Reviews

"Imogen" is a spy with Britain's MI6, with close contacts in the CIA (Josh Charles) and in French Intelligence (Dali Bensallah), trying to confirm whether her "target" (played quite compellingly by Lebanese-American actress Yumna Marwan) is a high-level ISIS terrorist commander on a deadly covert mission, or is a deeply troubled and concerned parent just trying desperately to keep her young daughter safe. As is so often the case, Ms. Moss is almost freakishly good as the mysterious lead character. And James Purefoy leads an international supporting cast of equally fascinating background/flashback characters. If you have any doubts about Ms. Moss' portrayal of an action heroine, watch her take on a couple of armed thugs on motorcycles and beat them both to death with a nasty iron pipe. THWAPP!

On the heels of giving an Oscar nominated performance in Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon," Lily Gladstone is once again a force to be reckoned with in this TV miniseries. Her character of Cam Bentland has followed in her adoptive father's footsteps, entering into law enforcement in the Victoria, B. C., area. It's based upon a book written by the character in the show, Rebecca Godfrey, who died of cancer in 2022, but not before choosing Riley Keough to play her in this. Vritika Gupta portrays the unfortunate victim in the story, Reena Virk, and Chloe Guidry plays Josephine "Jo" Bell, the evil ringleader who imagines herself a young female John Gotti (THE guy to be, in her twisted mind). We know all this (as did Cam and Rebecca IRL) by the conclusion of the second episode (of 8), so I reserve the right to revise my rating and/or re-review this series later in its limited run. But I am anxious to see where the producers and the director take it from here. For now, rated 8 of 10.

Imagine the most contrived, convoluted story re: a mousy author of Bond-like spy novels (played by a plumped Bryce Dallas Howard) who finds out her outlandish books are closer to real-crime documentaries than she could've imagined, and her "male-model" hero), Agent Argylle (played by ex-Superdude Henry Cavill) and the agent's right-hand man, Wyatt (portrayed by the ex-professional wrestling strongman John Cena) far less fictional than she believed them to be. Then make a movie that's 3/4 hour too long, and with far too many corny stunts and elaborate effects. Can the resulting film be at all watchable? Yes, and two words are the one & only reason: SAM ROCKWELL. Not since "Mr. Right" has Rockwell been this combination of charming leading man and lethal killing machine (and as always, deft dancer). By taking his roles seriously only when he must & injecting silliness whenever possible, he absolutely owns another movie that fails on almost every other level humanly conceivable. He has firmly and undeniably entered my list of top-3 working actors., for both comedy & drama.

First, I'll begin with my biases: I HATED HATED HATED "Big Bang Theory," which I thought was deeply insulting to the so-called "smart people" (led by Johnny Galecki's "Leonard"), essentially equally insulting to the "hot chick," Penny (as played by Kaley Cuoco) and, all his awards aside, insulting to the obviously (kinda prototypically) gay actor, Jim Parsons, who enthusiastically portrays the King of the Geniuses, Sheldon. As I have with other initially promising yet ultimately disappointing long-running series like "Lost" & "The Walking Dead," I soon stopped watching the utterly pointless and needlessly repetitive "nerds are funny" & "blondes are dumb" show. Then, soon after that series skidded to a halt, a new limited streaming series debuted, starring Cuoco and titled, "The Flight Attendant." Much to my astonishment, I liked that a lot (the first season better than the second, but nonetheless) and now a limited series on the NBC Peacock streaming TV network, adds to Cuoco's comedic résumé: "Based on a True Story" costarring Chris Messina as her aging midlife-crisis ex-tennis-pro husband (am I imagining that Kaley Cuoco was married to a professional tennis player IRL?!). She's quite good in this one, too, as a true-crime obsessed pregnant real-estate agent/housewife, whose handsome plumber may or may not be a genuine, stab'em 37 times & lop off their heads serial killer! Ah the era of social media/podcasts! So I rate this, Ms. Cuoco's latest over-the-top satirical effort, and in spite of its often ludicrous, Swiss-cheese plot, 7/10 stars (rounding up).

