In the second sketch of the third season of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, one character admits, “I just take everything way too far! I got too hyper.” This line could be part of pretty much every ITYSL sketch, both in this new season and in the …
Read More »'You Hurt My Feelings': The Perfect Julia Louis-Dreyfus Cringe Comedy
“We’re so lucky,” Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tells her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies). He’s a therapist with a private practice in Manhattan; she teaches creative writing at The New School. Their son, Elliott (Owen Teague), is happy, healthy, and works at a weed dispensary, though Mom isn’t so jazzed about that …
Read More »'FUBAR' Gives Arnold Schwarzenegger His Most Fun Role in Years
You probably didn’t notice, but earlier this year, CBS launched a TV adaptation of True Lies, the 1994 James Cameron-directed action comedy that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis as, respectively, a master spy and the civilian wife who is shocked to discover what her husband really does for …
Read More »'Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai' Is Enchanting and Terribly Cute
In 1984 a promising director named Joe Dante unleashed Gremlins. It was a horror-comedy that played like a polished-up version of something he might have worked on for his mentor, B-movie king Roger Corman, who shepherded Dante’s first solo feature, Piranha, in 1978. Dante already had The Howling to his …
Read More »'American Born Chinese' Is a Thrilling 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Reunion
Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan plays a fairly minor role in the Disney+ family series American Born Chinese. But there may be no more important character to convey what the show is trying to do, and how well it succeeds at most of it. Chinese is a complicated mix of …
Read More »Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City' Has Sharply Divided Cannes
Imagine you’re a filmmaker, and you’ve assembled a dream cast of A-list stars, crack character actors, and your usual stock company of famous faces. Your production-design team has gifted you with a set that’s evocative of a 1950s Southwestern desert landscape, complete with Monument Valley vistas and Route 66 iconography. …
Read More »Was the Pedophilia 'Sex Kindergarten' in Texas All a Lie?
The title might give the game away a little, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of How to Create a Sex Scandal. The new Max docuseries, brisk, brief, and damning, makes a convincing case that an East Texas pedophilia case that sent seven people to prison was in fact a …
Read More »'The Idol' Is More Toxic and Way Worse Than You've Heard
Memo to showrunners: When in doubt about your lead character, just cut to her masturbating while choking herself. It’s a little past the halfway mark of the first episode of The Idol — the HBO series about the pressure chamber of pop stardom from the minds of Abel “The Weeknd” …
Read More »'Happy Valley' Returns to Send Catherine Cawood Off Into the Sunset
It has been more than seven years since we last saw Catherine Cawood, the world-weary Yorkshire cop heroine of the excellent British drama Happy Valley, and our first new glimpse of her in forever seems about right. Catherine, still played by the great Sarah Lancashire, shows up at a construction …
Read More »'Master Gardener' Is Paul Schrader Playing With Neo-Nazi Dynamite
A person sits at a desk, in a room so stark and tidy it might belong to a monk or a model prisoner, writing in a notebook. His inner monologue plays as a voiceover, drier than sandpaper; in this case, it’s a horticulture lecture about French and British gardens. If …
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