TV amp; Movies Reviews

When I was a kid growing up in the Nineties, Godzilla reigned supreme. The king of the monsters was a schlock superstar, and as a disciple, I worshipped at an altar of VHS tapes. It was a good time at the height of Heisei era, with disasterpieces like Godzilla vs. …

Very early on in Todd Haynes‘ May December, Julianne Moore is prepping for a BBQ. Her character, Gracie, is a suburban mom in Savannah, Georgia, idly chatting to a neighbor in a spacious, tastefully decorated kitchen. Her husband wanders through, grabbing a beer before going back outside to man the …

It’s hard to keep track of all the ethical violations depicted in Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, the new three-part Netflix docuseries whose title suggests a straight-to-cable Nineties TV movie. Some of the sins here on display are, literally, mortal: Paolo Macchiarini, an apparent sociopath, a definite conman, and, …

When last we saw FX‘s Fargo nearly three years ago, its creator, Noah Hawley, had taken the franchise away from its home turf, both physically and demographically. The fourth season roamed hundreds of miles south from the show’s usual Minnesotan stomping grounds for a story set on the mean streets …

Sports fans tend to feel proprietary about their heroes, as if stars owed us more than the heroics and physical sacrifice they provide on the field or court. The better the athlete, the more we expect and demand. So, when all-world Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders announced his retirement …

“All art is autobiographical,” Federico Fellini once said. “The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” No one would accuse Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s two-and-a-half-hour epic (that’s the theatrical cut’s running time, mind you; there’s a four-hour version waiting in the wings as well) about the French dictator’s rise and fall, of being …

It’s only about two minutes and 25 seconds, yet it remains the single best thing Eli Roth has ever done. Tucked right in the middle of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino‘s ambitious, mondo-grimy Grindhouse (2007) is a trailer for a fake movie called Thanksgiving. You probably remember it, if you …

The 2006 film The Queen, written by Peter Morgan, dramatizes the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. Much of the conflict comes from Queen Elizabeth’s reluctance to publicly address the grief of her subjects, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair pleading with her to speak. In the fourth …

Long before there was a Katniss Everdeen, future victor of the Hunger Games and Panem’s No. 1 revolutionary icon, there was Lucy Gray Baird — a young woman who also hailed from District 12 and found herself recruited as a tribute in a fascist world’s annual entertainment death march. She …

When it was released in 2010, Edgar Wright‘s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was considered a disappointment. It grossed less than $50 million at the box office, on a reported production budget of $85 million. And the reviews, while mostly positive, were less than enthusiastically so. In hindsight, though, Wright’s …