The Imitation Game is well acted, well directed and interesting. It tells the fascinating story of Alan Turing, brilliant code breaker autistic, as he cracks the Nazis unbreakable code and ends (SPOILER ALERT) with his suicide. It’s also kind of boring. When I watched J.Edgar a few years and noticed how by the numbers and […]
How great has The Mindy Project been this season? Seriously. It’s settled down into the actuality of the Mindy + Danny relationship with aplomb. They’ve even managed to eke out a bit of a workplace comedy vibe – using the considerable talents of Adam Pally (as Peter) to amp up everyone else from dragging supporting […]
This Thanksgiving, I decided to watch all 9 Thanksgiving episodes of Friends in order to finally determine: “Why does Ross, the largest of the Friends, not simply eat the others [for Thanksgiving]?”* Here are the lessons I learned: – The first instalment, The One Where Underdog Gets Away, features one of those “early sitcom family […]
You already know the biggest problem with the newest installment of the Hunger Games, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. It’s right there in that ridiculously long title. They took the last movie of the Hunger Games saga, and split it in half. This means that the finished film is half the final story, half […]
I had a disappointing movie weekend. On the surface, Big Hero 6 is the perfect movie for me. It’s a cartoon! It’s action packed! It features adorable, beautiful animation! And it’s genial enough. Funny enough. Engrossing enough. But at the end I was left with the distinct impression that I’d just sat through a decent […]
There are moments of Interstellar that are outstanding. It is visually stunning. It has a breathtaking vision of space, grounded by actual astrophysics (theoretically, sort of), which gets writ large across a gritty film landscape that manages to evoke classic science fiction movies while also featuring stunning graphics. And the simplified plot – man goes […]
Part Taxi Driver, Part American Psycho, entirely a biting satire of the modern entertainment complex. Nightcrawler may sound like an X-Men spin off but it’s actually a fascinating spin down the rabbit hole of our modern news landscape, and an interesting twist on the antihero genre. I don’t want to spoil the journey I […]
In a lot of ways, Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a creatively masturbatory exercise in pretension. It may also be brilliant. Just look at that damn title! Uselessly subtitled, with inexplicable punctuation. It begs you to take it seriously, while creating just enough of a wink to pretend its better than […]