Season five is the best of the five now available. That’s a strange thing to say about a show built on a wildly tired Hollywood trope — the recycled premise, the anthology remake — but Noah Hawley keeps finding new ways to run with the Coen Brothers’ original idea, and this time he hits it out of the park. Season two is a close second — my son argues it’s actually the best, and with outstanding performances by Jean Smart, Ted Danson, Bokeem Woodbine, Cristin Milioti, and Kieran Culkin (plus Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons, who met on set and later married), that’s a hard case to refute. Season one is decent; three and four are meh. Hawley hasn’t committed to a sixth season, nor has the show been cancelled, so where this goes next is anyone’s guess.

Season five is the show at its most Coen: twisted violence woven with the driest of humor, absurdly naive kindness sitting next to the basest amoral cruelty.

The acting is ferocious top to bottom — no one is coasting. Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple is a revelation as Dorothy Lyon (aka Nadine), the victim of heinous marital abuse who escapes her ultra MAGA, Ammon Bundy on glue ex-husband, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Hawley toys with the Greek dramatic device of charactonym, as the absurdly indefatigable, resourceful and indestructible Dorothy is indeed both a lion, or rather, as numerous foes call her, a tiger. She is also monstrously full of shit when necessary, so also a liar.

One of the dumbest things America does, and boy are we stupid, is elect law enforcement leaders. It is no accident that the Chief of Police is rarely the one who is the corrupt antagonist in film, it is always the Sheriff.

In this show, Jon Hamm is that Sheriff, and he’s never been better. He seems to be experiencing a Travolta-like career rebirth, in this role, and also in his excellent turns in “The Morning Show,” and “Friends and Neighbors”. The latter two are both Apple TV productions, and both are good. So it looks like there will be no more insurance commercials for him.

The moral tone here is at once ancient, Old Testament, and perhaps even before, or as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character says, “it’s from an older text, written on stone tablets in the era of Skull Fuckers.” It is also modern, as I will explain below. Leigh is magnificent as a filthy rich corporate lending mogul Lorraine Lyon, and Temple’s mother-in-law, who originally hates her but comes to love and respect the woman who marries her nebbish and childishly naive son, played flawlessly by David Rysdahl. Her business isn’t cartoonish loan-sharking — it’s the respectable kind, the kind with a logo and a customer service line, the modern debt-collection machine that legally, patiently, grinds people down over years instead of breaking a kneecap in an alley. That’s the update Hawley makes to the old Fargo formula: the violence used to come from desperate amateurs with guns; now it also comes from spreadsheets.

Although Hawley lets him talk like one, Hamm’s Tillman is more than just a MAGA cartoon. He is a man who, in his own mind, has convinced himself that his various personas — sheriff, husband, patriarch — are now a single identity. His cartoon is real, and he cannot accept any challenge to the manufactured character he now fully inhabits. His delusion is complete and quite dangerous. Every act of violence he commits reads to him as law enforcement, self-defense, or God’s will, often all three. The clearest window into that mind comes after he finally captures Dorothy — at great cost, having torn through half his own posse to do it — and her mother-in-law tries to buy him off by offering to completely fund his reelection campaign. She does this only after messing with his re-election campaign in the most hilarious way — her lawyer/consigliere hires three men, all named Roy Tillman, all in identical cowboy hats, to appear on a debate stage with him. It does not go well, he freaks out and assaults a couple different people. Despite this humiliation, he responds to Lyon’s “offer” with the full fundamentalist package: scripture, property rights, his God-given freedom from government interference. Lyon doesn’t even blink. “Oh, you mean absolute freedom with zero responsibility? Only one person gets to do that — a baby.” It’s the whole season’s thesis in one line: Tillman’s worldview is that of a whining toddler, dressed up in a badge and a Bible. Libertarianism in its rawest form is, in my opinion, indeed the world’s most infantile political persuasion.

My favorite character among many may be Sam Spruell’s Old Munch, a complete anachronism from God-knows-what time, with an absurd countenance, ridiculous clothing and haircut, and an unplaceable Middle European accent. His moral code is primeval, he almost seems like a Golem, who pursues the escaped Dorothy (the Wizard of Oz nod most likely intentional), in the service of Sheriff Roy, at least at first. This character, combined with Leigh, demonstrates the modern/ancient combination of themes, or rather two sides of the same coin. Munch is the archaic, possibly five-century-old sin eater, who accepts money to absorb the sins of the rich, as the poor always do metaphorically. Leigh is the modern-day money lender, who capitalizes on the weakness of the desperate by issuing credit to them at exorbitant rates, then makes them feel shitty about it as she ruins their lives through modern indentured servitude. Hawley unambiguously skewers corporate and individual greed here and in all five incarnations of the series.

The cast is further populated both by the sweetest and most guileless of innocents, and the cruelest and most unscrupulous monsters, operating in the same world. Dorothy is the one who straddles both, capable of extraordinary kindness, but boy, do not mess with her, dontcha know.

The dialogue is crisp and spot on. One of my favorite lines is when Hamm’s christofascist Sheriff is confronted by his current father-in-law, as the inevitable SWAT team surrounds his ranch/complex, and he asks him, “so, are you Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?”

Hawley and his team have real musical taste, and unlike a lot of modern film and TV, they use it in service of the story instead of substituting a needle-drop for writing they couldn’t be bothered to do. Jeff Russo’s score often strips down to a single drummer or bare percussion, nervously pounding through the season’s most stressful scenes rather than swelling to tell you how to feel. The song selection is even more restless: Mongolian throat singers Huun-Huur-Tu share space with Ralph Stanley and Tennessee Ernie Ford, cheesy prog outfits like Yes and Rush sit next to Muscle Shoals soul (James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet”), and for a more modern twist, Marilyn Manson and Prodigy.

That’s the trick of this season — it keeps switching registers between the atavistic and the modern themes without ever losing the thread, because they are in fact the same. Nihil novum sub sole est. Nothing new under the sun. Munch is out of some five-hundred-year-old moral order, absorbing sins for cash; Leigh’s character does the same thing with a loan document and a smile. Dorothy is the one character built to survive both worlds — lion, tiger, liar, whatever the moment calls for — and watching her out-maneuver Old Testament punishment and modern predatory vulture capitalism with the same set of tools is the real pleasure of the season. Hawley isn’t just skewering greed here, he’s arguing it never changed forms, it is just paperwork. Just see it. Streaming free on hulu now.

Note: This is an old review of mine I found recently, but the themes are even more poignant today as we are inundated with greater levels of electronic distraction than before, compounded and complicated by the advent of AI, the mother of all distractions. Although filmed 15 years ago, it feels current.

Disconnect is a plea, an admonition, and a quiet and convincing imperative. It shows us who we are, now, and how new things may not always be good things. We can download Library of Congress–sized packets of information at unthinkable speeds, we can see from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Marianas Trench on a whim, we can call five thousand people we’ve never met our friends — but do we connect with those closest to us? America’s ongoing experiment in individualism may be failing us, the film suggests. Despite more and more ways for us all to connect, loneliness is at an all-time high. Maybe it’s time, as the title suggests, to disconnect.

Three simple stories are woven loosely together, à la Altman or Soderbergh, with fine acting and a sure director’s hand, and for me the film achieves a satisfying and provocative result. Each story gets going with some sort of online stimulus. At first it appeared a bit obvious that there was a train wreck ahead for each set of characters. What made this picture exceptional was that it showed where the characters were headed without revealing where they would stop and turn along the way. Each story’s resolution is individual and surprising.

The common thread is that modern humans may substitute vague, unclear online relationships for real ones with those around them, and that disaster can follow. Apparently the cast never got Stephen Stills’ memo about loving the one you’re with. Each character eventually learns the hard way that old-fashioned interaction with family and true friends will always be more satisfying than the easier, but unreal, relationships found online.

The true nature of human connection is at once simpler and infinitely more complicated than the specialized, miraculous, but still somewhat crude gadgets modern technology offers. The film lays out the superficialities and dangers of modern interpersonal communication, but not in a moralizing way — it trusts its faces and silences to make the argument that its characters’ devices can’t. It has been said that the majority of human communication is non-verbal, and the film makes it clear that technology may not be making up the lost ground.

The acting is uniformly good; these felt like real people with depth and genuine human conflicts. Jason Bateman is excellent, as are all the younger actors. The designer Marc Jacobs makes his acting debut here, playing an online pimp running a brothel of teenaged porn webcasters, and he’s genuinely convincing — a lesser film would have made the character one-dimensionally evil, but we see real, if warped, affection for the outcasts he’s taken in. There’s a sly irony in the casting that the film never underlines but doesn’t need to: a man whose career is built on curating image and appearance, playing a man who profits from other people’s manufactured images. Most of the characters here are flawed, and their individual biases get them into trouble, but there are no heroes and no abject villains.

My favorite moment in the film is the guttural, primal reaction of Haley Ramm — playing the sister of a cyberbullied teenaged misfit — to the impossibly rude behavior of one of her so-called “real” friends. As she’s pouring her emotions out to her peers about the horror of what’s happened, one of those friends, nose buried in her phone, oblivious to Ramm’s plight, interrupts to shout about some banal triumph involving a boy she likes. Ramm’s reaction: she spits in her face.

I’ve read other critics call the film’s methods of presentation crude and overbearing, but I didn’t find that so. I believed these characters, cared about them, and wanted them to do the right thing. The larger questions are left for each viewer to sit with after these three small stories, each with its own minor horrors and moments of hope. When a film does that, it’s cinema at its best. And I’m still thinking about it.

As always, I recommend the theater over home viewing for any decent film, but that might be nigh on impossible for this one. The film is available for free with an Amazon Prime subscription, and on other platforms for just a few bucks. Well worth your time.

I went into The Invite expecting little and got something else entirely — a film whose depth and quality caught me completely off guard. Ed Norton and Penélope Cruz are actors for whom I have a great deal of respect, but I could not previously say the same about Seth Rogen or Olivia Wilde.

Concerning Rogen, I should clarify. He was a writer on the hilarious Da Ali G Show (2000), and his work on Superbad (2007) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) remains genuinely funny — that’s the Rogen I think was fantastic. The current model is a different story: he’s replaced Adam Sandler as one of my least favorite comedic actors, a one-dimensional and overrated stoner, especially given the accolades heaped on The Studio (2025), a hackneyed and mediocre product full of inbred Hollywood clichés. In fairness, I was so unimpressed I only watched two and half episodes, maybe it got better, but it did not inspire me enough to find out. So it was against that recent disappointment that I watched The Invite. He’s still mining the same turf — of course he smokes several joints — but he’s quite good here, acerbic and biting, with a real vulnerability underneath.

Wilde seemed OK to me previously, but her work had been unmemorable — rather, I was unaware of it more than anything else. No longer. What a pleasure to learn about her, as she directs this film and does a fantastic job, making some unusual and interesting choices along the way. I further learned this isn’t her first directing effort — she’s a well-rounded cinematic multi-hyphenate.

Here’s the part that complicates everything I just said about Rogen: according to Norton, Rogen was very active in the improvisation sessions, and at least one of his suggestions pushed the film in a dramatically different direction. Coming from Norton — an actor not exactly known for handing out undeserved praise — that carries weight. I couldn’t find out exactly what that direction was, but if Norton says Rogen drove it, that’s good enough for me.

The film itself belongs to a very tiny cinematic subgenre — films adapted from plays (or in this case, another film) that almost exclusively involve two adult couples. The set is one place, in one apartment or home, over one day or so. The obvious archetypal progenitor is Edward Albee’s 1962 Tony-winning Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, turned into a cinematic masterpiece by Mike Nichols in 1966, starring Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis, and — in her finest performance — Elizabeth Taylor. The film won several Oscars. The only other member of this small club that I know of is Roman Polanski’s Carnage (2011), adapted from Yasmina Reza’s 2006 play God of Carnage, starring Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet as the bourgeois Upper West Siders opposite John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster as the middle-class NYC gentry. Both films are witty, savage, hilarious, and sometimes frightening takes on the grinding despair some marriages carry. Both are excellent, and you can trace the thread running from the Nichols film through Polanski’s and on to Wilde’s. Polanski clearly knew the first; Wilde keeps the thread going through The Invite. She stands with giants and holds her own quite well.

Like the other two films, this is an adaptation of prior work — here, the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs (Sentimental), written and directed by Cesc Gay. I tried to find it streaming to compare but couldn’t — a comparison I’ll revisit if it surfaces somewhere. The adapted screenplay is written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack.

Wilde has made some bold and daring choices here. She shot the film in sequence, like a play — rare, and unsurprising once you hear her cite Nichols as an influence. According to Norton, she also asked the actors to flesh out their characters alone beforehand, then use that private material during filming, so that revelations on-screen would be genuine reactions rather than performed ones. It shows.

The premise is simple. On a single evening, we find Joe (Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) in the small apartment Joe inherited from his parents. He’s a bitter, frustrated man — a former rock musician with a single ‘90s hit, now a music teacher at a mediocre high school, hating his job, feeling like a failure, refusing to even touch the piano in their home. Angela is unhappy too, a former art school grad who feels she abandoned her career to raise the couple’s only daughter. They’re clearly struggling in a sexless marriage, bickering constantly. When Joe gets home from work in his usual bad mood, he learns Angela has invited the upstairs couple over for dinner. Joe is outraged — he wants no part of socializing, particularly with the couple upstairs, about whom he constantly complains. They apparently make a great deal of noise during sex, more extensive than Joe and Angela ever imagined. Angela has gone to town preparing for the evening and won’t let Joe cancel, though he desperately wants to.

Mid-argument, there’s a knock at the door. Hawk (Norton), a retired firefighter, and his divorcée girlfriend Pina (Cruz), a sex therapist, have arrived. There’s no turning back now. Their conversation opens with Hawk casually noting that he and Pina heard the two of them arguing, and asking if this is really a good time. With a reluctant Joe acquiescing to his wife’s wishes, the evening is on.

Like Virginia Woolf and Carnage before it, the alliances in the room aren’t fixed. The four of them ping-pong between siding along gender lines and siding with their own spouse, the loyalties shifting depending on what’s just been said. Cruz gets one of the film’s sharpest turns in this regard: she goes off at length on menopause and the difficulty older women have achieving orgasm, and the moment recalibrates the whole room — Angela’s alignment with her shifts, Joe and Hawk are left exposed in a way the scene clearly wants them to be. It’s a rare thing for a studio comedy to let a woman in her fifties hold the floor on that subject without turning it into a punchline at her expense, and Cruz doesn’t play it for laughs — she plays it like someone finally getting to say something true out loud.

I won’t spoil what happens next, but the film earns its own tonal whiplash. The shifts from comic to bleak to absurd don’t feel like hedging — they land because the cast has built enough goodwill and specificity by that point that you believe these four people contain multitudes. It’s a hard trick to pull off in real time, in one location, over one evening, and the film mostly sticks the landing. And it is genuinely funny, sometimes absurdly and painfully so.

