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"Fantastic" is a charming contemporary fable, a showcase for the varied talents of the late Tom Wilkinson in high-curmudgeon mode, leprechaunish Andrew Scott and goddessy Jessica Brown Findlay (fka Lady Sibyl Crawley of "Downton"). The script and the cinematography seem just about perfect if you can stand a bit of whimsey from time to time--e.g. Our heroine, Bella (Findlay), is a foundling who's rescued by a flock of ducks and "one of those elderly lunatics" who go swimming in the lake in London's Hyde Park. Mad props to whoever designed the walled garden that's at the heart of it all, also to whoever styled young Bella's perfectly symmetrical plate of vegetables and all the other OCD signifiers that fill her little cottage.

This film's not recommended for the cynical or the literal-minded; I can't believe some reviewers slagged it because it "glamorizes mental illness" or some such. Apart from her insistence on perfect order and symmetry, lovely Bella's just an extreme introvert, even an agoraphobe, "terrified by the unpredictability of nature," but she gets by with a little (okay, more than a little) help from her friends and realizes her life's ambition, and is there anything so wrong with that?

We saw this one a few years ago and loved it, but couldn't remember the title when we felt like seeing it again. Luckily it turned up eventually on the slideshow of stuff that like-minded customers watched, including "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain," which is also recommended (even though it kind of sentimentalizes mental illness, IMHO). Thanks, Amazon algo!

In 2008, Claire Foy was only a year or so older (and maybe an inch or two taller) than the title character, and she and Matthew Macfadyen, as Arthur Clennam, are genuinely appealing as the only two normies at the center of this Dickensian maelstrom of weirdos and grotesques, played by just about every actor you've ever seen in a British cop show or costume drama. Tom Courtenay does the star turn as celebrity debtor William Dorritt, with Judy Parfitt not far behind as the irascible Mrs Clennam; only shouty Eddie Marsan as Mr Panks and Andy Serkis as the villainous Rigaud go just a little bit farther over the top* than seems absolutely required.

Anyone who's ever tried to read the novel--I tend to get bogged down in the first chapter where Rigaud's awaiting the guillotine and Clennam's stuck in quarantine with the Meagles family in Marseilles--will appreciate what a fabulous job master adapter Andrew Davies has done in ironing out Dickens's complicated plot and tamping down the absurdities and tedious conventions of serialized 19th-century fiction. (OTOH he doesn't have to work too hard to point out the parallels between Mr. Merdle's all-destroying Ponzi scheme and the financial scandals of the oughties, Bernie Madoff and all that.) My only criticism is that we never get to see Mr. Gowan's finished painting of Tom Courtenay posing as a Roman emperor. Highly recommended!

*Not to mention Amanda Redman showing off her "exceedingly well developed lungs" as The Bosom, the trophy wife of sketchy financier Mr. Merdle.

Scrapper is a charming, eventually quite involving film about a precocious 12-year-old who's been living by her wits since her mother's death, at least until she's unwillingly reunited with her childlike absentee dad. Some of the opening scenes may seem like your basic indie-film filler--Georgie and her friend Ali goofing around on the grounds of the tidy, brightly painted council estate where they live (looks like the color scheme was suggested by Wes Anderson, btw)--but her deep-fake phone call that convinces "the Social" that she's being looked after by her imaginary uncle is pure comedy gold and totally won me over.

In any case, the pace picks up right away as soon as Dad 's back in the picture. The dialogue's sharp and funny; they both seem to be on the same level as far as emotional maturity goes, and they both have a gift for the same kind of lippy banter. Once in a while the camera cuts away to a chorus of neighborhood kids who comment on what's going on, mostly disapprovingly. The outcome of the father-daughter reunion, though predictable, is still quite moving without being sentimental. Big props to w/d Charlotte Regan--I hope she pitched this one as Paper Moon meets the Florida Project--and to the set dressers or whoever threw together the ceiling-scraping monument that Georgie erects in her mother's bedroom. Highly recommended!

