TV: The Great (Season 3)
Hulu’s superb “anti-historical” comedy The Great continues with another stellar arc in its third season. Gleefully skewering the historical record, it involves the contentious political strivings of Catherine the Great …
Hulu’s superb “anti-historical” comedy The Great continues with another stellar arc in its third season. Gleefully skewering the historical record, it involves the contentious political strivings of Catherine the Great …
While my interest World War II has cooled in recent years, I’m still intrigued by the era, especially when the topic is approached from an unusual angle. Narvik (2022) scratches …
Back during the Spy 100 Project I rather enjoyed the staid spy film The Man Who Never Was, which dramatizes one of military history’s most elaborate and successful deception operations. …
When it comes to “big idea” specfic, Hannu Rajaniemi is one of the best in the business. In his fourth novel Summerland (2018), he enters the burgeoning new subgenre of …
Paul Verhoeven is nothing if not a provocateur, and Benedetta (2021) is the latest example, an extravagant, explicit tale of lesbian romance set in a 17th-century convent. Virginie Efira makes a …
Hulu’s astonishingly good dark comedy The Great is about (er, sort of) the rise of Catherine the Great and her attempts to fix Russia. Spoiler alert: she failed. (This gag …
Normally, I would say reaching the end of a TV season only to have a “what was the point?” reaction would be a bad thing. The devious trick of Glória, …
The third film in Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy,” All the President’s Men (1976), may be the best of them. This dramatization of the Watergate scandal stars Robert Redford as …
The fact that American film and television is just now starting to chisel away at America’s racist history is damning; no wonder the pace of racial justice is so glacial. …
Given David Simon is one of TV’s most important auteurs, not to mention a personal favorite, it has long pestered the completist in me that I haven’t witnessed his entire …
The fact that I’m still pondering the historical veracity of Kill the Messenger (2014) is a good sign that it has successfully made its point as a post-truth era conspiracy …
Movie based on actual events can be tricky beasts to wrangle, but The Forgotten Battle (2020) is a solid effort, perhaps because it chronicles a more obscure event of World …
Before diving into this miniseries, I had never heard of the Profumo Affair, an early-sixties British political scandal involving a conservative minister of parliament and a teenaged model. The Trial …
Based on true events, The Courier (2020) isn’t an overwhelmingly successful dramatization of history, but it’s less prone to biopic mediocrity than other tales of its stripe. Set during the …
If interesting stories don’t necessarily make for good films, a case in point might be Wasp Network (2019), which takes as its subject the plight of Cuba shortly after the …
I had rather a middling reaction to Netflix’s The Defeated, an attractive international production that lands somewhere between high prestige drama and middle-of-the-road procedural. Set in Berlin in the aftermath …