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The 88th Academy Awards – 2016 Winners
Last night, the 88th Academy Awards were held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, hosted by black comedian Chris Rock (a fact notable for the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that had been building ever since the all-white nominees were announced). Below are this year’s winners of the main categories, with brief commentary on each: BEST PICTURE Bridge…
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SUFFRAGETTE (2015)
Wonder Woman is a child of the suffragette movement. The symbols we associate with her strength and power belonged to the American feminists who came before and inspired William Moulton Marston to create a new kind of heroine. Suffrage was a dynamic and furious force to be reckoned with. A force that, for some women,…
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Brie Larson: Room at the Top
Every generation has their breakthrough artists, but when it comes to Hollywood stars the concept is relative and volatile. Brie Larson represents the epitome of this phenomenon. Over the past few months the Sacramento-native has become the talk of tinsel town and the world for her outstanding, Oscar-nominated performance in Room. This heartbreaking drama, directed…
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Star Trek 2017: Set Phasers to Prediction
Bryan Fuller was recently announced as the showrunner of CBS’s new Star Trek TV series, due for launch in early-2017 (first episode on CBS, before transferring to their video-on-demand service CBS All Access). Can we predict what the future has in store for Star Trek next year, based solely on the scraps of information we…
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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…