As for the music, the choices were also very good. The score is sparse throughout — mostly cello with light accompaniment — and that restraint suits the film, letting the tension sit and build on its own. The soundtrack by English singer-songwriter Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange works well, in keeping with the mood of “inescapable dread and claustrophobia,” including the piece “Contentious Environment,” an apt title. Ending the film with the demo of “Our House” by Graham Nash over the rolling credits was perfection. I’m not a huge fan of the song itself, which appears in finished form on Déjà Vu, the first studio LP from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. At the time the demo was recorded — presumably in “their house” — Mitchell and Nash were still living together, and in love. The rawness of the take, with just Nash on piano and Mitchell adding beautiful harmonies and laughing, adds a poignant irony. We all know what they did not know at the time: the relationship didn’t last. It resonates deeply with the themes of the film.

Comparisons to Nichols and Polanski are a heavy burden to place on any film, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf remains untouchable — a genuine masterpiece, the kind of film against which “very good” will always look modest. But Carnage, on reflection, is a fairer fight than I gave it credit for above, and The Invite holds its own against it. Wilde doesn’t just complete the lineage from Nichols through Polanski — she earns her place in it, and she and her collaborators should be proud of what they’ve made.

This is a genuinely good film, funny and sharp and occasionally devastating, and it deserves better than to be filed as a pleasant surprise. See it in theaters while you can.

CONTAINS SPOILERS! WATCH FIRST BEFORE READING.

Richard Gadd’s disturbing, controversial, ground-breaking, and allegedly semi-autobiographical Baby Reindeer (2024) exploded on Netflix a couple years back, and cleaned up on the Awards circuit, winning six Emmys and two Golden Globes. Gadd is the son of Geoffrey Michael Gadd OBE, a University of Dundee (Scotland) geomicrobiologist whose research into how fungi reshape the planet has earned him international recognition. This is not irrelevant, as Gadd has mentioned that the series draws on his own childhood and young adulthood. In Baby Reindeer, Gadd tells the story of a deeply troubled and failed comedian, his utterly bizarre stalker, and his history of abuse and associated complicated sexuality. Gadd was originally an avant-garde comedian, if that is even a term, but Baby Reindeer is hardly funny. Male rape, transsexualism, drug abuse and mental illness were all prevalent themes in this laugh riot. The Servant (1963), Harold Pinter’s play made into a film starring James Fox and Dirk Bogarde, seems much closer to the series than any comedy I have ever seen, with its similar use of psychological domination and fluid interpersonal power dynamics. Baby Reindeer may even be as twisted as another Bogarde film, The Night Porter (1974), co-starring Charlotte Rampling. Those are both great films, by the way, but by no means are they comedies.

I am not sure I can recommend Baby Reindeer — it is not for the faint of heart — nonetheless there is no mistaking Gadd’s singular talent, he is a true artist in every sense of the word, as well as an exceptional actor. He wrote and played the main role in that series, as he does here in Half Man. He shares the spotlight in his latest work with Jamie Bell, who came to prominence as a child actor starring in Billy Elliot (2000), and Bell matches Gadd step for step. They mine similar turf as does Baby Reindeer, if slightly more conventional. That is if one considers the following conventional — profoundly toxic masculinity, uncontrolled rage, mechanical sex acts, deeply repressed child abuse and sexual preference issues. All of these themes are explored via a detailed examination of a thirty-year relationship between two highly disturbed, pathologically codependent, and competitive brothers.

The story covers three decades of their intertwined and oppositional lives of two brothers, not biologically related, whose mothers are lesbian life partners. Ruben is simultaneously abusive and protective, aggressive, thoroughly dominant, criminal, anti-intellectual, and confident. Niall is passive-aggressive, highly intelligent, sexually repressed, as well as overwhelmingly obsessed and jealous of his brother. They are bound together by their commonality — seemingly congenital and irredeemable outsiders.

In what becomes thematic for all his unpredictable behavior, Ruben returns to Niall’s teenage life like a sudden storm, after years of living with his abusive father. He is a juvenile delinquent with a prior record, inserted into Niall’s home by two mothers who appear indifferent to the consequences. His first act of significance is to locate the boy who has been tormenting Niall at school and beat him savagely. Niall is simultaneously impressed, relieved and appalled — it is the first iteration of a dynamic that will define the next thirty years. Nobody bothers Niall again. Nobody gets close to him either. It is also the beginning of Niall’s coercion into Ruben’s service — before he leaves for college, he is pressured, by Ruben and with the tacit compliance of both mothers, into cheating on Ruben’s university entrance examinations, keeping Ruben out of prison for an unspecified violent transgression. It is one of several reasons Niall resents both women for the rest of his life. They chose Ruben over him, repeatedly and without apology, and he never forgave them for it.

The homoerotic undercurrent between them is established early, in a scene of startling grotesquerie. Ruben sneaks his girlfriend Mona into Niall’s bedroom in the middle of the night and essentially orchestrates the loss of Niall’s virginity while he watches, participating just enough to make the subtext unmistakable. Ruben and Mona laugh afterward. Niall says nothing, as he will say nothing for the next three decades about anything that actually matters. What the scene establishes, beneath its surface ugliness, is the charged and unacknowledged current between the two of them — a current Ruben will spend the rest of his life violently denying, and Niall will spend the rest of his life repressing. Mona, incidentally, will eventually become Ruben’s wife. The second time Niall sleeps with her is not, in some deeply buried sense, entirely unconnected to the first.

I cannot overemphasize just how good an actor Gadd is. Nor the quality of the dialog he writes, nor the casting decisions he makes. Gadd and Bell play the adult versions of the two brothers. Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson also excel as the young versions of Ruben and Niall, respectively, and Neve McIntosh is very good as Lydia Soprano redux, as she plays Niall’s cold and unsupportive mother Lori.

Some reviewers have complained that Gadd has failed to explain the behavior of his characters. I think that is lazy — it isn’t the artist’s job, the viewer is responsible for drawing his or her own conclusions, and their behavior seems to me entirely consistent with what has happened to them. The same reviewer also made the claim that Niall was merely self-destructive and therefore not unlikeable, but I think that also misses the point. While the two of them are both “half men,” in the sense that they are incomplete and stunted, Niall is, in my view, almost as despicable as Ruben. His inability to admit who he is, as well as his dangerous, wanton and reckless sexual behavior, not to mention his self-destructive nihilism and combination of self-loathing and megalomania, make him singularly detestable. Of course, he doesn’t try to beat people to death, so there is that.

The series consists of six harrowing episodes, each roughly an hour in length. I am grateful that we watched it over several weeks, as a binge watch could be too emotionally demanding. It is that powerful.

The series is roughly linear, following Niall and Ruben’s mutual existence over what appears to be about thirty years. However, it does begin and end, and returns to a central, pivotal scene — the eventual marriage of Niall to Alby, his friend from college, the man Ruben beat to disfigurement, and the man Niall finally admits he loves once he can no longer deny who he is. We know from the opening scene that something terrible happens in a barn on the wedding grounds. We spend six episodes finding out why it was inevitable.

Ruben has been in and out of juvenile detention since before we meet him, violence being his native language. What sends him to adult prison — for thirteen years — is his discovery of Niall and Alby in an intimate embrace and he beats Alby to disfigurement — Alby being a quietly perceptive young man Niall had met on his first day at college, the one person who ever seemed to see Niall clearly in a way he could not himself. At trial, Ruben’s defense rested on the claim that Alby had made sexual advances toward him — a cynical leveraging of Scotland’s rampant homophobia. Niall, browbeaten and terrified, initially corroborated the lie on the stand. Then he recanted. Ruben, watching from the dock, went berserk and was dragged from the courtroom. It was the first time Niall had told the truth at Ruben’s expense, and Ruben never forgave him for it. And Niall never recovered from the episode.

By the time we catch up with the adult Niall, he is broke, adrift, and has spent years draining his mother’s patience and finances with one half-formed scheme or rescue request after another — minor scandals, debts, vague promises to “sort himself out” that never materialize. It is against this backdrop that Niall discovers, to his outrage, that Ruben — out of prison after thirteen years and thriving — has secretly been the source of money he thought came from his mother. He does not feel gratitude. He feels humiliated. In a fit of resentment he stalks Ruben’s house, vandalizes his car, gets chased, hides, and is finally spotted — and moments later, still staring at Ruben rather than the road, crashes his car and is rendered unconscious and taken to a hospital.

The hospital scene that follows is one of the best in the series — a structural twin to the prison scene that comes later. Ruben, visiting Niall’s bedside, taunts him mercilessly, forcing him to admit the truth: that despite Niall’s apparent advantages, Ruben has still come out ahead, and Niall would trade everything to be him for even a moment. “I don’t need to work for status,” Ruben tells him. “I was born with it.” And later: “I am the soundtrack to your greatest moments. You might be the painter, but I am the rolling hills.” Niall, broken open, finally confesses everything — his lifelong obsession, his envy, his fear of Ruben since the courtroom betrayal, his resentment of Ruben’s mother for “raising a monster” and treating him like dirt. For one genuine, unguarded moment, they apologize to each other. It is real. It will not last.

Some time later, Niall has a girlfriend and appears, for once, to be building something resembling a normal life — except that he has already been conned out of a small fortune by a fraudulent conversion therapy program, money his girlfriend lent him believing it would repay his debt to Ruben. She becomes pregnant. The two couples — Niall and his girlfriend, Ruben and Mona — begin socializing. It does not last. Ruben, learning that Niall had the money all along and never repaid him, demands it back immediately — and discovers in the process that he has been lying to everyone for over a year about losing his job, the real source of his desperation.

Ruben, running out of patience and money, leverages the unpaid debt into something close to indentured servitude — menial chores, weekly payments, and, crucially, spying on Mona, who begins dance classes against Ruben’s will. Ruben, every inch the controlling chauvinist pig he has always been, cannot tolerate even the suggestion of another man’s existence in her vicinity. It is during this period that Niall, previously humiliated by his editor who told him bluntly that his work was hollow and that he needed to write about something he actually knows, finally does — and the resulting novel will make him famous. He reads a passage from the unfinished work to Mona — a passage in which he has written about her, flatteringly. She is moved. They have sex. It is, like all of Niall’s sexual encounters, a quick animal fuck — perhaps even an act of revenge for her participation in the rape that took his virginity. Niall still doesn’t know how to make love to someone.

Niall has also spent his own girlfriend’s money — borrowed under the pretense of repaying Ruben — on conversion therapy, a desperate, pathetic, and ultimately futile attempt to excise the part of himself he cannot face. He has lied to her about that too. Niall, spineless as ever, eventually succumbs to Ruben’s threats and demands, and admits there may have been a man Mona spoke to at the dance class. Ruben goes ballistic and stomps the man to within an inch of his life. That is what sends him back to prison. Before any of that, though, Mona had already delivered her own quiet cruelty — telling Niall, almost in passing, that she’d had other lovers, that he was never as special as he believed himself to be. Niall, furious and humiliated yet again, skips his girlfriend’s birthing class, visits a male prostitute, and that — predictably, pathetically — is the end of that relationship too.

Alby and Niall eventually reconnect after many years when Niall was forced to go to a hospital, due to the multiple sexually transmitted diseases he had contracted from his sordid, promiscuous behavior, as well as his rampant drug abuse. Alby, who has visible evidence of reconstructive facial surgery, was a nurse at the facility. In typical Niall fashion, he initially attempts to slink out without interacting with Alby, but Alby confronts him. Prior to reconnecting with Alby, Niall’s denial had been comically sad — “I’m not gay because I don’t love them,” them being the men with whom he has had countless passionless, impersonal sexual encounters.

Ruben’s mother, having lived for years in a vegetative state after a failed suicide attempt, finally is about to die. Niall, who has avoided her his entire life and blames her for bringing Ruben into his world in the first place — and resents his own mother for welcoming her — finally sees her on her deathbed and, overcome, vomits on her. It is, in its grotesque way, the most honest thing he does in the entire series. Ruben is granted compassionate release to attend the funeral, where he comes upon Niall in urgent conversation with Mona. She has just told Niall she is pregnant from their brief encounter, wherein she also had informed him that Ruben was sterile, an obvious partial explanation of Ruben’s continued twisted hyper-masculine behavior. Ruben doesn’t yet know what they are discussing, but he goes berserk regardless — it is only the presence of his prison escort that prevents him from killing them both on the spot. He goes back to prison still not knowing. Which sets up everything.

Niall eventually achieves his own fame when he finally writes what he knows -The Rising Sun is, of course, the story of Niall and Ruben themselves — names changed, little else disguised — and its title is its own quiet admission: Ruben has always been the sun Niall orbits, the thing that makes everything else visible. By the time it wins him his award, Niall is still a wreck — cocaine-dependent, hollowed out, and at a press conference fielding questions about the book’s true subject, he cannot escape Ruben even in his moment of triumph.

Ruben’s second sentence runs four years; it is three years in, in a prison visiting room, that the title of the series is spoken aloud for the first and only time. Ruben, who has spent thirty years as the most terrifying human being in any room he has ever entered, finally buckles under the pressure of maintaining his fake, hypermasculine facade and it ruptures. The scene begins with Niall confessing what Ruben has long suspected — that he is gay. In keeping with his repressed, selfish persona, Niall’s confession is initially an attempt to defuse Ruben’s suspicion that something far more sinister is afoot. Which, as we know, there is. Ruben laughs, tells him he always knew, and that it doesn’t matter. Then Ruben confesses that his father did not merely beat and neglect him, but repeatedly raped him — and then admits, in what may be the most brutal and courageous piece of writing in recent television, that his body sometimes responded. He looks at Niall and calls himself a half man. For one extraordinary moment, these two devastated men are closer than they have ever been. Gadd has spent six episodes building to this single moment of nakedness, and then immediately destroys it — because this is also the moment Niall, inexplicably, but with characteristic unconscious cruelty, chooses to tell Ruben he slept with Mona. Worse, that the child Ruben has been celebrating as his own is not. Which is where things stand when, several years after his release, Ruben shows up at the wedding uninvited. He delivers a toast of chilling ambiguity — and then leads Niall into the barn. Niall’s mother has pressed a ceremonial Scottish knife on him before the ceremony, the one moment where Gadd’s hand shows perhaps a touch too plainly. In the barn, Ruben makes Niall say it one more time — what it’s like to be obsessed with him. “Everything and nothing,” Niall says, “the best and the worst, all at once. Like I’m high off you.” Ruben, who once said he was the soundtrack to Niall’s greatest moments, has just become the last one. The tenderness, the betrayal and the impending violence are all inseparable and inevitable. These two men were never going to make it out of that barn.

Richard Gadd understands that damage doesn’t excuse people, and that sympathy is not a necessary component of a good script — in fact it may be a cop out. He unflinchingly shows the consequences of the psychic injury that trauma inflicts, and does so without mercy — for his characters, or for us. Half Man is a triumph, and in my opinion, the best series of 2026 so far.

