TV amp; Movies Reviews

To some, he’ll always be Pennywise, the eternal sewer-dwelling clown of your nightmares. To others, he’s the hapless, unlucky Air Bnb occupant in Barbarian or the ambitious, sniveling Marquis in the John Wick-iverse. And to still others, he’s the kid who followed his dad Stellan and his older brother Alexander …

1. Always hire Anthony Hopkins to deliver exposition. The man is an Oscar-winner, he’s played everybody from Hamlet to Hannibal Lecter, he’s got the best butter-melting British purr in the business. So if you’re Zack Snyder — or even if you’re not Zack Snyder, but are dropping the second chapter …

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: Some criminals abduct a rich guy’s child and demand a hefty sum to give the youngster back. The “victim” then proceeds to make life hell for the kidnappers. It’s more or less the plot of The Ransom of Red …

Once upon a time … in war-torn London, Winston Churchill found himself face to face with the potential end of England as he knew it. The Blitz was in full effect. Europe was slowly being crushed under Hitler’s boot heels. German U-boats had turned the Atlantic into a graveyard, effectively …

The first episode of The Jinx Part Two is titled “Why Are You Still Here?” Like every installment of the true crime docuseries, it’s a quote from the episode itself; in this case, it’s prosecutor John Lewin asking accused murderer Robert Durst why he hadn’t already fled the country by …

In the new Hulu limited series Under the Bridge, Riley Keough plays Rebecca Godfrey, a novelist who begins writing a non-fiction book about the murder of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl who lived in the same Canadian suburb where Rebecca grew up. In one episode, Rebecca’s father reads the first …

They’re big, they’re hairy, they’re an urban myth that refuses to die — they’re the mythological creatures known as Sasquatches, those reclusive figures occasionally seen wandering in the woods and who may or may not rock a size 22 men’s shoe size. Some may doubt their existence, given that they …

When The Last of Us debuted early in 2023, I began my rave review by saying, “Among the many compliments I can give HBO’s The Last of Us is that it eventually made me forget that it’s based on a video game.” Some gamers took this as both a backhanded …

In the opening seconds of HBO‘s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s bestselling novel The Sympathizer, the pay cable giant’s familiar logo is transformed so that, instead of evoking a television set turning on, it becomes part of a reel of 8mm film. The miniseries, about a North Vietnamese double agent …

The most succinct piece of TV criticism I’ve read in the last decade was this 58-word tweet from Topher Florence: There is, sadly, no real show called Surf Dracula, but the Surf Dracula Problem is everywhere in television these days. Too many series now treat their entire first season as …