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 …
Film: Narvik
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 …
Film: Operation Mincemeat
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. …
Novel: Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi
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 …
Film: Benedetta
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 …
TV: The Great (Seasons 1-2)
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 …
TV: Glória (Season 1)
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, …
Film: All the President’s Men
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 …
Film: Judas and the Black Messiah
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. …
TV: Generation Kill
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 …
Film: Kill the Messenger
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 …
Film: The Forgotten Battle
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 …
TV: The Trial of Christine Keeler
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 …
Film: The Courier
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 …
Film: Wasp Network
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 …
TV: The Defeated (Season 1)
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 …