Streaming on HBO now.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is clearly a labor of love, to which the oft–maligned term “amateur” could be applied. I use the term in its original sense, as the product of one (or those) who “loves” film. This is not to imply that the filmmakers, albeit somewhat hampered by a limited budget, are somehow less than professional. On the contrary, the success of the film is owed largely to the finesse of these dedicated professionals, whose financing was clearly limited. As a musician, I get an inkling of the difficulty of producing the final product when making studio recordings. But film is several layers more complicated, music is but a part of its whole, and the collaborative effort required to pull off anything this daring, inventive and complicated is impressive.

This is filmmaker Benh Zeitlin’s first feature length work, and is adapted from Lucy Alibar’s Juicy and Delicious: A Play. Although neither is from New Orleans, their local knowledge is deep.

I had some trouble placing it in its historical filmic context, but the term “magical realism” is close. This is usually associated with South American works, typically novels like those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Director Guillermo del Toro also comes to mind, and it is no accident that del Toro later sought out Alibar to write his planned adaptation of The Secret Garden, which never materialized-kindred sensibilities recognizing each other. Comparisons are often inadequate, nonetheless I found the film akin to works by Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet-part The Fisher King (1991), part City of Lost Children (1995), if you will.

At the beginning of the film, it was not clear to me what continent, or even what century the film was depicting. Or even if it was intended to be perceived as a real place. Several oblique references later, it slowly dawned on me that this was a very poor enclave on the outskirts of New Orleans, probably right before Katrina. And it was seamless, even with huge potential production complications, including filming a great deal on water. This is no easy feat for a film with a $200 million budget, much less one made for less than one hundredth of that cost. See Waterworld (1995), a colossal failure.

The tone of such a project is absolutely essential and there is no way this would be believable if the cast were not spot-on perfect, particularly the lead. I was told by one of the producers who spoke at a Q and A session I attended after a screening in Berkeley that they looked at 4000 children, scouring Southern Louisiana for the actor to fill the role they knew would make or break the film. They luckily discovered a remarkable child with the fabulous name of Quvenzhane Wallis, who at the time of their discovery was a mere six years old. She was given the lead role of Hushpuppy. This young girl possessed a fire and determination that borders on the supernatural. Miracles do happen.

The phenomenon is rare but not unique, one can listen to Mozart and comment, “that is an amazing piece”, and then you learn that he was six years old when he wrote it? It turns the world upside down-children are not supposed to be that deep, that talented, that world-weary far too early. And the success of the film almost entirely rests on her shoulders- it is the child’s view of this world that gives it all of its magic. Whose crazy idea was this? There is no way a rational person could see what the filmmakers apparently saw in this movie, that it could work. I would love to hear the production meeting where somebody says, “hey, let’s take some wild boars and strap some horns on their heads, blow a lot of mist into the air and everyone will believe they are giant mythical creatures.” But it is believable, and largely due to this amazing young girl. In Gilliam’s The Fisher King, we know that Robin Williams’ character can see the huge creature with the red lights for eyes, but we know it is a fictitious apparition residing only inside his damaged and broken psyche. We understand what happened to him and why he saw what he saw. When the aurochs come to Hushpuppy — they are massive, steaming and ancient, a species of wild cattle extinct for centuries- they carry the weight of everything melting: the ice caps receding, the seas rising, the Bathtub itself already half-swallowed by water. Hushpuppy is not crazy, the beasts are truly real to her. She is just a child who has not yet had her fantasy world “educated” out of her. And frankly, the beasts seem no more mythical than the ghostly oil derricks depicted just outside her home in the “Bathtub”, as its residents call it.

Wallis, who at age nine became the youngest Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, had never acted before. As a matter of fact, none of the cast were professional actors, all were local residents. And she is not the only one here who shines. Dwight Henry, who plays her father Wink, was a baker who ran a shop near the production; he was famously reluctant to take the role because he didn't want to close his bakery. Henry is magnificent as Wink- stubborn, vain, somewhat broken, but always deeply human.

The score, composed by Zeitlin himself with Dan Romer, is as handmade as the Bathtub. Fiddles, found percussion, and what sounds like a haunted jug band fully resonate with Hushpuppy's interior life. Like the film itself, it shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.

The ensemble creates a full vision of a believable subculture, completely separate from the rest of even Louisiana, which is hardly typically American. The only influence of modern American culture I saw were the beer bottles. They barely have electricity, there is no running water, no schools, no jobs, only an endless party fueled by food you can catch or grow, and music you make yourself. I’ve seen better looking “houses” at homeless encampments in downtown LA. The “boat” she rides in was the back of a pickup truck strapped to pontoons.

The film’s most quietly radical sequence involves government workers who arrive after a storm. The disastrous Katrina is the obvious reference, both as a natural phenomenon, as well as the pathetic and bumbled federal response to it. The somewhat well-intended civil servants first try to coerce, and then end up forcing the reluctant residents of the Bathtub to relocate to a shelter. They are not villains — the shelter is clean, dry, and safe. And yet Zeitlin engineers a complete reversal of our sympathies without cheating. The fluorescent lights, the institutional beds, the enforced passivity — everything the Bathtub is not. The film understands something that policy rarely does: that dignity is not the same as safety, and that a life built around self-sufficiency and wildness can be worth more to its inhabitants than amenities imposed from outside.

Hushpuppy and her people have survived storms, fire, and hunger on their own terms- the Bathtub has been a party since the French trappers arrived, representing centuries of stubborn self-sufficiency. At the shelter, the authorities do what authorities do — they clean her up, and put her in what they perceive as proper clothes. The image of Hushpuppy in a neat, girlish pink dress, her wild self briefly erased by good intentions, is worth a thousand words of policy criticism.

The response is not gratitude. The residents riot, steal a bus, and drive themselves home. This is not the behavior of people who have been rescued — it is the behavior of people who have been kidnapped. Hushpuppy, ridiculous and inappropriate pink dress and all, is going back to the Bathtub.

But we do not feel sorry for them, because the film shows us that for the residents of the Bathtub, they are the lucky ones. As Hushpuppy says, “other people only have one holiday each year”, and it seems the party in the Bathtub has gone on uninterrupted for eons. For this and a hundred other reasons, we believe. It is a world that surely we could not accept as a place where a healthy child could prosper. But we do. And we sympathize. And that is the magic of film when it works. What lingers is not any single image or scene, but the feeling that you have briefly inhabited a world that runs on different rules than your own — and the faint, irrational sadness when you have to leave it

You can rent it on Amazon for $4, and I am sure it is available for a similar price on other streaming services. Well worth it at the price of a cheap coffee.

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“I am not a person who is capable of not knowing something,”says Detective Agathe Albans, in the brilliant TV series, Patriot (2015, reviewed here). She is not, admittedly, a well-known character, but the line is universal. Albans is an obscure, niche variant of an almost Greek archetype in prestige television: the troubled genius, highly flawed, often drug addicted, neurodivergent, socially impossible, or some combination of all three. They see or do what no one else can. Adrian Monk, Gregory House, Rust Cohle, Beth Harmon, Saga Norén, Clarice Starling and the OG and ubiquitous Sherlock Holmes-these characters are often obnoxious, sometimes cruel, and in any ordinary moral universe mostly intolerable. So why do we love them? Competence porn as a phenomenon is not simply the fantasy of intelligence, but a fantasy of coherence: the hope that somewhere, someone can still see the world as whole, even as we increasingly suspect that continuity and order are illusions. Scientific discoveries of the recent past illustrate just how flawed and confusing our collective understandings are, and in part explain our thirst for a consistent, solid world, as opposed to a buzzing cloud of bewilderment.

The Human Genome Project began in 1990, with a three billion dollar budget, more than twenty sequencing centers, over 2,500 international scientists and a projected timeline of fifteen years. The goal was to sequence all of the roughly three billion letters in the human genome distributed across the twenty three chromosome pairs, and along the way, determine how many genes make a human. In 2000, at the annual Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting, Ewan Birney organized a betting pool called GeneSweep. For one to five dollars, over 460 scientists wagered on the final gene count. The winner would receive $1200 and a signed copy of The Double Helix, written by misogynist dickhead James Watson. He was the co-recipient with Francis Crick of the 1962 Nobel prize for the elucidation of the structural nature of DNA, and beneficiary of Rosalind Franklin’s X Ray diffraction data, and a man whose legacy remains inseparable from the erasure of her contribution. The guesses ranged from roughly 25,000 to 150,000 protein-coding genes. Caenorhabditis Elegans, the lowly nematode that is among the most studied organisms on earth, with its puny complement of exactly 1031 cells, has around 19,000 genes. So it was surmised that humans, with our complex nervous and immune systems and very big brains, would have many times more. Only Lee Rowan, Paul Dear and Olivier Jaillion guessed under 30,000. They won. The end results were between 20 and 25 thousand protein-coding genes, roughly the same number as a mouse. The lowly water flea appears to have more genes than any other animal sequenced.

The explanation, for the moment, is that behind the genome itself lies an immense regulatory architecture, including epigenetic alterations and a host of RNAs barely imagined a generation ago- microRNAs, interfering RNAs, circular, pi-RNAs, long non-coding and telomerase RNAs, and even some that are carried by sperm into the fertilized egg that can potentially influence generations. And now it is apparent that there are even deeper mechanisms used by cells to regulate expression- that RNA itself can experience similar modification of its bases, as does DNA. Further, it is not just messenger RNAs (the blueprint for proteins), but transfer RNAs (that specifically select each amino acid that builds a protein), and even ribosomal RNAs (the structural components that assemble proteins) can experience base changes. And so another term enters the already crowded vocabulary: epitranscriptomics, the chemical modification of RNA itself. Fer crissake, we have just learned that octopuses can modify their RNA within HOURS to change the way they respond to their environments, especially with respect to temperature variation. We think we know so much, yet how little we do know.

Our knowledge of our own species grows even less stable, as our previous understanding of human origins and milestones begins to crumble. The older one-dimensional view of a clean evolutionary line now gives way to a more tangled web of interbreeding populations-modern humans mixing with Neanderthals, Denisovans and other archaic groups yet to be defined. Migrations out of Africa by multiple Homo species to other continents appear earlier and more complex than once believed, while the use of fire, tools, language-like capacities, symbolic behavior and even art seems to drift steadily further into the past.

Beyond our own lineage the uncertainties multiply. Sequencing of oceans, soils, ponds and Antarctic waters has uncovered vast reservoirs of previously unknown genetic “dark matter” belonging to organisms and viral-like entities whose biologies remain uncharacterized. Every discovery widens the scope of knowledge, and that expansion produces even greater gaps, much as the expanding universe produces more regions of empty and unknown space.

Cosmology has its own versions of the gene-count humiliation and our feeble grasp of the complexity of biological regulation. In 1929, Edwin Hubble published observations showing that distant galaxies are receding from us, their light stretched towards the red end of the spectrum in proportion to their distance-revealing that the universe is expanding. For much of the 20th century, improved instrumentation promised refinement rather than upheaval. Sorry, no. In the 1970’s increasingly sensitive spectrography and radio wave observations revealed that stars at the outer edges of galaxies were moving too quickly to be held together by matter alone, so an unseen mass was postulated-dark matter, inferred from its observable gravitational effects, but never directly detected, and possibly an indication that our description of gravity is empirically powerful, yet mechanistically incomplete. Later observations added an even stranger twist requiring more hand-waving-the universe itself appears to be accelerating, and is attributed now to a still more mysterious and undetected phenomenon called dark energy.

And now, even the rate at which our universe is expanding has become unsettled. There are two distinct ways to measure it. The first looks very far back, to the cosmic microwave background radiation-the leftover heat from the big bang-and yields an expansion rate of about 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec (a few million light years). The other looks outward from the nearby universe, measuring the distances to relatively close objects, and then builds step by step to farther ones, and arriving at a figure closer to 73 . The difference may not seem like much , but it is statistically significant enough to provoke a simple response-what the fuck? Something in our understanding of the cosmos is not quite right.

Despite the genius of figures like Max Planck, Albert Einstein and countless others, our description of the natural world remains deeply incomplete. We still cannot reconcile our understanding of the very small with our understanding of the very large. Quantum mechanics and quantum chromodynamics describe the subatomic world with astonishing predictive power, but not exactly narrative elegance. How many damned particles are there anyway, with their colors, charges, generations, spins and flavors? Beneath the familiar solidity of matter lies a zoo of quarks, leptons, gluons, photons, weak bosons, fields, spins, charges, colors, flavors, and virtual interactions. Even the supposedly simple proton is not a tiny billiard ball, but a seething system of valence quarks, gluons, and transient particle-antiparticle activity. The Higgs boson, absurdly nicknamed “the God particle”, mercifully singular in popular imagination, did not simplify the universe so much as confirm that our most successful theories remain strange beyond ordinary intuition. And gravity still sits apart-perhaps a force carried by an undiscovered graviton, perhaps the curvature of spacetime, perhaps something we still do not know how to describe.

Are you bored yet? The point is that despite the efforts of thousands — perhaps millions — of intelligent and inspired investigators, our condition may still be best described by the line often attributed to Confucius-“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.” The more we learn, the more the room starts to darken.

The genome did not become simpler once it was sequenced. Human origins did not become cleaner once more fossils and archaic DNA were found. The universe did not become more settled once it was measured more precisely. Knowledge hasn’t failed us. It has worked almost too well, revealing systems beneath systems, each stranger, deeper, and less coherent than we had hoped. The quest for certainty is a fool’s errand.

None of this seems to have anything to do with television. That is, I would argue, exactly wrong.

In my view, it is no accident that the explosion of competence porn on prestige TV has come at exactly this moment, which is the same time that traditional broadcast TV’s stranglehold on the visual medium began to disintegrate. Many of us-myself certainly included-are deeply enamored of fictitious geniuses like Sherlock Holmes, because they produce a world that is simple, explainable and mercifully united. These minds are almost always warped and special, organized around some fatal flaw that drives them. They may be misanthropes like House or Holmes, unlikeable and pompous drug addicts, or, OCD-spectrum characters like Astrid, or Monk, or even an old school gent like Columbo, but in every case the disorder is converted into method. The flaw becomes the method, the wound becomes the gift. Monk’s terror of contamination makes him the most observant man in the room. House’s cruelty becomes a diagnostic weapon. Columbo’s deception appears to be harmless stupidity, but it is in fact a trap.

These characters do not overcome their damage in order to become useful. Their damage is what makes them useful. They make the pandemonium understandable. They take the scattered clues, corrupt institutions, bad evidence, stupid bosses, false assumptions, and social noise, and make it all line up. It’s not so much that they’re smart, but that they can still see how one thing led to another. They pull order from chaos.

In this atmosphere, the appeal of what has been called competence porn, one of the backbones of prestige television, to the point where entire stations rely upon it, is more than just escapism. It has become a fantasy of legitimacy, a way of imagining that the framework of reality can still be mastered by the singularly sufficient mind.

