TV amp; Movies Reviews

Nobody likes Carl Morck — mostly because he makes it clear early and often how little he likes them. Everything and everyone is an opportunity to complain. He’s an English cop stuck working in Scotland because of a marriage that’s long over. He’s much smarter than everyone else in his …

It was the crane kick seen ’round the world. There he is, skinny and picked-upon Daniel LaRusso, squaring off with the Cobra Kai dojo’s resident Aryan-youth bully and ace leg-sweeper Johnny Lawrence, in the final round of the All-Valley Karate tournament. His sensei, Nariyoshi Miyagi, watches impassively from the sidelines …

There are dozens upon dozens of memorable eccentrics, delusional antiheroes, blustery authority figures, sad sacks, screw-ups and all-too-lovable schmucks that populate the 12 feature films and handful of shorts directed by Wes Anderson. It is safe to say that there’s nobody else like Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda in his back …

Into every generation, a hangout sitcom is born —light on plot, and heavy on the chemistry of a group of young adults spending way too much time together in the big city. Gen X had Friends. The millennials had too many to count, including New Girl, How I Met Your …

This post contains spoilers for the limited series Sirens, now streaming on Netflix. Maybe I should have known that Sirens was going to be confusing when its main character licked a stranger’s neck. The licking happens late in the first of five episodes, created by Molly Smith Metzler, based on …

A new Spike Lee movie is still a calendar-clearing event; in the near 30 years since She’s Gotta Have It helped kickstart the Amerindie boom and introduced the world to a brash, trash-talking auteur from Brooklyn, he’s given us era-defining statements and eccentric sidebars, epic biopics and intimate performance movies, …

In 2018, Shia LaBeouf was feeling heartbroken, adrift, in a state of what he called “spiritual sickness.” So the actor did what a lot of us were doing back then when we found ourselves in serious need of help: He went on Twitter. In the video that LaBeouf posted on …

“I bled, I peed, I cried, and vomited.” This sentence comes at the end of the second paragraph of The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary, extraordinarily raw 2011 memoir about growing up, nearly giving up, and straining to getting a grip on a traumatic past. It follows one of …

Ari Aster would like you to go back in time. The writer-director of Hereditary and Midsommar doesn’t need you to travel too far. Just five years. You probably remember a few of the details from May 2020: social distancing, social-media diatribes, swabs being thrust violently into nasal cavities, “I Can’t …

Eight movies. Five directors. Three dozen character actors. Two dozen exotic locales, each one of them the perfect background for globetrotting espionage. A dozen action set pieces. A half dozen peeled-off masks. One best-of-show brawl set in a public bathroom. Numerous car chases, motorcycle chases, helicopter chases, explosions, collateral-damage relationships, …