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DEUTSCHLAND 83
There has always been a big market for Ostalgie. From Goodbye Lenin to The Lives of Others, life in Germany during the Cold War continues to exert a strange fascination for viewers. Spy drama Deutschland 83 makes the most of that interest, tapping into both our obsession with life behind the Berlin Wall, and the…
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THE X-FILES – ‘My Struggle II’
While not as distasteful as “Babylon”, the finale of The X-Files’ so-called ‘event series’ was a preposterous mess that bit off more than it could chew. Maybe if this had been a two-hour film (possibly as intended, as Chris Carter once admitted writing a third movie on spec), it perhaps would have had the necessary…
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BONE TOMAHAWK (2015)
Bone Tomahawk is, for the most part, a character-driven western with lots of talky scenes. It’s also a bloody and violent western with sequences reminiscent of the most brutal Spaghetti westerns of the ’60s and ’70s. Sometimes, these two strands are adequately—even cleverly—reconciled; in such moments, the film’s at its best. But it occasionally slips…
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BETTER CALL SAUL, 2.2 – ‘Cobbler’
The big picture is yet to emerge for season 2 of Better Call Saul, but “Cobbler” concluded last week’s storyline very amusingly, and the show is doing a nice job easing us into a new direction—with Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) getting used to his fancy new job at Davis & Main (where he’s valued and listened…
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VINYL, 1.2 – ‘Yesterday Once More’
The basic problem with Vinyl is that it’s like a really good three-minute pop song trapped inside a prog rock monstrosity. While this week’s episode, “Yesterday Once More”, was less ponderous than the two-hour opener, Vinyl still feels like an over-stuffed and baggy monster of a show; as excessive as the cocaine its increasingly out-of-control…
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MAD DOGS – Season One
“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” is the recurring line of the Noël Coward song, but the heroes are very American here. The source of the confusion stems from knowing Mad Dogs is an adaptation of a British series than ran from 2011-13, and presumably nobody could think of a more…
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SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE (2015)
Sleeping with Other People was self-deprecatingly pitched by its own writer-director as “When Harry Met Sally for assholes” when it debuted at Sundance. Yet Leslye Headland’s more sincere intention for her bawdy but bittersweet rom-com was to create an open dialogue about loneliness. Before they embark upon a decade of sleeping with other people, Jake…
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OUT 1 (1971)
Jacques Rivette is an ongoing revelation for me. News of the French director’s death broke as I was part way through watching Arrow’s release of his 776-minute tour de force, Out 1 (1971), for the very first time. It’s easy to mistake the extraordinary running time and its longstanding (often mythical) reputation among cinephiles as…
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THE FINEST HOURS (2016)
With Brooklyn, Carol, and now The Finest Hours, films set in 1952 are having a bit of a moment. Here, the story being told is that of the crew members aboard an oil tanker that disastrously splits in half, and the U.S Coast Guard team that went out into the dangerous storm to rescue them.…
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THE X-FILES – ‘Babylon’
Where to begin? I’ve perhaps been too kind to The X-Files this year, because it was a formative television show for me as a teenager, so I was prepared to cut it some slack. All of the episodes this series have had problems (with the exception of “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster”, which wasn’t…