The phenomenon can even be inverted, in the sense that the opposite proves the rule. In Patriot, Happy Valley, and The Bridge, the fantasy is turned upside down-incompetence is not an obstacle within the system. It is the system. The machinery of government, intelligence, policing, family, and work is so compromised by vanity, cowardice, bureaucracy and delusion that the genuinely perceptive characters seem mythic by contrast. Especially noteworthy are the women, who must endure the additional burden of misogyny. Patriot’s Agathe Albans, Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, The Bridge’s Saga Norén, or even Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs must fight their way through professional complacency and male stupidity in order to see what is plainly in front of them. Sally Wainwright has made a career out of this subject, from Scott & Bailey to Happy Valley and the excellent Riot Women — reviewed here — where women in their fifties start a rock band and immediately run into the same old machinery of condescension, dismissal, and institutional stupidity. The setting changes. The insult does not.

Patriot’s John Tavner, meanwhile, is not a master of the system, but buried inside of it, forced to wade through a sea of bureaucratic incompetence that makes his worn, grim effectiveness feel both heroic and pathetic. The genius is still there, but now he is half-drowned. Yossarian from Catch 22 (1970) is the great ancestor of this inverted form, a character from Joseph Heller’s novel, and played brilliantly in the film by the great Alan Arkin. He is a man who sees clearly and is punished for it, because the system needs everyone to pretend they can’t. His sanity looks like craziness. His refusal to fly the missions is the only sane response to an insane situation, and everyone around him knows it and won’t say so. John Tavner is Yossarian several decades later, with the joke taken out. He’s not operating outside the system — he’s trapped inside it, doing his job in the ruins of what his job was supposed to be. Yossarian still had the option of running away to Sweden. Tavner doesn’t even have that. What he has is the drainage pipe (his refuge in the empty lot beside the Luxembourg industrial piping company he doesn’t actually work for), his folk songs, and the next terrible thing he has to do. Both of them are surrounded by institutions that have confused following orders with thinking, and staying alive with doing right. The difference is that in Catch-22, for all its darkness, escape is still an imagined possibility. In Patriot, that escape seems nearly impossible, and it is no accident that they are separated by over fifty years of institutional decay.

We live in an era when institutional incompetence no longer feels like an accident or a temporary failure of the system — when the cartoonish Idiocracy (2006) has come to life, embodied in Washington’s pathological liar and grifter-in-chief, and his merry band of fools. It often feels like the system’s preferred operating mode-rewarded, televised, monetized, and defended. At the same time, science keeps doing what science does best — expanding knowledge in ways that generate still more questions. The room grows larger. The black cat grows harder to find. Some days it is not clear there is a cat at all.

Which brings us back to Agathe Albans — a character almost no one has heard of, from a series that never found the audience it deserved, delivering perhaps the defining line of the entire genre. “I am not a person who is capable of not knowing something.” It is not a boast. It is a plaintive cry of desperation and grief. Because the not-knowing is everywhere, it is structural and it is metastasizing. This is why the fantasy persists. Not because we believe Sherlock Holmes exists, or House, or Monk, or Agathe Albans, or Catherine Cawood. We know better, but occasionally require some relief from what we know. As the Rolling Stones once put it, “ we all need someone we can lean on.” The fantasy is not that the world is coherent. The fantasy is that someone, somewhere, might still be able to see it whole.

We need Sherlock Holmes more than ever. We need Agathe Albans more than we know.

You’d figure Brendan Gleeson’s son Dohmnall could act, and he can, very well. He plays serial killer Sam Fortner, opposite Steve Carell, who long ago proved he had serious dramatic chops and here plays Sam’s psychiatrist Alan Strauss. They are the gravitational center of The Patient, which at its essence is a stripped-down protagonist-antagonist drama. Strauss is a therapist still reeling from the death of his wife, and he moves through the series spiritually and emotionally unmoored, his grief giving the show its deepest weight. Fortner, meanwhile, is a nice variation on the standard psychotic murderer. He is not a killer without insight. He knows, at least in part, what he is and he is genuinely trying, however clumsily and catastrophically, to do something about it. The nearest analog is probably Dexter Morgan, played brilliantly by Michael C. Hall. Dexter is also painfully aware of his ”dark passenger”, but manages his compulsions far more successfully, channeling them into something like a code. Which at least has a moral structure to it, if there is such a thing. Fortner has no such discipline, only shame, compulsion and a desperate desire to stop. As for Dexter (2006), I heartily recommend all four incarnations of the franchise : the OG, Dexter:New Blood (2021), Dexter:Original Sin (2024) and the latest, and probably the best of the spinoffs, Dexter:Resurrection (2025).

The basic premise then, is that Sam kidnaps Alan, thinking private sessions to cure him of his lethal habit will help; Sam takes him to his mom’s basement where he lives (of course he does), and most of the series transpires there, with Alan chained to the floor.

The Fortner/Strauss interaction is not all the series has to offer, nor are Gleeson and Carell’s performances the only ones worthy of mention. Sam’s mother Candace is played by Broadway vet Linda Emond, who also does a fine job, hand-wringing her twisted way through the ugly mess. She is not innocent, nor is she overtly monstrous. She is perhaps something worse. Yes, she is a weak and duplicitous survivor of the same tormentor as Sam. But she is also a mother whose love has turned sclerotic and decayed into complicity. She has foolishly clung to the bourgeois notion that enough therapy and love will turn the most likely irredeemable little monster into a normal son. She is unable, or unwilling, to face this truth, nor is she capable, or willing, of putting a stop to the carnage by turning Sam in to the authorities. Thus she becomes complicit.

The Patient is further enriched by the subplot involving flashbacks with Strauss’ dead wife Beth (Laura Niemi), his estranged son Ezra (Andrew Leeds), and his imagined conversations with his therapist and mentor Charlie Addison (David Alan Grier). All three actors turn in fine portrayals, particularly Grier. Ezra’s response to his mother’s death leads him, in part, to Orthodox Judaism, and that creates the rupture between him and his father. The dead mother was a cantor, and Alan’s guilt over his schism with his son and his grief become indistinguishable, with the added loss of his tribal connection to his Jewish roots and community.

Perhaps the smartest plot device is the use of Alan’s illusory conversations with his mentor, Charlie. Obviously he is talking to himself, but Charlie serves as his disciplined conscience, turning his internal thinking into dialogue. His situation is pretty bleak, and whatever insight he may or may not have into the reasons and/or justifications for his captivity, his estrangement from family and his very real fear, that is distinct from his salvation.

This rich series comes from the minds of Joel Fields and Joseph Weisberg, the same team that created The Americans (2013-2016), which I highly recommend, and features the most excellent husband-wife acting duo of Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys. Permit me a gossipy digression- they were both married and had families when they met while filming this series.

Returning to The Patient, I do have one criticism-unlike the masterful Mr Inbetweens (2019-2022, reviewed here)- it is not well served by the 22 minute per episode format. Maybe four shows of a one hour length would have be better, but it is now fully bingeable on Hulu, so that may not matter.

I was indeed at the edge of my seat, metaphorically. Quite good.

“Pretty good” is John Tavner’s stock response whenever anyone asks how he is doing, a phrase as remote from the truth as we are from the dying light of the Big Bang. John Tavner is the beleaguered, tortured, deadpan center of Patriot, a deep-cover intelligence officer dispatched on a brutal, absurdist mission by his calm but morally depraved father, who is trying to correct a massive blunder of his own making in a hugely important off-book effort to prevent a dangerous Iranian politician from gaining power and, ultimately, unleashing a nuclear threat. The twists and turns that unfold are staggering to behold, driven by the darkest form of comedy and elevated by what may be the greatest original music ever written for prestige television.

To call Michael Dorman’s depiction of Tavner brilliant and career-defining is woefully insufficient, and he is hardly the only one operating at that level. Stunning, profound and exemplary stagecraft abounds. Actors best known for more frivolous portraitures such as Kurtwood Smith (the Dad in That 70’s show) or Terry O’Quinn (from the arcane and obtuse hit series Lost), deliver unexpectedly rich and deeply textured portrayals of damaged, morally compromised men. Dorman, though, remains the show’s great center of gravity, somehow conveying professional lethality, psychic collapse and dry comic endurance all at once.

O’Quinn plays Tom Tavner, an unscrupulous, cowardly, and morally corrupt intelligence figure whose demeanor remains calm even as he steadily sacrifices his own son John to the consequences of his poor decisions, all the while displaying questionably truthful paternal concern. Kurtwood Smith is marvelous as Leslie Claret, a recovering drug-addicted industrial piping legend-the guy with the girl’s name-who initially loathes, and then, with visible reluctance, comes to respect John. Both performances deepen the show’s central vision of a world run by men who are at once ridiculous, dangerous and heartbreakingly human.

The rest of the cast does not allow these central performances to go to waste, and several additional actors are worthy of paragraphs of their own. Michael Chernus is excellent as Edward, Tom’s other son, a congressman entangled in the scheme who craves his father’s approval even as he tries, in his compromised way, to protect his younger brother from his father’s foolish and dangerous machinations. Chris Conrad, the creator’s brother, is wonderfully funny as the goofy ersatz engineering colleague Dennis McLaren, who John meets at the urinal, one of the show’s recurring motifs. John needs to “borrow” Dennis’s urine for drug tests so that he may gain employment under his cover, his own being full of cannabis residue (I will explain later). Once John lets the eternally bored Dennis in on the secret mission, Dennis proceeds to sink ever deeper into Tavner’s vortex of chaos, and in a fashion typical of the series, the consequences for him are by turns grave, ridiculous, frightening and outright hilarious.

Tony Fitzpatrick, Zoë Schwartz, Luc Schwartz and Marcus Toji also add further layers of strangeness, damage and emotional complexity. There are better known actors who are stellar as well. Gil Bellows, best known for The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and who is listed as a co-producer and occasional writer on the series, is marvelous as the vain and distracted owner of the McMillan Piping Company where John works as his cover. Debra Winger excels as one of the few steady and solid presences in the series depicting John’s mother, and as she plays the US Secretary of Transportation, she conveys some seriousness and weight, and serves as an emotional center and counterpoint to her son and husband’s wacky and dangerous subterfuge.

But my prize for finest supporting performance goes to Sweden’s Aliette Opheim as Detective Agathe Albans, the brilliant, relentless and somewhat spectrumish investigator who becomes convinced Tavner has committed murder and pursues him despite the indifference, stupidity or outright resistance of the men around her, becoming morally compromised herself along the way, even drawing her own daughter into Tavner’s ever-widening maelstrom of anarchy.

The series drips with brutal, ironic humor, and few modern institutions or tropes escape the rapier wit of Conrad’s script. I could spend all day cataloging them, but one of my favorite running targets is the misogynistic Luxembourgian police force. Since murder is virtually non-existent in Luxembourg City, and therefore unimportant in the eyes of its leaders, the homicide bureau consists entirely of women, a sad example of its twisted sexist hierarchy. They are led by the deadpan genius Detective Albans, and the women are uniformly competent, incisive and clear-eyed. The men, by contrast, are idiots-petty, insecure, cowardly and reflexively sexist buffoons who ask one another things like “ how many women did you deny a seat on the train today?” Conrad underlines the point with one of the show’s most savage visual jokes: a lavatory shot from the point of view of the urinals that reveals the micropenises of these foolish men.

Because Tavner is a highly secretive NOC officer, he needs a professional cover to move through the countries relevant to his task, in this case Luxembourg and Iran, and so he poses as an engineer, although does not know a damned thing about the piping business. That cover is more than a plot device. The industrial piping world becomes a metaphor for the mission itself: getting things from point A to point B, except in Tavner’s case the thing being moved is eleven million dollars intended for the right Iranian presidential candidate, a pliable figure who will do Washington’s bidding.

One of Patriot’s countless sources of humor is the ludicrously elaborate jargon of this world, with its fabricated, hyper-specialized terminology, such as “pin flam fastened pan traps” and “transmounted Marzel veins”, all spoken with an air of total seriousness, as if it were holy writ. Tavner’s ignorance of the business, and the fact that everyone around him speaks this language, turns scene after scene into a masterpiece of professionalized, Clouseauian nonsense. Speaking of the french detective, there is more than a bit of Peter Seller’s sardonic genius in Opheim’s portrayal of Albans. In one of the series’ most memorable scenes, Albans confronts Tavner seeking a police interview, as she knows he is a murderer, and engages him in a game of Rochambeau, better known in the U.S. as “Rock, Paper, Scissors”. She has already been established as a virtuoso of this mind game, dispatching every previous opponent with ease, until she meets Tavner. The tension between them is electric and intense as they play again and again, and she finally remarks, in a perfectly understated tone,”you are pretty good at this”, a line that that conveys surprise, irritation and reluctant respect all at once. It is a marvelous and absurdist moment, when ritualized struggle for dominance reveals itself as something else: a duel between hunter and quarry, ending only when Tavner, for reasons of his own, decides to let her win.

Then there is the music, which in my view is almost uniformly mishandled in modern film and television, too often as a lazy substitute for good writing, mood, or earned emotion, essentially stealing the significance from the artists who composed it, rather than creating it. Not here. Steven Conrad’s song selection is truly inspired. The series opens with folk legend Vashti Bunyon’s “Train Song”, and later deploys “Sure Shot” by the Beastie Boys, while also drawing from Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, John Prine, the Kinks, Townes Van Zandt, Caetano Veloso, The Flying Burrito Brothers and my personal hero Chris Bell of Big Star. These songs do not flatter the material or signal feeling from outside of it; they deepen the show’s strange and wounded emotional weather.

And then there is the original music, which, as I said, is simply the best I’ve heard in any television series, and better than most films. Tavner is a highly efficient, exquisitely trained lethal operative, groomed from childhood by his father for ultra-deep-cover intelligence work. His public footprint is virtually nonexistent. He is also profoundly damaged. Alongside the psychological toll of the despicable things he is required to do, he has endured genuine torture, including solitary confinement, and one of the series’ most grotesquely funny details: being forced to listen to Don McLean’s “American Pie” nonstop, a form of torment that is both specifically and ironically hideous. After his release, while recovering in Amsterdam and smoking heroic quantities of weed, he encounters a lonely and sad folk musician and begins writing songs and collaborates with him, penning songs whose lyrics are the only way he can release himself from the horror he has experienced. Those songs become graphic, plainspoken confessions of the things he has done and seen, and many of them are astonishing- funny, wounded, detailed and beautiful, like dispatches from a broken spy who somehow wandered into a lost singer-songwriter tradition. At their best, they are worthy of Jimmy Webb or Bobby Gentry. One particularly brilliant and memorable example is the song “ Guns and Groceries”, which I would buy if I had never seen the show before for its gorgeous melody and top-notch studio arrangement. Here John describes his need to acquire a firearm to murder the Iranian candidate, and they are hard to come by in Paris. In addition to being musically beautiful, check out these lyrics. Mournful and poignant. I’ve never done this before , but here is a youtube link to this amazing song, with its emotional lyrics, string swells including dissonance and hitting the dominant seventh chord at just the right time. This is an absolutely first-rate arrangement, and as good as original music gets in a TV show, or any film for that matter.