While this turns out to be at least a hour hour too long (and, rather oddly, a bit too frightening for its target child audience), the two leads are incomparably good. Emma Stone as the super-sweet Estella AND the shockingly coiffed, not-even-slightly-sweet Cruella De Ville; and Emma Thompson as the utterly irredeemably evil (even after we learn of the twist ending) Baronness. In the deep supporting cast, actors normally stuck being cast as the classic British villain (e.g. Mark Strong) are, as it happens, actually not one. The dogs even have uniquely quirky personalities. As the live-action fare of Disney goes, this allows the 2 Emmas to spread their considerable acting wings and fly over our heads-and poop on us! What a crazy, wacky mixed-up world we live in. I grant this a strong 7/10 star rating, despite the absence of much-needed film editing. And as the Oscar attested to, the costumes are sublime!

True Detective is an anthology series in which each 8-episode season features a new pair of law enforcement people investigating (a) new and ever grislier murder(s). The show, created by Nic Pizzolatto, debuted a decade ago in 2014, with real-life Texas friends Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey playing a couple of mismatched partners who are investigating a mysterious and deeply disturbing set of crimes. Five years after the third season was shown in January 2019 we're finally treated to Season 4, with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as yet another mismatched set of reluctant police ex-partners, and also featuring the long-underappreciated fine actor John Hawkes, as well as English actor Christopher Eccleston and Irish actress Fiona Shaw. This crime takes place in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle, where the entire complement of researchers in a station go missing and are eventually found out frozen solid in the huge layer of ice (at least up to their heads, faces still caught frozen in terror). Aspects of the case, including a human tongue cut from a victim (or perhaps even an unknown perpetrator), harken back to the case of murder of an Indigenous woman years before, worked on by our two unlikely protagonists. This new season definitely looks like the best since the first; I rate it 9/10 so far, with my usual caveat about adjusting it as we progress to the end.

As with all ten episodes this season, this was written by the great series creator Noah Hawley. And everyone came to play for this one: Jon Hamm delivers two excellent monologues; Joe Keery realistically communicates abject terror; Jennifer Jason Leigh manages to show she does feel some real emotion for her daughter in law; Sam Spruell continues totally weirding us out; and finally, Lamorne Morris makes it clear that our heroine Dot will, indeed, be rescued ALIVE! With one more installment left to go, we should all buckle up, buttercup, for the Federal & State Law Enforcement siege of the Tillman ranch!!

Photojournalist Amanda Mustard and filmmaker Rachel Beth Anderson have made a brutal documentary about Amanda's grandfather Bill Flickinger, a self-admitted serial pedophile who abused the female members of his own family and patients and their family members within and related to his chiropractic practice for many years. It took until the early '90s for Flickinger to be held legally accountable for any of his crimes, but even then he served a relatively abbreviated prison sentence (and got released early for his "good behavior"!) The links that Amanda makes to the Christian religiosity of generations of her family (until she relinquished that blind faith) are interesting, with many interview subjects emphasizing that God will forgive even the most prolonged and heinous sins imaginable and then welcome His true believers with open arms into Heaven (playing the "Get Outta Hell Free" card). Flickinger's claims that most underaged girls he victimized "enjoyed" being in his company and his inappropriate touching as much as he did-made me physically ill. Here's what I've never been able to fathom about pedophilia: how can it be sexually stimulating or fulfilling to cause someone to be abused who is sexually undeveloped and/or inexperienced and utterly incapable of understanding what's happening to them (more accurately, being perpetrated upon them)? It seems, not just terrifyingly insensitive, but literally illogical and totally nonsensical. So it's got nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with abuse of power and adult authority. In other words, it's the unmitigated torture of children, and the worst crime I could imagine. Although I don't disagree with some reviewers saying this film is self-indulgent, it's interesting how many believe that the family/victims had the right to hide their trauma from each other and the rest of the world, help the abuser cover up serious crimes and ultimately help him avoid both legal and personal accountability for years. In other words, people's so-called "rights to their privacy" trumps society's rights to know of the threats to their own lives and safety. Rate 8/10.

