People who make movies usually love watching them too, and sometimes I'll stumble upon a movie that is more of a homage to another movie than it is one of its own. Aesthetically imitating another story isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the inevitability of such a movie is that it's going to live in the shadow of the one that inspired it. Take Brian Kirk's Dead of Winter, for example. It's like he bred Fargo and No Country For Old Men together, not for the sake of creating so

One of the most impressive things about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is how it manages to be at once sparse and overwhelming, restrained and ferocious. The wind-swept California desert is sparse in the sense that it is barren, and barren in the sense that it serves as a meaningful, blank-facedly hostile backdrop to what this film really cares about: its complex, monumentally acted characters. These characters are restrained in that they don't wield visual gimmic

I feel torn about Flight Risk and the discourse surrounding it in some ways, because I know that many of the reviewers panning it are the type to criticize the occasionally antisemitic Mel Gibson in the morning before going to a Free Palestine rally that very same night. Nevertheless, I'm not here to lecture you on racism or Middle Eastern geopolitics, and however the cookie of international affairs may crumble, the unfortunate constant is that Flight Risk is just not very g

There's a popular theory surrounding Denis Villeneuve's Enemy, a theory that the entire movie takes place in the head of its main character, the mild-mannered Adam Bell. I think this theory epitomizes everything I don't like about the film. Watching it sometimes feels like licking the mold off the back of the refrigerator in the hopes of hallucinating something fantastic, and it eventually hits its stride as a well-acted, suspenseful cinematic experience that sometimes forge

A Still Small Voice is primarily an emotional footnote to Task season one, and I wouldn't have it any other way. This is a finale that reminds you of the humanity in all the characters you've spent the last several hours rooting for or against, and it takes the best things about the show and makes them even better. It slows down enough to let you process the emotional turmoil of everything that happened, and it exists to both affirm and challenge everything this show has taug

Wrongdoing and rightdoing, the sixth episode of Task, is a quietly devastating epilogue to episode five. It is the climactic moment of tragedy this entire show has been leading to, the hardest episode to stomach so far in this whole season. Not everybody survives. Secondary motives and loyalties are uncovered, tainting allegiances and even betrayals. And if tragedy weren't already enough, bureaucracy is also slowly overpowering any hopes that even the more upstanding characte

Writing is complicated and confusing, more so for some than it is for others, but especially when you're forced to check when you last published a blog post to get your inner clock back. In case you don't know, I have epilepsy, and just recently ended up going for yet another useless ER visit, because if one of you freaks out and calls 911 when I have a seizure, I'm required to go to the hospital and more often than not stay there until an ungodly hour of the morning. Luckily

Task is a show that both rewards you for being a people person and punishes you for assuming it was action-packed. No matter the assumptions you'll walk into this show with, what remains undeniable about it is the depth and complexity of its characters. This is a very well-written, well-acted drama. It is also a patient drama, and it avoids feeling contrived, even if it could sometimes afford to. Four episodes in, and it's obvious something big and probably tragic is coming;

Nobody's Stronger Than Forgiveness is the first episode of this show that really tests the limits of what its construction can bear. The foundation stands strong more than it crumbles. Everything that was already great about Task remains just as good, and this show is shaping up to be a truly top-tier drama with an abundance of powerful performances, despite some minor cracks that appear in the facade. Make no mistake, this is top-of-the-line episodic television. Even if epis

As is fairly standard for a TV show's sophomore episode, Family Statements has its mind set on creating new problems for our characters and making the ones that were already there worse. For as awful a man as he can be, Robbie was only trying to do the right thing when the boy his gang had just orphaned shyly walked into the trap house living room. However, the police don't acknowledge subtleties when it comes to missing persons cases, especially those involving children. Tas

There is a tragedy that lingers in the air around Brad Ingelsby's Task. It is a tragedy punctuated by Robbie Prendergrast's insistence on a life of crime, both in spite of and because of his need to care for children left to him by a life gone sideways. It is a tragedy reinforced by FBI agent Tom Brandis's heavy drinking to drown the sorrow of his wife's death. It is a tragedy that likewise shines via shockingly good cinematography that's dark enough to be moody, but not so d

Some will call this movie anti-cop. Some will call it morally bankrupt. Others will call it crass, depraved, and even filthy. The funny thing is, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri can be all of these things on a whim. And yet, the thing about it that amazes me most is how it reins in all its disparate and offensive parts by the time the credits roll, becoming an unexpectedly moving and even beautiful picture with a lot more on its mind than Mildred Hayes's impressive

Movies are a lot of fun, and some of the most fun I've had with them is the occasional treat of seeing two radically different ingredients getting mixed to create something entirely new. Such is the case with Dan Trachtenberg's Prey, a radical and exciting experiment that mixes the high-concept science fiction of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator with a relatively primitive Colonial America. I watched the trailer for this movie an ungodly number of times before it was released