John’s journey is the arc of the two seasons, with one implausible circumstance after another, which he grimly endures. What makes Patriot so extraordinary is that it never treats John suffering as merely a plot device or as the cost of espionage heroism. Because it is obvious he doesn’t feel heroic. Instead, it is a record of his total disintegration-his personality, his conscience and ultimately his body. He gives everything in service of a project so morally compromised, so littered with collateral damage, that no one involved could fully defend it without self-deception. He gives everything to it, operating with zombie-like determination to complete his tasks, and not just metaphorically but literally, losing fingers, teeth, most of his sight and whatever remained of the self that at one time may have been separable from the mission. The genius, and the horror, of the series is that Conrad makes no attempt to sort out the bravery, villainy, sacrifice or the madness; all of these things happen at once, a work of profound moral ambiguity in which devotion to duty becomes annihilation. By the time John swims through the jellyfish in the Channel between France and England (another metaphor for danger and things gone awry), and is finally pulled from the water by his friend from his time in captivity, he is not redeemed or triumphant, he is simply emptied out. For the first time, real tears come to his eyes and it is one of the saddest and most profound scenes in the entire series- he is drained and lost, a man who has given himself so wholly to the designs of others that almost nothing recognizable remains. That Patriot can render such devastation while remaining one of the funniest, strangest and most piercingly intelligent series I’ve ever seen is a remarkable and singular achievement.

Amazon never really promoted it and that is why most have never heard of it, but it is there on Prime waiting for you to be amazed.

Postscript: I just learned that a Patriot Season 3 will be coming out in late October 2026. Incredibly good news

Whether transliterated with a circumflex or a macron over the a, sirât is derived from the Arabic word for path or way. In Islamic tradition, it can also refer to the bridge stretched over hell that souls must cross on the way to paradise, an image loosely analogous to the ferry over the River Styx in Greek mythology. This seems to be the sense in which director Oliver Laxe is using it here: not merely as a route through a physical space, but as a metaphor for passage through suffering, terror, and ordeal towards some possible deliverance. Laxe has stated that he is a practicing Sufi Muslim, a mystical sect of Islam, and one can see from where the title and the story come.

The film begins as a standard missing-persons dramaquest, with a man, Luis (Sergi López), his tweener son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog Pipa gingerly entering a pounding desert rave somewhere in Morocco, passing out flyers with his missing daughter’s picture to the enraptured, and quite possibly chemically enhanced crusty desert rats. He has not seen his daughter in months. These are not weekend partiers at Lollapalooza, but seasoned and hardcore societal dropouts, the closest American analog being hardcore itinerant Deadheads. The tone, which is probably the film’s strongest suit, is set immediately. Slow-motion shots of spaced-out dancers and pounding music are intertwined with an unforgiving, dusty landscape. This time and space do not align with the affairs of the rest of the world; the tentative and worried look on the face of the out of place Luis foreshadows the events that later occur.

Out of the wider mass of mostly unresponsive dancers, Luis and Esteban latch on to one particular five-person troupe- three men and two women- who seem less like visitors to this scene than permanent inhabitants of it. Whether they offer an actual clue about his missing daughter, or merely a faint pretext of hope, for Luis this is all he has, and for the moment it must be enough. When the local army/police force arrives to break up the obviously unpermitted desert gathering, and drives the ravers out, Luis makes an impulsive, life-altering choice, and he panics. Partly out of desperation and at the insistence of his son, and perhaps against his better judgement, he makes an impulsive, transformative choice and follows his only lead-this seemingly more experienced troupe, who is headed to yet another desert rave, where he might find his lost daughter.

From that point on, the film’s human landscape narrows to two distinct groups:Luis and his small family on one side, and this ragged band of ravers on the other, the latter becoming at once his guides, his objects of suspicion, and the frail vessel for his hope that his daughter might still be found. The ravers’ convoy consists of two field-modified vehicles packed with all of their worldly belongings and a battered assortment of PA gear. Both the machines and their occupants look as if they have rolled in from central casting for any number of Australian desert-apocalypse films, with Mad Max (1979) being the most obvious reference point, though this is clearly not meant to be science fiction. The people here are nearly as worn as the machinery-one man missing a leg, another an arm, and all of them appear sunburnt, exhausted and used up by whatever life they have been living. Off into the desert and the unknown goes this tiny caravan.

I must now say that Laxe has done something unusual here: he has made a film where everything and nothing seem to happen, at least in the first half of the film. On the surface, a group of off-the-grid ravers engrossed in dance get chased off into the arid void by the local army, and not much else occurs. Internally, however, one man undergoes a private hell; he would certainly say that his life has turned inside out. As he searches for his daughter who has been missing for several months in this desert rave culture, his journey takes on something almost Greek in its scale and cruelty. Beyond that, the outside world barely intrudes, apart from the intermittent appearance of troops and a few brief, vague references to conflict between two nations. The central characters are essentially on their own. Some reviewers have suggested that WWIII has begun, but that was not obvious to me.

The geocultural effect here is profound as the landscape itself becomes a character. It is defined by vast, endless desolation, and stripped of nearly all evidence of biology, human or otherwise, among the rocks, sand and hideous storms. There are also hints that the area has been previously war-torn, adding another level of danger to an already severe and unrelenting environment. In such a barren void, it would be virtually impossible not to disappear completely.

It also matters that López and Arjuno are moving through a world largely populated by non-actors, many of the from the same rave milieu the film depicts. Their presence gives an unsettling authenticity: Luis does not so much seem to enter a movie as intrude on a pre-existing reality.

In interviews, Laxe has revealed that he a major admirer of legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkofsky (Andrei Rublev 1967, Solaris 1972, Stalker 1976), and it appears to me that this film was also heavily influenced by the late 60’s-70’s American film movement, wherein the standard Hollywood studio-based filmmaking was rejected, and replaced by an auteur-style, director-driven process. Laxe specifically mentions that he admired, and had in mind, existential road movies such as Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971) when making Sirāt.

One thing that occurs to me when listening to Laxe, or any director for that matter speak about their work, is that although artists like Tarkovsky may vehemently deny that they are using symbolism-and I am not accusing Laxe of making any such denial, it matters little what the artist thinks they are presenting, especially in a medium as visceral and immediate as film. The archetypes are what they are, and they strike the audience before the mind has time for semantic disputes about semiotics, symbolism or other elevated theoretical considerations. Those discussions come after the body has absorbed the blow, and lie in the shadows that the film casts, waiting to be examined at a later date.

As for Sirāt, once Luis makes his transformative choice to follow the experienced ravers, terrible things happen along their way, and I will leave it at that. At the beginning of the film, he has lost his connection to his daughter and to a world he does not understand. Whether or not he ever physically finds her, circumstances ultimately force him to shed his ego, experiencing what the Sufis call fana, the annihilation of the self. In one profound moment, Luis finally lets himself go and dances to the rave music, and in doing so comes closer to his daughter than he ever has before, whether he has found her in any literal sense or not. In this way, but not in the way he intended, his journey has achieved a kind of resolution and closure.

Sirāt was nominated for Best Director, Best Actor and Actress Awards at Cannes this year, and won the Grand Prix for Best Film, and was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Sirāt is an unusual film and reminds us of the power that cinema has to surprise and move us, and its accolades are richly deserved. Sirāt is still in theaters and as always, I recommend seeing it there. But it will be streaming soon.

Capitalism can beget some pretty horrific behavior, particularly when it comes to war. Arthur Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons addresses how a bad decision, based on economics rather than morality, can have catastrophic long-term effects on a family. Director David Mendizábal’s interpretation of this powerful story has just begun its run at the Berkeley Rep, starring Jimmy Smits and his long time partner Wanda De Jésus.

Miller’s play is both an indictment of wartime profiteering as well as a portrayal of a domestic tragedy, and the two are inextricably intertwined. The idea was born after his mother showed him a newspaper story about a trial of manufacturers who were accused of sending defective airplane parts to the military, and those defects resulted in the deaths of several pilots. Twenty one, in fact. I have always wondered where the moderately successful 2010ish electropop duo from Ohio got their name, and now I know.

The phrase that purportedly caught Miller’s eye was that the manufacturer on trial had said that he had “done it for his family”, a chilling admission. This unfortunate and ubiquitous story, the sins of the father, has a long history. It has given rise to a quite a lot of great art. Sophocles’ Antigone, which is ironically entitled, as that means “against the family” in Greek, and The Godfather come to my mind. Stef also points out that this theme is depicted in Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, and can have real-life tragic consequences, such the unfortunate suicide of brilliant musician/poet David Berman, who may have prematurely ended his life because he could not live with his estranged father’s despicable behavior as a longtime apologist attorney for horrific corporate malfeasance. Miller himself continued to explore this theme-the toxic side of providing for one’s family-in his more famous play, Death of a Salesman, which came out a few years after All My Sons.

In this work, Miller reshaped the themes of Greek-styled tragedy into a story that unfolds in an American front yard. The Berkeley Rep adaptation, directed by David Mendizábal, reimagines the story using a Puerto Rican family in place of the lily-white original, while retaining a single set that evokes the archetypal American suburban yard-complete in spirit with everything but the white picket fence. The fragile balance that the American Dream often requires gains an added layer here: an immigrant family whose hard-earned success makes the stakes of maintaining that dream all the more palpable.

Aside from this subtle shift in perspective, the production itself is a largely meat-and-potatoes presentation of the play, which contains more than enough power on its own to deliver a gripping evening of theater, and Mendizábal wisely refrains from tampering with it. The story is simple enough. A successful businessman lives in a small town, and at first glance his family appears to be cruising along comfortably, enjoying the fruits of his labor. Early on, however, tragedy intrudes-both familial and national. A wartime scandal involving defective airplane parts that caused the deaths of several pilots slowly comes to light, while the family continues to grapple with the seemingly unrelated death of their eldest son, who was also lost in a wartime plane crash.

The rest of the production rests on the shoulders of longtime partners and veteran actors Jimmy Smits and Wanda De Jesús, who play Joe and Kate Keller. Smits portrays a man whose obvious charm initially appears genuine but gradually begins to feel forced. A fine actor who commands both respect and warm admiration, Smits presents Joe Keller as a back-slapping, joke-cracking guy who keeps the backyard conversations moving, all along insisting that everything is fine-which it most certainly is not.

De Jesus’ Kate is the emotional center of the play. She portrays Kate as woman who is both strong and fragile, teetering on the edge of hysteria as she clings to the belief that her missing- and almost certainly deceased- son is still alive, since no body has been found in the years since the crash. If her Larry is dead, then the moral structure holding the household together collapses. Kate appears to be the only one who knows the truth, and her denial feels less like delusion than a desperate act of preservation.

Beneath the neighborly small talk and seemingly benign backyard conversation lies a festering and poisonous truth. Years earlier, the family’s factory shipped defective aircraft parts that killed the twenty-one pilots. Keller’s partner and neighbor, Steve Deever, took the blame, and remained in prison while the business continued to prosper. Now, Deever’s estranged son George and daughter Ann- who was once engaged to the missing son Larry, and now is drawn to the surviving son Chris-return to the yard where the truth can no longer remain buried.

Kate’s refusal to accept Larry’s death is more than mere grief: it is the delicate fiction holding the family together. Despite initially spending time in jail for the crime, Joe continues to insist he was innocent, and blames George and Ann’s father for releasing the defective parts, claiming that he was sick at home when the parts were shipped- despite the fact that he had never missed a day at work in his life. When George arrives after visiting his father in prison, he makes it clear that he is not buying the story. Convinced that the Kellers used his dad as a scapegoat to save themselves, he urges his sister to come home, away from a family that is deeply compromised. Under this pressure, Kate inadvertently admits that Joe’s sickness was a lie, and the carefully maintained story begins to crack.

The moral detonation comes when Chris finally confronts his father, rejecting Joe’s defense that everything was done “for the family” and insisting that the men who died were not strangers but fellow human beings. Joe then weakly slinks back into a cynical and amoral defense of his reprehensible behavior, resorting to the childish excuse that “everybody does it”, even as he seems to know that his words ring hollow. The final blow comes when Ann produces a letter Larry wrote the day before his last flight, revealing that he had learned the truth about the defective parts and could not live with the shame. Knowing that it was his father whose callous business choice sent these men to their deaths, Larry deliberately crashed his plane. Faced with that truth, the carefully maintained illusion shatters, and Joe finally understands what he has done: the dead pilots were indeed “all my sons”.

In the final scene, Joe finally breaks down and retreats inside the house. A single gunshot is heard. The reckoning has occurred. The truth has been revealed.In the brief moments that follow, Kate sits frozen on the porch, her son Chris sobbing in her arms, as the full weight of the tragedy settles over the shattered household. Devastated by what he believes he has caused, Chris says quietly “Mother, I didn’t mean to.” She replies, “Don’t, dear. Don’t take it upon yourself. Forget now. Live.” Fade to black.

This powerful conclusion packed a wallop, and the cast received a well-deserved standing ovation. As for the production itself, Mendizábal wisely realized that the script held more than enough power on its own and resisted the temptation to tamper with it in any serious way. His most notable interpretive decision was to cast minorities in every major role: the Keller family as Puerto Rican, and the Deever family as African-American, the latter giving the production added punch as the Deevers were in fact the ones who paid for the crimes of the business, an unfortunately well-heeled theme. Both Stef and I thought that the first act was a bit stiff and corny, perhaps in part due to the nearly eighty year old script, but by the second act we were fully engaged. The acting was uniformly quite good, especially from the Keller family-Smits and DeJesus, as well as Alejandro Hernandez as Chris. Brandon Gill did a fine job as George. The weak spot for me, and one of the few points on which Stef and I disagreed, although she gives it a 7, was MaYaa Boateng as Ann, who I found unnatural and unconvincing.

Nonetheless, this was a very fine production of a powerful play that still carries weight nearly eight decades after its premier- reminding us that some themes, unfortunately, are eternal.

Before turning to Mr Inbetween, it is worth pausing to briefly discuss the remarkable Australian filmmaking collective Blue Tongue Films. Over the past two decades, this loose cooperative group has quietly produced some of the best neo-noir films and prestige TV shows of the modern era, along with a list of inventive music videos for the likes of Bob Dylan and Brandon Flowers of the Killers. The collective includes a rotating roster of writer-directors, actors and producers-most prominently the brothers Joel and Nash Edgerton, along with filmmakers such as David Michôd-a group of multi-hyphenate collaborators who frequently appear in one another’s projects when they are not writing or directing them. Their work and/or appearances range from major studio productions such as the Star Wars franchise and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), to more taut indie crime films like The Square (2008) and The Stranger (2022, to be reviewed here, and not a Blue Tongue production but it is Australian and stars Joel Edgerton), as well as the brilliant and touching Train Dreams (2025), a recent Oscar nominee. For many American viewers, their breakout moment arrived with the feral crime drama Animal Kingdom (2010), a film that announced a new generation of Australian film artists with a gift for the same kind of moral ambiguity, dark humor and casual violence that the groundbreaking series The Sopranos introduced, at least on TV, in 1999. These artists are well-worth an in-depth dive, and I look forward to exploring their catalogue in the future.