The only question in this bizarre documentary is whether irresponsible children who packed the grounds of "Action Park" helped Gene Mulvihill, the irresponsible business jerk who owned and ran the place, actually design and build all the ridiculous, tinker-toy like rides at this deathtrap of a so-called "Amusement Park." People, some well known for their talents & future endeavors (Chris Gethard, Alison Becker, Johnny Knoxville) and some quite average New Jersey teenagers, are interviewed to describe how they managed to survive this deadly right of passage all the way into adulthood. The conclusion that this tale reaches, as with so many dozens/hundreds of other documentaries, is that money (profits, minimum-wage jobs, county tax revenue, etc., and not the safety and wellbeing of children) is all that matters in the U. S. Unless the healthy and athletic teenaged boy who is thrown from a ride into a large, adjacent bed of jagged rocks and killed just happens to be your son. Sorry?!?

This four-part miniseries adaptation of Anthony Doerr's beloved novel of the same name benefits from performances which aren't merely good. They are revelatory. The authenticity lent by firsttime actress Ara Mia Loberti, who's blind, playing the blind French heroine Marie-Laure, cannot be overstated. And open-faced young actor Louis Hoffman brilliantly portrays the German soldier who is her most-dedicated radio listener, Werner. The two share a tender kiss near the of episode 4/4 that's fantastic. Old pros Mark Ruffalo plays her dad, a Paris museum curator, & a professorial Hugh Laurie, her uncle, in flashbacks. And finally, we must have a really villainous Nazi, and there's none finer than the Berlin-trained Lars Eidinger as Reinhold von Rumpel, who's so monumentally evil that he's not even loyal to his own genocidal regime. He's charged with stealing all precious gems at war's end for the Reich, but he hears of a diamond that legendarily promises eternal life to its owner and must locate and jealously possess it for himself. (Of course, if homicidal sociopaths thought logically, the fact he himself murders its previous owner might give him pause about its supernatural powers!) Anyway, this show earns a rating of a strong 8/10 stars from me. Watch it!

This documentary is about four Latina friends accused of gang raping two little girls in Texas in the late 1990s. Almost immediately it is crystal clear why they were so quickly accused and then convicted of a heinous crime that NEVER EVEN HAPPENED: a statement was made that "this is what gay people do" That's seriously entrenched homophobia! Everybody conscious for the past 50 years knows that the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by the vast majority of the population who are, in fact, heterosexuals. These four women were examined, including the administration of lie detector tests (inadmissible in court, of course, but indicating no deviant sex) and determined to be only the most minimal of "threats," and ultimately a Texas Appeals Court completely exonerated them of all those crimes. Before I got too overjoyed by the happy ending to their yearslong ordeals with "criminal justice," I would advise viewers to pay attention to their original judge deciding regarding their new trial. When the administrator of the lie detector tests states under oath that no evidence of "deviant sexual" behavior had been indicated, you see the ignorant old coot practically do a spit take up on the bench, ask "... meaning...?" and the witness patiently explain, "Anything illegal." How did I interpret that reaction and his question? I think he considered anything that any gay people or lesbian would ever do by its very definition to be "deviant," because it "deviates" from what Judge Queer-Hating Dummy would do himself. Well, that gets one extra star from me, rating a 9/10.

Season 1 of this NBC/Peacock series was based on the incredible true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch (played by Joshua Jackson), who was an extremely highly touted and richly compensated neurosurgeon in the state of Texas. He started out in Tennessee as a young stem-cell researcher looking at procedures for performing minimally invasive spinal surgeries for persons with chronic back and neck pain. But quickly learning that such researchers didn't get paid handsomely enough to support an ultra-luxurious (enough) lifestyle, he had decided to become a practicing neurosurgeon. Emphasize practicing, since as a fellow neurosurgeon there at Baylor Memorial Hospital, memorably played by Christian Slater, would eventually say about him, he was the most incompetent "butcher" of a surgeon that he had ever seen weild a scalpel. After turning his own BFF into a quadriplegic (!), he was finally tried and convicted for knowingly, maliciously maiming and killing at least a dozen patients in his career. The verdict: life in prison without parole.

