Chuck Bowen

It took The Office a while to lose its teeth and become a perpetual meme and cuddle-fest, while Space Force goes soft within just a few episodes before limping to an embarrassingly inspirational family reunion finale.

The limited series is a carnival of horrors weighed down by moralizing, hysteria, and cross-associations.

As themes go, “life goes on” would surely rank as one of the least profound, but Tales from the Loop continues to offer details that resonate.

Given the wildness of the story, The Outsider sometimes feels ludicrously tony, but it’s undeniably gripping—a beach read rendered by real artists. The series is so clever that it might take you a while to realize that it’s essentially Dracula. ... Or, perhaps even more fitting, The Outsider suggests a merging of Kolchak with Price’s The Night Of.

After a long and promising wind-up, with characteristically gorgeous Milch dialogue, the movie reveals itself to be a shocking non-event that hews closely to the formula of a “very special episode” of a venerable series. There’s a wedding, there’s a funeral, and there’s a murder that’s telegraphed far advance, which effectively drains it of the impact of the show’s most upsetting and challenging acts of violence.

Swanberg is a poet not only of conversation, but of gestures; for all the talk in this season, it’s the physical moments, encapsulations of currents which words are inadequate to express, that truly haunt, illuminating the challenge and potential futility of communion.

If Fosse/Verdon lacks the obsessiveness and sensual fanaticism of Fosse and Verdon’s art, though, it nevertheless gives ample space for Rockwell and Williams to inhabit their characters.

Bahrani renders reading passive without any sense of irony, reducing books to a bland MacGuffin. Unsurprisingly, Bahrani fashions a classic into a futuristic chase film with endless torrents of exposition, which represents every culturally bastardizing tendency it pretends to decry.

The series is a wicked, decadent comedy about our impending apocalypse, its relativism suggesting a cheeky come-on as well as a parting attempt at some sort of clarity.

Goodman and Metcalf slip Dan and Jackie back on like second skins; Barr isn't nearly as subtle as her co-stars, but she still has her verbal fastball, and delivers consistently solid punchlines with merciless precision. Gilbert, one of the original show's most striking presences, has seasoned Darlene's awkwardness to reflect the character's ongoing sense of misplacement and newfound feelings of failure. But the biggest surprise is Goranson, whose expressions of misery are among this new season's most haunting and nuanced flourishes.

Robbin' Season is cloaked in a heavy yet strangely exhilarating veil of dread. ... Yet there are moments of wonder within the brutally and beautifully pragmatic Robbin' Season.

Here and Now is so preoccupied with checking off representative boxes that it forgets to whip up actual drama. There's little plot, no aesthetic distinctiveness, and no sense of casualness or specificity to the series.

There's little of the numbing, script-heavy exposition in Mosaic that lards most TV shows, allowing the actors to fashion strikingly specific and stylish performances, defining characters by their habits and environments rather than by the mandates of signifying dialogue. Soderbergh provides resonant snapshots of the characters, boiling decades of history into glances and absurdist asides.

In terms of scale and narrative ingenuity, Wormwood is as staggering as any Morris film--pure heroin for the conspiracy buffs who binged on Netflix's Making of a Murderer--though one wishes that the filmmaker was less fancy.

The series is awash in bursts of expressionist color, on-screen text, the breaking of the fourth wall, and riffs that allow Lee to revel in the actors' chemistry and in the intuitive power of his own imagination, leading to tones that daringly crash into one another.

Altogether, the second season of The Girlfriend Experience is knottier and more surprising, though somewhat less satisfying, than the first. But this is the sort of experimentation and inconsistency that push television beyond the dictates of delivering narrative by the yard.

Mindhunter is addictive and resonant for its mining of two evocative forms of social contrast. The terrific cast informs Fincher and creator Joe Penhall's sociological schematic with a human element that's unusual for a crime procedural, and the series has a piercing sense of how macro influences micro culture.

This narrative passiveness scans less as psychosexual critique than as a case of writers getting lost in a thicket of obligatory happenstance.

There's something remote and stiflingly preordained about the series, which suggests Playhouse 90 cocooned in a derivative formal polish that stripes it of grit and uncertainty.

Gypsy is an elaborately structured drama that's too derivatively clever by at least half; throughout, its intricately arranged causes and effects grow stiflingly busy and thematic, resembling a behavioral proof that Rubin seems determined to confirm.

The Wizard of Lies doesn't refute that armchair outrage, which probably isn't possible or desirable anyway, but it's so pointedly lacking in empathetic imagination that one wonders why Levinson made the film, which bears less of a resemblance to art than a book report.

This is another prestigious series that's competently written and directed, dutifully performed, and politically astute, yet mired in numbing earnestness that dampens the most important element of all art: figurative revelation.

Better Call Saul grows more ironic and tragic with each subsequent episode.

Five came Back s gripped by a fascinating irony: It’s a propagandistic examination of propaganda. The book contrasts the macro of the U.S.‘s efforts to win WWII with the micro of each filmmaker’s military experience, offering surgically precise, engagingly empathetic portraits of soldiers as well as significant artists. The series loses much of the book’s micro texture by necessity of form.

Bette and Joan is at its canniest when contrasting Bette and Joan's respective vanities, understanding that Bette's has aged better than Joan's, and that Joan was misguidedly devising, in Baby Jane, the rules that would enable her own upstaging.

What Billions offers is vicarious revelry in stylish power, exuding a trashy, toxic purity.

Santa Clarita Diet is a charmingly goofy lark, revealing itself to be a comedy of remarriage hidden in zombie's clothing.

This Training Day is steeped in clichés so embarrassingly retrograde that it suggests John McTiernan's Last Action Hero played with a straight face.