Among these many offerings, Mr. Inbetween is an extraordinary under-the-radar crime series from the fertile mind of Scott Ryan. Ryan wrote and starred in every one of the 26 episodes across its three seasons, available now on Hulu. The series, and main character Ray Shoesmith, sprung from Ryan’s lofi university project film, The Magician (2005). Ryan did everything on this project, from writing, directing and acting to wardrobe and catering, all on a $3000 budget. I look forward to checking out Ray Shoesmith’s nascent debut.

As with all great art, Mr Inbetween has cultural and filmic antecedents. The Sopranos was a magnificent and ground-breaking vision from the veteran television writer David Chase, whose frustration with the limitations of network TV literally created the genre of prestige television. The Sopranos is rightly considered the greatest modern TV show of all time, along with The Wire and Breaking Bad, who both followed and owe the series a great debt.

Ryan is not ashamed to admit that his greatest inspiration was in fact this story of a New Jersey crime family and its role as a satellite mob orbiting the greater New York City Five Families. Ryan has stated that his favorite episode, which is mine as well, is the brilliant and hilarious “Pine Barrens”. He has further stated that when writing both the second and third seasons of Mr Inbetween, he watched the entire series of the Sopranos front to back, with a pen and paper in hand, making notes the entire way.

Despite its obvious influences, Mr Inbetween is unique and compelling. Ryan has created a character that is both morally bankrupt and deeply psychopathic, yet somehow charming and sympathetic. We root for Ray, and his pain is our pain. Another more recent TV character named Ray, Ray Donovan, superbly performed by Liev Schreiber, also comes to mind as an analogue.

In this series, Ray Shoesmith is a working class hitman/fixer navigating the banal routines of suburban Sydney life alongside a profession built on intimidation and extortion, and the occasional murder. He is genuinely unobtrusive and has earned the moniker “The Magician”, which we do not learn until near the end of the series, ostensibly for his ability to quietly make problems, and sometimes people, disappear. What makes him compelling is that he is not presented as a glamorous criminal mastermind or conventional TV anti-hero. He is something far more weird: a polite, soft-spoken man with a strange slightly off-kilter charisma, and whose moral code seems both firmly grounded yet simultaneously disturbing. Physically and temperamentally, he is not like any leading man I can recall. His countenance is not strikingly handsome, his gait is unusual and gawky, and he displays a permanent quirky half-smile that is part grimace and also reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s in Batman (1989) or even The Shining (1980). He often appears quietly amused by something others cannot see.

The world of Mr Inbetween is both deeply stupid and misogynistic, but Ray himself is not. He lacks a great native intelligence, but is clearly cunning and street savvy, as he rarely does the dumb things that so many other characters do. Ray’s criminal life would be considerably darker without the presence of his loyal but spectacularly dim sidekick Gary, played with perfect comic timing by Justin Rosniak. Rosniak’s role is familiar, reminiscent of excitable idiots and unwise associates who frequent films like Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction, such as Steve Buscemi’s doofuses in either The Big Lebowski or Fargo, Brad Pitt in True Romance, or even Robert DeNiro in Jackie Brown. Gary’s misadventures often tax Ray’s patience, but it is clear that he loves his intellectually challenged, but unquestioningly loyal friend, and their deep bond and interactions are both touching and often quite funny. And, Gary is capable of the same kind of vicious criminal competence that Ray himself displays when it is most needed.

What distinguishes Ray from the many anti-heros who populate modern prestige TV is not a tortured conscience but his peculiar personal ethic-he is unswervingly loyal and believes in fairness and respect. He despises bullies and cruelty towards the weak, often dispatching these intimidators without mercy and in his own way, he rejects pointless dishonesty. As Bob Dylan says in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, to live outside the law, one must be honest. Yet, these values coexist with a career that routinely involves intimidation and lethal violence. He is a man whose sense of justice does not align with the law, but feels coherent within his own moral universe.

There is another side to Ray, one completely opposite to his criminal side, and the success of the series lies in its ability to effortlessly slide between these two seemingly contradictory worlds. That side is quite ordinary and involves the mundane obligations of caring for his daughter, Brittany, who starts at about age eight and moves into tweenhood by the end of the series. She is played quite maturely by Chika Yasamura, and their relationship is quite touching and real as she navigates life between her remarried and rather strict Christian mother and Ray, who could not be more different. Another wonderful touch is Ray’s relationship with his older brother Bruce, who suffers from ALS. The performance that Nicholas Cassim turns in here in this role is striking, believable and quite remarkable, and he may be the best actor in the series. We learn a lot about Ray through his interactions with his family-his maturing daughter, his dying brother, and his estranged and ultimately senile and decaying father. Each of them is a touchstone in Ray’s journey and they keep him human.

Ryan himself is a remarkable actor and what he pulls off here is truly noteworthy. Across three tightly constructed seasons, with its unusually short episodes that clock in the twenty five minute range, Ryan builds a portrait of a man who exists permanently between identities-between loving father and ruthless killer, loyal friend and brutal enforcer, and ordinary suburbanite and professional criminal. His performance anchors the entire enterprise, combining deadpan humor, flashes of true warmth, and sudden and thoughtless brutality. He is both frighteningly real and oddly likeable. What happens to him along the way is scary, deeply moving, painfully sad, idiotically and comically stupid, and above all human. Ray stands apart. He is not a traditional leading man, but something more interesting- a working stiff who is both a cold-blooded murder as well as a deeply sympathetic and wounded person who you can’t help but root for.

I miss him already. On Hulu now.

1850s Russia was a brutal place, unless you were a member of the gentry or the court. More than a third of the population under Tsar Nicholas the First were serfs, the Russian equivalent of an American sharecropper-peasants legally bound to landowners, and in practice little different from slaves. Ivan Turgenev was among the first major Russian writers to treat the average, lower class citizens not as background figures, but as fully realized human beings-just as Dickens and Balzac had the previous decade. In that sense, Mark Twain feels like his American heir, though he came later and under very different circumstances. Twain relied more heavily on humor, and he and never risked as much, faring far better than Turgenev, who was imprisoned by the czar for his writing, including The Sportsman’s Sketches, the collection published 1852 that helped galvanize sentiment against serfdom. One of the stories in that volume, The Singers, written in the late 1840s, inspired this film. Although there is no direct evidence of the Turgenev’s influence on Twain, Twain’s close friend and publisher William Dean Howells admired Turgenev deeply, and Twain himself visited Russia in 1867. One can detect echoes of the Russian’s moral realism in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), both written afterward.

The Singers was nominated by the Academy Awards committee for Best Live Action Short in 2025. Director, writer, producer and cinematographer Sam A. Davis had been nominated once before, for his 2023 short Nai Nai & Wài Pó. He grew up in a small Michigan town and was intimately familiar with a culture of male pseudo-strength -the inability, even the revulsion, towards emotional expression, and the catastrophic damage that repression can cause. Turgenev’s story of lonely, downtrodden men gathered in a tavern for a singing contest-a contest that briefly becomes communion-struck him as urgently contemporary. Like Turgenev, he centers on broken men. There are no women in the film at all. It is explicitly about vulnerability-what happens when men, trained to endure silently, are finally permitted to feel.

Davis and casting director Natalie Lin took an unusual approach to casting. Instead of trained actors, they searched exclusively through Instagram and Tik Tok, using an algorithm to locate men whose faces carried lived experience and either sang karaoke or busked. They cast Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, subway buskers, an opera vocal coach, reality television contestants, and most notably the singer/songwriter Chris Smithers. All deeply human non-actors, discovered through a decidedly non-human process. And damn, they all can sing.

Davis’ choices with lighting motif and tone give a distinct nod to cinematographer Gordon Willis and director Francis Ford Coppola’s opening scene in The Godfather (1972), with its cavernous shadows and oppressive darkness. He shot on grainy 35mm film to achieve a similar effect- an atmosphere of moral gravity and intimacy. The opening image is a beautiful outdoor still shot of a lonely bar on a snowy evening, and and an out-of-focus train mournfully whistles past. After that, nearly every shot is an interior close-up. Faces dominate the frame as the camera lingers and the darkness presses inward. And, only at the end does the film return to the outside world, as the sound of a train whistling by interrupts the silence inside the bar, bookending the film with its plaintive cry. It is a powerful metaphor.

Ironically, these interiors were not filmed in some frozen midwestern outpost, but in the sunny Los Angeles suburb of La Habra, inside a Moose Lodge. Even more curiously, the lodge bears the number 1858-the very period when Turgenev, exiled from Russia, was living a restless, nomadic life between, Russia, England and France. Adding a non-relevant personal touch, Stef grew up just a short distance away and her close friends know that bar very well. Speaking of, in this instance, she agrees with me that this is a wonderful film.

It is not really a spoiler to say that after the set-up, the majority of the film consists of impromptu outbursts of singing, partially initiated by the bartender, played by NYC busker Mike Young. Like many dive bars, the ceiling is covered with old, crumply one dollar bills, and the bartender announces to the gathered patrons that among those George Washingtons is a single Ben Franklin. After witnessing one customer pester several others for a free beer, he proposes that the person who is the best singer will get a free beer, and he will direct them to the single one hundred dollar bill on the ceiling, and it will be theirs. The unexpected display of considerable musical talent that follows is both surprising and deeply rewarding.

A tiny bit of cheesiness at the end in the form of a group hug felt unnecessary to me, but that is a small criticism. At just over 15 minutes, and free online on Netflix, The Singers is an absolutely wonderful short film and well worth anyone’s time.

In Sentimental Value, director Joachim Trier reunites with actor Renate Reinsve, continuing one of European cinema’s most compelling contemporary collaborations. Though Reinsve appears briefly in Trier’s Oslo, August 31st (2011), the partnership truly emerged with the excellent The Worst Person in the World (2021), which turned her into an international sensation and earned her the Best Actress prize at Cannes. The film also went on to receive Academy Award nominations for both Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay. Trier wisely realized that Reinsve has a face the camera reads effortlessly, as if thought itself were visible, and structured two films around it. I would rate The Worst Person in the World eight out of ten, and I heartily endorse it.

Joachim Trier’s two latest films approach adulthood from opposite directions. The Worst Person in the World follows a character largely unshaped by a fixed past, burdened instead by the terror of open possibility. Sentimental Value, by contrast, is defined by what has already happened-a generational inheritance wherein emotional patterns pass down through a family almost epigenetically. It examines the aftermath of a mother’s collapse and a father’s inability to answer it, and the damage carried by their children. His distance from them, and from his own feelings, is not so much chosen as learned.

In The Worst Person in the World, Reinsve’s character Julie moves from one possible life to another-as a student, a photographer, a partner-never quite settling on who she is. Trier lets the film wander with her, building it out of moments rather than plot turns. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Julie steps outside and finds Oslo frozen in place-cars are stopped at intersections, pedestrians are suspended mid-gesture, even a dog is caught in motion. She moves silently through the city to find the barista she met the night before, the moment less a fantasy than a visual expression of acting on an impulse before doubt has time to return. In the end, the film defines adulthood as something that is not an arrival, but a series of choices. Here, Reinsve’s character Julie lives inside possibility, while in his next film, he examines characters shaped by consequence.

Sentimental Value is centered around the aging, once-celebrated film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who abruptly returns to the orbit of his two adult daughters after years of emotional and physical absence. In the opening scenes, Nora (played by Reinsve) is an actor unraveling backstage, struggling to go onstage, and her temperament borders on caricature-a classic diva panic. We learn that she is a rising star, in sharp contrast to her father, who has not yet appeared, but is about to reenter her life. His career has quietly faded, and after a fifteen-year absence he returns with a new film. When he does return to his daughters, it quickly becomes clear that he is less interested in reconciliation than leveraging his daughter’s newfound prominence to support his project-a film confronting his wife’s suicide, the trauma that widened the schism between Nora, her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and their father. It soon becomes evident that he would like Nora to play the role of her mother and to shoot the film in their grief-soaked home that she still inhabits- a proposal she adamantly rejects.

Skarsgård, the scion of Sweden’s premier acting family, delivers his typically top-notch performance as Gustav, the vain and cold once-celebrated director who is seeking to return to past glory. After Nora’s initial rejection, he turns to bright young American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning, in a fine performance), who acts as an outsider’s foil to the family’s deep-seated wounds. Gustav first meets Kemp at a festival screening one of his earlier films-the only one in which Agnes, not Nora, appears as a child actor. That earlier work, set against the backdrop of World War II grapples with inherited psychological scars, suggesting a lineage of damage stretching from Gustav’s mother-and her possible suicide-into the next generation.

Trier’s decision to make Agnes, the former child performer, ultimately reject an artistic life, is a brilliant one. Now a historian, she stands in direct contrast to her actress sister, whose life is somewhat of mess and remains unsettled and volatile. Agnes has become Nora’s emotional ballast-a reversal of childhood roles, when the older sister once shielded and comforted the younger in the aftermath of their mother’s death. I should note that Lilleaas’ performance is every bit as nuanced and powerful as those of Skarsagård’s or Reinsve’s- a judgement evidently shared by awards voters, as she received Best Supporting Actress nominations from both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.

Returning to the story, it is clear that Kemp idolizes Gustav, and agrees to take on the role of Agnes and Nora’s mother, even to the point of dying her hair to resemble her. As work begins, the childhood home becomes a character unto itself-a literal repository of memory-and the boundary between lived experience and the script grows uncomfortably blurred. In the end, it is Kemp who recognizes that she is miscast. The realization comes as she attempts to read an extended monologue in English, nobly striving to capture its emotional force, but eventually and correctly concluding that the speech demands linguistic and cultural authenticity-something she cannot convincingly provide. Ultimately, Nora somewhat reluctantly agrees to take the demanding part despite her trepidation and bitterness, recognizing it was written for her all along, and that, in his own way, Gustav is trying to make peace with her through the film.

Trier, along with his cinematographer and editor, ultimately succeeds because the family dynamics and performances feel lived and not engineered. He gives these magnificent actors the direction, script and space to patiently work through their shared difficulties and history, allowing them to fully disappear into the characters with quiet conviction-which they all do admirably. As in Chloe Zhao’s beautiful film Hamnet (2025), also reviewed on this site, art becomes a response to grief. An artist’s reaction to tragedy and trauma may not be immediately palpable or visible, it is often concealed beneath conflicting emotions and personal foibles. But when the dust settles, it is recognizable and true.

As always, I recommend a visit to your local theater for the most complete cinematic experience, and even at first run prices, Sentimental Value is well worth your investment. Nonetheless, it is also now available on Prime for ten bucks. Either way, don’t miss it.

SPOILER ALERTS

Most comedies do not begin with an interrupted suicide attempt-yet this is unmistakably comedic, or at least a drama that uses comedy to help tell its powerful and sad stories. It confronts its subjects without flinching. This potent, painful, and frequently very funny short series comes from the fertile, creative mind of Sally Wainwright, whose magnificent Happy Valley (2014-2023) we just finished. As an aside, I may review that soon, and I recommend it without reservation.

