“Uncut Gems” builds a genre-busting tale of crime and debt and chutzpah around an instantly indelible character named Howard Ratner, absolutely the last person in the world you’d want to play chicken against.
Sam Eifling
Posted inMovie Reviews
‘The Rise of Skywalker’ disappoints
The cast is fine. The effects are fine. The sense of wonder and adventure and beauty are all fine. What’s missing is any sort of payoff that suggests the keepers of these stories cared about them as anything other than an ATM.
Posted inMovie Reviews
“Dolemite Is My Name” is low-key inspirational
How did this whole story remain stuck in time for 45 years? And why does it feel so fresh anyway?
Posted inRock Candy
George Takei’s “They Called Us Enemy” exhumes Rohwer, comic book-style
In “They Called Us Enemy,” the “Star Trek” actor’s new graphic novel memoir from Top Shelf, Takei tells the story of his family being removed from their homes in 1942 and sent by train to an internment camp — a euphemism, Takei notes archly, for imprisonment — in southeast Arkansas.
Posted inTV Review
HBO’s “Chernobyl” asks: What’s the price of a lie?
In laying the disaster at the feet, primarily, of liars and tinpot dictators, “Chernobyl” creator Craig Mazin here has spun a deft political drama for an era where the phrase “Russian election interference” has rocked Europe and the United States.
Posted inEntertainment
“Booksmart” flips the teen romp formula
The FOMO in a time of smartphones must be crippling: here you are plowing through AP Calc while elsewhere dudes are at Nick’s karate-chopping stacks of pizza boxes and still scoring full rides to Stanford.
Posted inEntertainment
Penny Lane’s “Hail Satan?” is a Rapert-y highlights reel of hypocrisy
The new documentary “Hail Satan?”, directed by Penny Lane, falls somewhere between a ridealong with a genuinely oddball subculture and a valentine to the emerging religion of satanists.
Posted inRock Candy
‘True Detective’ season 3 finale recap: Wins for Mahershala Ali, Northwest Arkansas
Let’s appreciate for a moment what it means to a show like “True Detective” that you can stream TV now. Not simply to tape it, but watch it on devices as small as the pulpy paperback that it has, for many people, replaced. The ability to revisit it endlessly, to fast-forward and rewind and rewatch as easily as Wayne Hays’ memory skates through time. The third season of Nic Pizzolatto’s serial crime drama — destined to be remembered alongside its astonishing, fulgent first season, rather than the boggy, overcomplicated Season 2 — was a television story that skipped boldly between three timelines spread across 35 years, while living firmly in 2019.
Posted inRock Candy
‘True Detective’ episode 7 recap: Penultimate payoff
The sight of two broad-shouldered black Cadillacs in front of Wayne Hays’ house, and of a chicken tycoon phoning him to come outside, is the cliffhanger from the next-to-last episode of “True Detective’s” third season.
Posted inRock Candy
‘True Detective’ episode 6 recap: Enter the chicken king
Things are not going well for Tom Purcell, and that’s really saying a lot. Episode 6 of this third season of “True Detective” finds him mad as hell and not taking it anymore, and marks a high mark for Scoot McNairy, who till now has played the grieving father as the embodiment of cuckolded defeat.