Director Justin Simien makes his feature film debut with the satirical drama Dear White People. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; leaving with the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent, which was certainly deserved. The movie focuses on several students’ experiences at an Ivy League college during a pseudo- race war. Dear White People…
Punk rock, at its finest, both agitates and puts a smile on your face. Danish band Iceage did that on their previous two albums, New Brigade and You’re Nothing. Both were obliterating affairs dealing with both physical and philosophical anxieties in short, aggressive, and noisy spurts, like a Black Flag for the 21st century. This,…
About two thirds of the way through this week’s Parenthood, Jabbar asks Crosby a deceptively simple question: “How old is Grandpa?” And yet, it’s a question that gets to the heart of this final season. The show is called Parenthood. Confronting the reality that your parents get old is the perfect way to bring everything…
I’m not going to lie, that “three months later” title card pretty much blew my mind the first time I watched this episode. Not because anything particularly shocking happens as a result of it, but because it's the sort of thing that Parenthood wouldn’t typically do in previous seasons. Between seasons, maybe you would see…
It was an odd feeling watching this episode of Penny Dreadful. Up until this point every moment and scene was done to build to the conclusion of the last episode, which saw the assembling of the "monster hunting" team. There was a clear trajectory of every storyline that built upon each other until the series was…
This week, Olivia Pope devotes her energy to proving the innocence of a man who stands accused of attempting to assassinate President Cooper, who is the Scandal universe’s analogue to Ronald Reagan. The notion of innocence is an elusive one in Olivia Pope’s Washington, and so it’s fitting that the case of the week here…
With the second half of its Halloween two-parter, American Horror Story: Freak Show continues its exploration of its characters backstories, before arriving at a conclusion that seems to signal, at last, the “real” beginning of this season. The major flashbacks this episode focus on Elsa and on Twisty the Clown. While these feel serve to…
“Do you understand what an accident is?” Technically speaking, 'The Separation of Crows' is better than last week’s “Greensleeves.” There is one genuinely great, tense dramatic centerpiece, and many of the scenes surrounding that are also good, creating mood, developing character—in other words, doing a lot of the work that, on occasion, Sons can forget…
Television is a tricky medium, especially in its current form. A series evolves over time, takes detours, scenic routes, tantalizing tangents, flights of fancy with supporting characters that, for even a moment, hold more interest and more promise than the stars of the show. Things change in a television series. But in the era of…
As we get started this week, I’d like to offer Verizon’s summary of this episode: “SAMCRO makes an unlikely partnership in order to undermine a powerful club enemy.” I am not inspired with confidence. And sure enough, “Greensleeves” suffers from the same issues as earlier episodes this season, the same issues that have plagued the…