A writing professor once told me that all writing must begin with a question, and then attempt to answer it. Riot Women asks what happens to women once society stops expecting anything new from them-when they feel they have nowhere left to go and have become invisible in their own lives. The series tackles menopause, rage, retirement insecurity, expectations of quiet behavior, anger, misogyny, rape, adoption, sexual harassment, alternative sexuality and gender, identity reinvention, boredom, marriage, divorce, caregiving, burnout, addiction, codependency, and grief. It is hard to think of a social anxiety it leaves untouched, and Wainwright shows no interest in softening any of them.

The premise is simple enough. Responding to a request for acts at a charity talent contest, Jess (Lorraine Asbourne), a late middle-aged bar owner and aspiring drummer decides she will form a rock band. She recruits her immediate circle of friends, who agree with varying degrees of enthusiasm and seriousness. The most committed, at least at the outset, is keyboard player Beth (Joanna Scanlon), an ample soon-to-be grandmother who is estranged from nearly every branch of her family and who becomes the emotional spine of the series. Recently divorced after a marriage long since fossilized, distant from her adopted adult son through equal parts circumstance and stubbornness, and unable to connect with a senile mother from a generation that never expected the self-definition Beth craves, she exists in a kind of suspended life. Even her brother remains physically and emotionally remote, their relationship complicated further by the looming tensions of inheritance. Beth has reached a crossroads: not so much convinced her life is wasted as certain she cannot continue it unchanged. The series opens with her on the verge of ending it all, only to be interrupted by a ringing phone-a comic intrusion into genuine despair, and a tonal maneuver the show repeats throughout, giving its darkest material a distinctly farcical edge.

At exactly the right moment, the prospect of a creative project- however unserious at first-gives Beth a reason to keep moving. She commits with whatever energy a burned out, depressed, post-menopausal woman uncertain of her own identity can muster. Jess and Beth’s friend Holly (Tasmin Grieg), meanwhile, is retiring from a deeply misogynistic police force where corruption and casual sexist behavior are tolerated, and she too decides she has had enough. She picks up a bass and join Jess and Beth, who can at least approximate musicianship. The band is completed by Holly’s mildly disengaged midwife sister Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore) on guitar, who possesses no more technical proficiency than her sister. In fact, the actors do play the instruments in the show, and this lends further authenticity to the series. The band’s first ambitious choice is ABBA’s “Waterloo”. All of these actors acquit themselves well-Scanlon especially. But the series truly ignites when a whirlwind of chaos arrives in the form of Kitty (Rosalie Craig). Craig is absolutely terrific in the role and dominates every scene she enters. She is an unavoidable presence, a Tasmanian devil of a force-erratic, combustible, profane and feral-with her past at first unclear. When, by accident of circumstance, Beth hears Kitty drunkenly sing karaoke, any uncertainty Beth feels about the band vanishes. There is only one possible path: Kitty must be the band’s frontwoman. Henceforth, ABBA covers are not going to cut it. At this point, Riot Women becomes less about formation than about consequences. The setup lays the groundwork, with the predominant theme being late middle-aged female discontent. At its heart, the show follows the bond between Beth, whose aborted suicide begins the series, and Kitty, the wayward daughter of an all-male crime family and survivor of a horrific childhood. The two women are deeply dissatisfied in both different and similar ways, and, despite those differences, need each other badly.

I must say that the six episode series lags a bit in the middle, and I am not entirely sure why. Stef liked it, but not as much as I did. Perhaps there’s simply too much going on-the various women, every member of the band including the three backup singers, plus families and jobs, with the narrative occasionally drifting out of focus. The men are uniformly shitty to varying degrees, which may well be the point, and after decades of film and television portraying women as one-dimensional plot devices, complaining about the inversion feels a bit hollow. One male arc does matter: that of Beth’s adopted son Tom (Jonny Green). When the truth about his parentage abruptly surfaces-that he is the result of Kitty’s repeated rape at age twelve by criminal associates of her father, itself bound up in the violence and predation of her infamous family- it knocks Kitty, then Beth, and finally Tom sideways, and the series gives their conflicting emotions room to register rather than rushing past them. The connection between Beth and Kitty is almost absurdly coincidental, the sort of twist that might feel cheap in another show, yet here it underscores a larger point: these lives were entangled long before the band gave them the language for it. At any rate, whenever the focus settles back on Kitty, easily the most compelling character, the show regains its footing. Craig commands the screen the moment she appears, and dares anyone else to compete.

The music is surprisingly quite good, though I am not quite sure why I say “surprisingly”. Perhaps that itself is the point. One does not instinctively expect women in late middle age to produce pointed hard rock songs with such prickly themes, yet Riot Women does exactly that. Unlike most of modern television, the music here genuinely packs a punch and directly serves the drama’s central idea. The band begins with a song like “Waterloo”, a smart choice by Wainwright precisely because it is wrong: it is a song about a woman’s defeat, where she surrenders in love and relinquishes agency, which is exactly what the series ultimately rejects. Once Kitty arrives on the scene, that sentiment clearly won’t do. Her first appearance-singing Karaoke, where the group still lives musically-immediately shows Beth that she is dealing with a singular, powerful voice, and this suggests a different future. When Kitty eventually does join the band she remarks, politely (unusual for her), that “Waterloo” is the wrong choice, proposing The Rolling Stones’ “ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, which she claims is the greatest rock song of all time-a debatable, but not misguided point. The rehearsal ends there, yet the seed has been planted. When Beth and Kitty finally begin writing, they are not interested in half measures. Blunt original songs like “Seeing Red”, “I’m Just like Your Mother”, “Shitting Pineapples” and “Riot Women” unflinchingly confront subjects such as messy childbirth, menopause and misogyny head on. This ain’t Taylor Swift or Joni Mitchell territory: the lineage runs closer to female pioneers Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, and OG Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna-and it is no accident that artists in that orbit populate the soundtrack. The songs themselves are written by Hanni Pidduck and Clara Townsend of the London-based queer duo ARXX, whose influences lean more towards The Runaways and Nirvana, rather than any confessional singer/songwriter.

As a musician and songwriter, I especially appreciated how central the original music is to the series, and it holds everything else together. I know firsthand how a band can become a kind of family, and I value collaborative art precisely because of how difficult it is. When it works, the reward feels disproportionate to the effort. This may explain why I responded to it more strongly than Stef…or maybe I am just a sap. With art, as with people, you either forgive their weaknesses or you don’t.

Several plot threads run through the series, most-but importantly not all- resolving across the six episodes. The band survives personal betrayal, injuries, disappointments, family disruptions, interpersonal relationship disputes and its own internal chaos. They do eventually record an original song, fulfill their goal of playing the charity event, attract outside attention, and ultimately perform an actual show at a festival to considerable success. Yet some strands remain open, most notably Kitty’s reconnection with her estranged family, leaving ample dramatic ground for a second season, which BBC has alread greenlit. I very much look forward to the next iteration.

Kudos to Sally Wainwright, who has done it again. All six episodes are now available on Britbox.

SPOILER ALERTS

Jody Foster has long been one of those rare performers whose intelligence is visible on screen as well as off it. I have always liked her-as an actor and as a public figure- and at her best she is a genuinely top-tier artist. Taxi Driver (1976), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Contact (1997), The Accused (1998) and Panic Room (2002), are all excellent films and she is superb in each. She has also worked in French cinema before, in the magnificent A Very Long Engagement (2004), directed by one of my absolute favorites, the masterful Jean-Pierre Jeunet. She has a small but notable role, playing the morally ambiguous widow of a WW1 soldier who systematically and methodically avenges her husband’s wartime death. Her performance here is nuanced and quietly unsettling.

Her more recent work, however, has felt a bit different. In the fourth season of Nic Pizzolatto’s spectacular True Detective series, she was solid, and occasionally striking, but not consistently compelling; the season itself lands somewhere in the middle of the series- it was not the best (Season 1), nor was it the worst (Season 2). She is also pretty good in the biopic Nyad (2023), a respectable, well-made film that never quite transcends its formula. The point being not that she has noticeably declined, but that the expectations are unusually high: we are dealing with what is unmistakably a Hall-of-Fame career.

Back to Vie Privée, which incidentally should not be confused with Vie Privée (1942), a French wartime domestic melodrama of the same name, nor Louis Malle’s 1962 film, the thinly fictionalized anatomy of a star’s ascent, starring the fabulous Brigitte Bardot (RIP). My repeated digressions here may already suggest that the film I am about to review did not overwhelm me.

First, I must say that Stef liked it a little better than I did, and it’s not as though I hated it. Her rating is 6.5/10, so perhaps she is a tougher grader than I am. I do think it is worth seeing-just not at full price. A discounted matinee showing, or perhaps a streaming watch would be better.

Nevertheless, to the film we return. Rather than beginning with a dramatic incident, the film opens on a life already slightly out of joint. Lilian Steiner is a divorced psychoanalyst, yet she is still entangled with her ex-husband Gabriel, played well by veteran Daniel Auteil. He is an opthamologist, a not-so-subtle metaphor for her inability to see her life clearly. The two slip back into an almost casual intimacy- a confusion that mirrors the rest of her life, professional as well as personal, none of it on especially firm footing. Her relationship with her only son is colder still, bordering on indifference; early on she barely engages with her grandchild and even hesitates to pick the baby up. In the consulting room, she faces a procession of faintly absurd patients with trivial fixations and self-dramatizing anxieties. She mechanically records each session, as her barely concealed indifference requires it-she is not really paying attention, she is in fact phoning it in, despite her frequent and perhaps unnecessary proclamations that she is a professional analyst.

The drama gradually narrows until it focuses on the one patient who matters-Paula, whose story becomes the film’s emotional and narrative core. Her death unsettles Lillian more than she initially admits, and uncovering both her true feelings towards Paula and the circumstances behind her death become the film’s central trajectory. The film then moves into the dead woman’s orbit- her distraught and suspicious daughter and her unfaithful husband, Simon, here portrayed by the wonderful Matieu Amalric, perhaps best known from the excellent The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). The mystery of Paula’s death is further compounded by the death of her wealthy Aunt Perle, who leaves her a substantial inheritance. The film initially withholds whether this relationship was affectionate or opportunistic, casting a faintly unflattering light on both Paula and her husband’s motivations.

In searching for meaning behind Paula’s death, Lillian seeks out Paula’s hypnotist. What begins as skepticism becomes a strangely profound encounter, followed by a break-in at the psychoanalyst’s office, and these events push Lillian to conduct her own investigation. Under hypnosis, she reveals a buried love for Paula and an intensifying suspicion of Simon, fueling an obsessive, and increasingly irrational pursuit of Simon as the potential murderer of his late wife and her Aunt Perle. Gabriel is reluctantly pulled into this quixotic investigation, one that functions less as a search for the truth than as an attempt to escape the monotony and sterility of their carefully ordered existence. Potential clues emerge when they learn that the drugs that led to Paula’s suspicious death by overdose were picked up from the pharmacist by her husband, and that Lillian’s prescription may have been misread to call for a much higher dose than she intended. The possibility emerges that the widower killed both women for money- a neat explanation that satisfies the police logic as well as Lillian’s emotional certainty.

Lillian and Gabriel’s pursuit of Simon begins to edge into silliness, and the stiffness of Rebecca Zlotnick’s direction recalls late-period Woody Allen, and that is not a compliment. The accumulated explanations never quite resolve into truth; each revelation feels psychologically persuasive but factually unstable, built from projection and guilt rather than evidence. Lillian’s investigations becomes less about finding a killer than confronting the emptiness in her own life.

What emerges is not murder but despair: Paula’s death appears self-inflicted, her aunt’s death closer to assisted suicide, and the tale of adultery and inheritance a story imposed by the living to make the randomness of death more bearable. Lillian realizes that she was never uncovering Paula’s life so much as exposing her own dissatisfaction. The mystery dissolves, but the disturbance remains.

Zlotnick ultimately ties the threads together neatly. The break-in proves innocuous and wholly unrelated to Paula’s death, and Simon’s infidelity was well-known to Paula (of course, they are French!) The death of both Paula and her aunt are better explained by love and connection than any nefarious motivation. Lilian and Gabriel arrive at an understanding, settling into a healthier relationship closer to companionship than marriage. She returns to her practice calmer and more present, abandoning her tape recorder, and she engages more openly with her patients. Even her persona softens- she is less rigid in manner and dress. She apologizes to her son for previous her coldness, a once unthinkable admission, and even tenderly holds her grandchild, newly at ease with herself.

As I write, it becomes clear to me that the film’s shortcomings lie more in the direction and script than with the performances, which are all pretty good. It is nevertheless impressive to watch Foster so effortlessly move between two languages, and she deserves credit for the achievement. The film is still in theaters; I wouldn’t quite recommend the $14 ticket, but on further reflection, it is pretty decent and would be worth watching at home when it eventually arrives on streaming services, or at a discounted matinee.

The most expensive production in German TV history has everything: gorgeous period sets, excellent acting and writing, fabulous music and even dance-which would normally send me running. Bryan Ferry is in it, fer Christ’s sake, and plenty of late-20s jazz reworkings of Roxy Music tunes abound, including the obvious but still-beloved “A Song for Europe”. This series, alongside France’s Les Bureau des Légendes (also reviewed here), and the Danish-Swedish breakthrough The Bridge (Bron/Broen) represents modern television at the highest level, and demonstrates how decisively Continental Europe can compete with Britain and the United States in the modern prestige-TV era, often with greater ambition, intelligence, and historical seriousness. While it is first and foremost high-quality entertainment, in this era defined by a morally bankrupt and deeply unwell presidency, Babylon Berlin also reads as a warning from history.

The series opens in late 1920s Berlin, during the unstable final years of the Weimar Republic. Babylon Berlin quickly establishes itself as both a noir detective story and a sweeping social portrait of a city dancing on the edge of catastrophe. Paul von Hindenburg is presiding over a government already riddled with corruption. The economy is faltering and about to collapse outright, a reality vividly captured in the contrasts between multitudes of characters, who range from dirt poor to obscenely wealthy. Intriguing complexity abounds. There is an ascending Nazi Party, a looming military coup plot, a smuggled shipment of gold, Communist Trotskyite musicians and actors, spies of every stripe, Red Army operatives and Stalinist loyalists, pornographic films-both clandestine and commercial-morally elastic industrialists, corrupt police departments, and ordinary criminals struggling to survive. The whole mess is then refracted through the lives of a couple protagonists with thoroughly tortured souls.

Season One introduces Inspector Gereon Rath, a detective from the Cologne Police Department sent to Berlin on a politically sensitive assignment involving the blackmail of a prominent business leader. Personally, he is a mess, haunted by the trauma of WW1 and quietly addicted to morphine. He partners uneasily with Charlotte Ritter-a sharp, ambitious young working-class woman who supports her family while trying to be taken seriously in a brutally male-dominated police force. Volker Bruch, who is probably best known to American audiences for his role in The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2018), is absolutely terrific as Rath, conveying both rigidity and fracture beneath the surface while allowing a deeply emotional life to press against his restraint. Liv Lisa Fries, largely unknown to American audiences before this role, delivers one of the series most compelling performances as Charlotte Ritter and emerges as one of its quiet revelations. She matches Bruch step for step. Their wary, charged interplay unfolds slowly as mutual suspicion and professional calculation give way to an intimate, but precarious bond. Their relationship endures, but never comfortably, as it mirrors the circumstances they inhabit- a world in which stability itself is already slipping away.