Which brings us to Season 2. Now if you're like me, you'd naturally wonder how such a story lends itself to a second set of episodes. Because a highly touted stem-cell researcher from Italy, played by Edgar Ramirez, is receiving glowing accolades for 3D-printing biosynthetic body parts and somehow using live stem cells to make these Legos into living tissue. Of course, giving that process the critical consideration it richly deserved (by a transplant doctor played this time by actor Luke Kirby) reveals Ramirez' character to have largely invented credentials and an actual patient failure rate (like Duntsch) of essentially 100%. And here we go again!

We do learn a few interesting things about the mysterious case of the wrong-way driver on a freeway in upstate New York in July 2009 who killed a total of eight people, including herself. Not that we learn everything (nor anything really definitively) that we might want to know, but that's life. What I find even more fascinating is the reactions of many of the reviewers here. They seem really angry and judgmental about Aunt Diane, as if they believe unequivocally she began the drive that morning intending to kill herself and utterly decimate all of the families. Or that, if the toxicology tests and retests are to be believed, that Aunt Diane had been secretly an addict and closet alcoholic for a significant time, and was knowingly endangering everyone. (And that Diane's extended family is in nearly total denial over her culpability.) If you ask me after viewing this documentary, I'd say it's a lot more complicated then it first appears, and deserves more contemplation and consideration then it seemed to get at the time. That said, the absolutely horrific results speak for themselves. I give this 7/10, losing a star for being too long.

For my money, two detectives on television have been enduringly iconic and the best ever: One is Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo, and the other is Tony Shalhoub as Mr. Monk. Nearly 14 years after its original 8-year-long run, we have been given a neat gift of the return of Monk to work a final case (two homicides, actually). It's not the best installment of the series (a bit sentimental for that), but it's not bad and will probably largely satisfy the hardcore audience awaiting a reprise. Little touches, like an early shoutout to Monk's first assistant, Sharona (played by Bitty Schram, who quit the series midway through Season 3), and a lovely song, Human Kindness, provided by the great Randy Newman (who had composed Monk's original theme, "It's a Jungle Out There")

All actors portraying major characters return, including Hector Elizondo as Monk's beleagured therapist; Melora Hardin as his beloved deceased wife, Trudy; Traylor Howard as his long-time assistant, Natalie; Jason Gray-Stanford as Randy (since moved to run a small-town NJ PD); and of course, Ted Levine as Leland Stotllemeyer (also retired from the SFPD to run private security). The guest villain this time, played by Brit James Purefoy, is clearly supposed to be a version of Jeff Bezos (multibillionaire e-commerce inventor with his civilian space program, a la Blue Origin). A bit of humor: when a star-struck Randy hears Purefoy's character has "bought The Atlantic," it must be explained that it's a magazine (Bezos famously owns The Washington Post), and not the ocean the character's wife goes to swim in. My rating for this reunion is 8/10, but back in the day, the best original episodes were 9/10.

This episode, the fifth of seven in the miniseries, is both written and directed by the wonderful Brit Marling, also its co-star & co-creator. Many unexpected things occur as the Darby character (Emma Corrin) begins to (haltingly) recover from the head trauma of her vehicular accident out on the sheer ice. As her own thoughts get darker and darker, they are only exacerbated by the statement by Clive Owen character, Andy, "Why is it that wherever you go, death follows?" This is a statement with which she finds it impossible to argue when her close friend Sian succumbs to an infection brought on by her emergency field tracheotomy, and then she (Darby) herself is attacked by the disguised mystery murderer. As this installment comes to a shocking conclusion, it's looking increasingly dour for "Gen Z Sherlock Holmes." I rounded this rating up to 9 from 8.5!

I love the little Corn Brothers touches that Noah Hawley incorporates into his "Fargo" TV series. For example, every episode proclaims it a "true story," with only the names changed, but all the events having literally happened in 2019, just as "Fargo" the original movie once did back in the 1990s. Of course, just like then, that's all utter nonsense. In this third episode of the fifth season, a card is displayed saying "500 years ago," and we soon learn that "Ole Mench," the intimidating hitman played by Sam Spruell, has more than an unattractive haircut in common with a character in another Coen masterpiece, "No Country for Old Men." Serious evil. Namely, in 16th century Wales, he was a "sin-eater" (yep, that was a real thing back then). His terrifying Halloween costume is his normal outfit, no mask, and his typical facial expression. Crazy. Best installment so far; I rate it a strong 9 of 10.