head. The solution there? Get rid of the ugly! A procedure, done on sixteen-year-olds, eliminates all imperfections, physical and psychological. That means, on the eve of your 16th birthday, maybe you are a kid with an overbite and a burgeoning anxiety disorder. After your birthday day “surgery” though? Your jaws align perfectly and your heart rate stops spiking out of nowhere. Yes, even when you think about that time you said something dumb at that party. Oh, and your eyes are gold now, too. For funsies. One sure sign Laverne Cox is evil? White after Labor Day. That's just madness. (Brian Douglas/Netflix) On first blush, Uglies is a hodgepodge of dystopian fiction, especially of teen variety, remixed and reheated in a new mediocre shell. Pick your favorites of the genre and chances are this film will include at least one moment of “homage” to it. Enjoy a restriction on literature like found in Fahrenheit 451 or 2002’s “better than the Matrix” (real ones will get it) Equilibrium but want it to only ever so slightly mentioned? Uglies has you. Garish displays of beauty as a sign of elitism as in the Hunger Games? Check! A sort of return to the land, noble savage theme ala Brave New World? Got it. A have-and-have-nots society based on perceived genetic superiority akin to Gattaca? Of course. Better living through the elimination of pesky emotions? Well, you get the idea. Uglies has them all in the least thoughtful, most set-dressing way. Continue Reading →

Jeremy Saulnier’s films, even his darkly comedic debut Murder Party, are shot through with a resigned skepticism about violence. The characters who willingly pursue it as a solution, even a protagonist like Blue Ruin’s Dwight (Macon Blair), suffer for it. However, those who try to resist, from Murder Party’s Christopher (Chris Sharp) or the band members in Green Room, find they have no choice but to wield it. Even then, that inevitability rarely brings relief or catharsis. Violence might get them out of a dangerous situation or safely back home, but it leaves psychological scars. Rebel Ridge continues this tradition. Not that Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) doesn’t have plenty of good reasons to embrace violence. Within moments of arriving in a small town, he’s knocked off his bike by a cop car driven by Officers Marston (David Denman) and Lann (Emory Cohen). They’re white, he’s not. It’s easy to jump to conclusions about what’s about to happen. Despite their obvious racist stereotyping of him, however, they ultimately let him go. Unfortunately, before they do so, they strip him of the money he was carrying to bail his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc) out of lock-up on a low-level drug charge. It’s a very real process called civil asset forfeiture, which gives law officers tremendous power to seize money and assets from anyone they suspect of being involved in the drug trade. Worse, those who find their assets seized have little recourse. This town’s police chief, Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), has happily taken advantage of it to make up for what he considers unfair restrictions to his budget. It’s police corruption at its most resilient. Continue Reading →

Watching The Perfect Couple, Jenna Lamia’s slick adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel for Netflix, two thoughts immediately bubble up. The first isn’t the fault of the show’s quality so much as its timing. That thought is, “maybe we should give a break to all these shows and movies about rich folk in great locales doing crime”. In less than a year, I have reviewed shows with that plot taking place in a planned bunker in the tundra, on an ultra-expensive cruise ship, a rich enclave in West Palm Beach, and, now, an estate in a seaside New England town. Other recent entries include The Glass Onion, The Menu, and one could even mount an argument for Only Murderers in the Building. A lot of these are good. Some are great. But perhaps we could spread the ensemble crime-mystery wealth (haHA) a bit? Maybe a murder mystery set at a State Fair? Meghann Fahy's got those beach-y waves everybody wants. (Netflix) Granted, this is a bit unfair. The Perfect Couple comes from a novel. Hilderbrand set the novel in Nantucket, where she lived, so she was writing about the kind of climate outside her window. That all makes sense. However, it’s difficult not to see so much media where affluence is part of the scenery and not get a little tired of it. Especially when the series feel like they’re acting as a catalog as much, if not more, than critique. Continue Reading →