The rest of the cast is uniformly brilliant and are too numerous to name in full, but several performances stand out. Lars Eidinger, who American audiences may know from Personal Shopper (2016), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) or George Clooney’s most recent film, Jay Kelly (2025), is extraordinary as the industrialist/weirdo Alfred Nyssen. Nyssen fancies himself as an aesthete and modernist, drawn to technology and the abstractions of power. His fascination with rocketry reads as a grotesque premonition of the V-2 era to come, as if he were a character torn directly from the pages of Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Leonie Benesch, largely unknown to American audiences, is quietly devastating as Greta Overbeck, one of the series’ most unsettling, important and representative characters. Benesch charts Greta’s slow radicalization with remarkable restraint, showing how humilation, loneliness and a precarious economic situation can incrementally lead to political violence. Finally, Jens Harzer, unknown to Americans but a towering figure in German language theater, turns in a tour de force presentation of Dr. Anno Schmidt- almost certainly not his real name. Even without having completed Babylon Berlin, it is clear that “Schmidt” occupies a moral and structural fault line of the show. Under the auspices of psychiatric care, he systematically manipulates the protagonist Rath’s trauma and dependency, steering him towards ethically compromised actions that serve Schmidt’s covert political alliances. Though not yet fully articulated at this point in the series, Schmidt’s ideology is unmistakable: a belief in in hierarchy, obedience, and the instrumental use of individuals in the service of an authoritarian future that will harden into outright Nazisim. In this sense, Schmidt recalls Dr. Pointsman, another character from Gravity’s Rainbow-the terrifyingly rational physician who exploits psychological injury. In the book, it is protagonist Tyrone Slothrop who becomes the patient-victim of this manipulation. In Babylon Berlin, that role falls to Rath, whose behavior is methodically shaped to conform both to Schmidt’s proto-Nazi reactionary politics, and to the doctor’s pursuit of power, protection and material advantage within this collapsing system.

There are several secondary plotlines that conclude after the first two seasons’ sixteen episodes, and not all resolve cleanly, but none strain credulity, except for one scene in which a character holds their breath for an implausible amount of time. No matter. Kudos to Henk Handloegten, Tom Tykwer and Achin von Borries on a terrific series. There are two more seasons out on various streaming services and a fifth and final season is already in the can, and is slated for release in 2026. I look forward to watching all three of the seasons I have yet to see.

I understand that series concludes at the precise moment of the Weimar Republic’s final collapse in the first few months of 1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor, followed by the Reichstag fire and soon after the Enabling Act, which grants the Fürher the dictatorial powers he long sought. This Act effectively cleared the path for the systematic dismantling of German society that followed. It will be difficult to watch this final arc without unease: Babylon Berlin functions as a cautionary tale that American audiences should view with grave concern-and ideally, as a call to action. The historical moment it depicts corresponds uncomfortably to a 1932-like threshold, one that invites comparison with the current Donald Trump era: a period where democratic norms are strained and institutions are tested, and what follows depends entirely on whether effective resistance materializes or fails.

Whether as a historical warning and mirror, or simply as entertainment, Babylon Berlin is well worth your time.

Hollywood is among the most organized places on earth, despite ignorant put downs from the right wing, it is almost military in its structure. Every task has its own worker group. So if you want to break out of the mold, it’s probably best to do something yourself, rather than try to convince other people to let you do it. Giovanni Ribisi wanted to be a cinematographer. He is an excellent actor, but he wisely understood that to do what he wanted, he would have to produce a film himself.

Strange Darling is that film. Collaborating with Writer/Director JT Mollner, the knockout one/two acting punch of Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner, and Z Berg’s Elliot Smith-ish songs, these folks have done something special. It’s an actual original idea in the thriller vein, a modern noir.

Strange Darling’s striking visuals owe a great deal to Ribisi and Mollner’s combined appreciation of older Kodak 35mm film, a love shared with like-minded directors such as Nolan, Tarantino, Scorsese and PTA. That choice isn’t just a cosmetic nostalgia, as it imposes real restraints as an unforgiving format; requiring storyboarding and a high degree of visual discipline. Since Ribisi and Mollner have backgrounds as actors rather than film technicians, the film’s compositional control feels motivated by storytelling rather than technique, and this serves the film well.

Director Mollner uses non-linearity to great effect, structuring Strange Darling as a fractured pursuit that continually reframes the audience’s perception. Information is deliberately rationed, with each new segment altering context and keeping narrative certainty elusive until the final payoff. Too much plot information here would ruin it, but here is the basic outline.

A chance encounter between two unnamed characters- credited only as The Lady and The Demon- sets the film in motion, initiating a violent pursuit that unfolds across rural Oregon, with the aforementioned plaid-shirted and mossy Emo tunes providing an unexpectedly perfect backdrop to the action. At a glance, Strange Darling recalls the classics Badlands (1973) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in the surface familiarity of an outlaw couple whose power dynamic initially appears clear, but quickly proves unstable. Both films belong to the late-60’s/early 70’s rupture in American cinema that briefly operated outside the classical Hollywood system- an apt parallel for stories centered on characters who themselves exist beyond the accepted social order. Ribisi and Mollner clearly revere that moment in American filmmaking, and Strange Darling channels its independent spirit not as an imitation, but as a framework for reexamination and ultimately unsettling the myths those films helped establish.

Although we saw it in a theater some time ago, I do vividly recall that Stef and I had to sit through 20 minutes of previews, enduring utterly banal franchise dreck-titles clogged with colons and Roman numerals, each promising more of the same. That slog only sharpened the pleasure of encountering something genuinely fresh.

Be warned- it’s pretty harrowing and violent, but I think that is worth the pay off. As always, see it in a theater if you can find it, or it is readily available on several streaming services for just a few bucks.

I’m not a big fan of horror films, their easy cliches make them too predictable. Invocation of the supernatural is too often a lame plot device that excuses bad writing. I didn’t see that in Longlegs. It is spooky, creepy and quite simple, without a great deal of fluff.

I think Nicholas Cage deserves reconsideration as a consequential actor. He doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously these days, and the last three films I’ve seen him in have been wonderful. Yes, he has made some real stinkers, but look at someone like Michael Caine. Does Jaws: the Revenge negate Sleuth? Cage was brilliant in the touching and sad Pig (2021), which was one of my first reviews here; it is outstanding and serious, as is Longlegs. He is also capable of playful self-mockery, as in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), which was stupid fun and perfect plane flight fare. I am looking forward to his upcoming performance as the legendary Oakland Raiders coach and broadcasting genius John Madden, a Hall of Fame coach and as funny as a broadcaster gets, with only the late Bill Walton coming close to his unique and quirky humor. Madden (2026) is coming out later this year, with Christian Bale as Al Davis (??!!) That should be fun…or maybe not. Nonetheless, I will see it.

Cage’s screen persona as Longlegs, who is not given any other name, is frightening, bizarre, memorable, and not cliched. Which is difficult. Cage himself is unrecognizable. His mannerisms and speech are truly terrifying, he is barely coherent but compelling. His countenance lands somewhere between Heath Ledger’s lead role and unintentional swan song in The Joker (2019), and Sean Penn’s Cheyenne in This Must be the Place (2011). The former is well-documented and decent in my book; the latter is a delightful and sweet film with a nice nod to the Cure’s Robert Smith, as well Lou Reed and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. For me, it is not hyperbole to say that Cage places himself among the rarified acting figures of his generation.

Back to the movie. Longlegs is a psychological horror film centered around an FBI investigation that gradually exposes a disturbing intersection of serial murder, religious extremism and a touch of the supernatural, which normally turns me off, but is minimal here and serves the story well. Maika Monroe is excellent as Lee Harker, the Clarice Starling-like FBI agent, and as protagonist she carries the uncertainty of the film. She plays a young agent whose uncanny intuition has drawn the attention of her hard-nosed boss. (Blair Underwood as Agent Carter, who is solid in his turn.) Director Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho (1960) legend Anthony Perkins, employs subtle but striking techniques here, including framing Cage in close-ups that show him only from his mouth down, and uses sharp cuts sparingly, the restraint making them more effective.

As the investigation deepens, it becomes clear that Lee’s preternatural perceptions are not just gut feelings, but symptoms of unresolved trauma from her own childhood. Perkin’s treatment of her fragmented memories is particularly effective, as they are not framed as subjective reveries. Her past intrudes in partial, degraded fragments that feels less like recollections than signal interference. Instead, they surface through distorted sounds leaking from the past into the present, shifts in perspective, and abrupt, unmotivated cuts that interrupt scenes in mid-action, rather than flowing naturally from them, a formal choice that recalls Faulkner’s famous dictum that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

By the time the film formally realizes that Lee Harker has a direct connection to Longlegs dating back to her childhood, the audience has already intuitively absorbed that fact. Perkins does not rely upon narrative beat or revelatory moment to establish this link, and that restraint makes the film distinctive. Alicia Witt is excellent as Lee’s damaged mother and plays an essential role in connecting Lee to her past. Witt’s performance is restrained and guarded, with Perkins presenting Ruth Harker less as a source of exposition then as an emotional scar that Lee carries into the present. Ruth’s compartmentalization of her past functions as a survival mechanism-a morally ambiguous tactic-and that low key portrayal gives the film more strength than it would have had she gone full Mommy Dearest (1981).

Perkins is not formally trained as a director, he is best known as a character actor and that serves him pretty well here. He also made a few stinkers before Longlegs, and he has obviously learned from those mistakes. The music and sound are well done, the editing is sharp and creative.

It is no longer in theaters, and you can see it for free on Hulu. Well worth it.

A delightfully weird black comedy from Korean director Park Chan-wook, based on Donald A. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax. Chan-wook, and Bong Joon-Ho, best known for the excellent Parasite (2019), are considered the twin pillars of modern Korean cinema. The former’s cult classic Oldboy (2003) won the Grand Prix at Cannes that year and is regarded by some as a cinematic masterpiece. Oldboy will go on my must-see list for 2026.

Its premise is simple enough. A man lives comfortably in a wooded suburb with his wife, two children and two dogs in the house where he grew up. It took him many years of steady labor to earn the money required to purchase it, the culmination of a long career as a loyal employee of a once flourishing paper company, recently purchased by American vulture capitalists. The choice of this fading industry is deliberate, and he is eventually informed that his job is being terminated, destined to be replaced by robots.

After about the first 20 minutes of the film, I turned to Stef and remarked that it felt like a screwball comedy from the 60’s, a reaction she immediately shared; and at that point she had it rated as 3/10. Ouch. Part of her reaction was fueled by how old-fashioned the film felt to her in its treatment of women. There were no women in the workplace and the female characters we did see were markedly submissive, which struck her as dated and a little irritating. It is unclear whether this was intentional, but for me it did add to the sense that the film was purposefully channeling a mid-century archaic sensibility, as in retrospect, that datedness may have been part of the point. The film’s exaggerated politeness and possibly deliberately retro social dynamic seemed calibrated to disarm the viewer into complacency, making the later turn toward darkness land with greater force. Still, it is hard to rule out a less charitable possibility: that this dynamic reflected an unexamined and frankly chauvinistic blind spot. It is also possible that the film’s preoccupation with economic disruption functioned as a deliberate lens through which the destabilization of gender roles was examined. Men flounder, clinging to diminished versions of an idealized masculinity, or unravel entirely, while women respond by adapting, reversing roles, or even seeking agency elsewhere, sometimes in the company of men who remain functionally stable within the same collapsing system. The choice here of a paper company as the central employer sharpens this dramatic tension with a dose of dark humor. Paper functions as a metaphor for obsolescence: something once trusted and foundational, now sliding towards irrelevance- mirroring a set of societal and gendered assumptions that can no longer be sustained.

It took some time to recognize that the film’s persistent, benign façade concealed an underlying hostility-an affective texture that we only later recognized had been coherent all along. The performers appear fully attuned to this dynamic: their cheerful and often goofy demeanors maintain the illusion just long enough to keep the viewer disarmed. When the film’s “gee-whiz” banality final curdles into something uglier, it does so without abandoning its humor. This productive contradiction recalls the work of the Coen Brothers, and Fargo (1996) in particular, though here the folksy relentlessness comes not from midwestern affability, but from Korean cultural norms of courtesy and ingrained deference. Both the Coens and Chan-wook understand that systems generate a particular kind of stupidity, and ordinary characters trapped in unforgiving circumstances can be driven to previously unthinkable behavior without ever shedding the false patina of politeness, dontcha know.

Lee Byung-hun, best known for his triple-threat turn in Squid Games (2021) as its malevolent “Front Man”, 001 game-winner and masked enforcer, is excellent as Man-Su, whose prior dismissal anchors the film’s conflict. His full emotional range, from humor to despair, is deftly on display-and he proves himself no small talent on the dance floor as well, adding a little grace to the silliness. The supporting cast is uniformly strong, and fully attuned to the film’s unique tone, remaining ridiculous and funny even under increasingly dire circumstances. Man-su initially insists to his family that reentering the dying industry will take a few short months; but after a year, reality intervenes. Tennis lessons, cello lessons, meat, and eventually even the house itself must be sacrificed to the new economic reality. It is at this point that he hatches the scheme that propels the remainder of the film.

Chan-wook and cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, with whom he has worked before, employ a hyper-real, deranged clarity in their approach to shots and color. They repeatedly use extreme close ups of eyes, hands, and sometimes mouths being smeared with the grease of chicken wings, greedily consumed. These are not emotional, but rather clinical, and frankly eerie. There is one particularly magnificent shot taken through the bottom of a beer glass containing a dropped shot. A face is warped and refracted through both the beer glass and the submerged shot glass as it is consumed. Since I cannot remember whether the face belongs to the protagonist-who has quit drinking but must drink here to enact his plan-or to the victim receiving the final blow of intoxication is beside the point. Positioned as the final move in a plan to render the victim obscenely drunk, the excessive dose of alcohol is not cheerfully insisted upon, and it carries a distinctly menacing charge. The distorted face in this bizarre shot conveys the desperation and unease the filmmakers intend, and it works beautifully.

Once Man-su’s plan is hatched and fully set in motion, the wheels come off and his world is turned upside down. Will his bizarre and twisted scheme deliver him to his ultimate goal, and return his family to its lost equilibrium? The conclusion is surprising while remaining true to its internal logic, and the effect is genuinely satisfying.

Experienced without distraction, this film is a reminder of how essential the darkened theater remains to cinema. Only there can the full force of the filmmaker’s formal choices be absorbed without interruption, and the cumulative effect of their visual, sonic and temporal decisions remain intact, free from cell phones or other intrusions. Catch this delight in a theater, it is worth the extra money.