Oldies may miss the star wattage and lush production values of the Merchant Ivory film (not to mention Helena BC's towering curly coif), but this BBC reboot is just about perfectly cast, and the 4-ep series format gives screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea) lots of room to maneuver. Forster's novel was basically a snapshot of the English caste system c. 1910, the year when, according to Virginia Woolf, "human character changed," though this observation mainly seems to apply to one of his three sets of characters--the Schlegel sisters, suffragists and anti-colonialists who host woke discussion groups and eat at health food restaurants where customers say things like "I don't know whether I have an aura or not."

The representatives of the affluent merchant class, the Wilcoxes, are sporty, judgy and thoroughly conventional, though Matthew Macfayden, as the Wilcox paterfamilias, seems far more affable and approachable than Anthony Hopkins in that role. Julia Ormond is splendid as the first Mrs Wilcox, a traditionalist who thinks that women should leave the opinions to the men and who deftly heads off an interfamily crisis by shepherding everyone in to breakfast. The scenes of her brief friendship with Margaret Schlegel (played by fabulous Hayley Atwell) are especially charming; as other reviewers have pointed out, they're the only two characters that have much in the way of chemistry between them.

Forster still relied pretty heavily on old-school plot devices--chance meetings, a stolen legacy, a cast-off mistress turning up unexpectedly, a spectacular death by misadventure--and Lonergan respects his reticence and indirectness as a narrator (you won't see anyone impulsively hooking up in a rowboat, if you get my drift). This version, in keeping with current trends, does keep reminding us that London was the capital of a multicultural empire, so that, for example, Jacky Bast, a blond Cockney in the Merchant Ivory version, is a copper-skinned Cypriot played by Rosalind Eleazar (Dora in The Personal History of David Copperfield), the poster girl for non-traditional casting.

TL;DR: Recommended! Unlike its distinguished predecessor, this version's more interested in conveying Forster's observations on class and character than in recreating the opulence of Edwardian personal grooming and domestic décor.

In S1 at least, the timeshiftimg gimmick--we get to see little snips of a single calendar day in three consecutive years, played back on shuffle--makes this intense, involving series even more so. Having to keep track of the lighting cues and whether Jeanette's still got her braces and Kate's still bleaching her hair really does concentrate the mind until normal narrative conventions are restored, in time for the big reveal in episode 8.

This well cast, tightly plotted series is recommended even to those, like us, who've long since aged out of the YA demo. Sorry we can't say the same for S2, which has a promising setup--wholesome HS STEM major morphs into punky black-hat hacker, glamorous exchange student maybe not all she appears to be?--but goes off the rails pretty quickly. Maybe we'll give it another chance one day..

"Cider House" is an enjoyably old-fashioned coming of age drama from '99, carved out of the John Irving novel by the author himself (so I guess all complaints about the adaptation should be addressed to him). The story begins in a hilltop orphanage in Maine in 1943, where Dr. Larch, the eccentric, ether-sniffing director (Michael Caine), delivers babies and looks after the older kids, including his unaccredited assistant, Homer (Toby Maguire). He also performs illegal abortions, a subject of contention between them. A chance encounter with a well traveled bomber pilot, Wally (Paul Rudd), and his pregnant girlfriend (Charlize Theron) inspires Homer to strike out on his own; he joins a crew of migrant apple pickers (including Delroy Lindo and Erykah Badu) in Wally's mother's orchard.

Irving's a master storyteller, of course, and the post-Dickensian plot developments (infidelity, incest, abortion, crippling illness, suicide) are resolved expeditiously, in time for Homer to do what he's got to do. The moral issues presented by the story aren't pressed too hard and tend to be treated in a skittish, Hollywoodish way. ("Citizen Ruth" it ain't IOW.) We keep seeing Homer dumping the contents of a sort of oversized chamberpot into an incinerator on the grounds, but there's no acknowledgement of what it is he's getting rid of.

Having said that, we were still intrigued by the zenlike contradiction between Homer's rejection of the "cider house rules" (basically any sort of arbitrary order imposed from on high) and his mentor's attempts to control his future, on the one hand, and his final decision (no spoilers here!). Toby McGuire's minimal acting style is perfect for the part; Caine's croaking New England accent, Theron's tomboyish beauty and the crisp New England landscapes all make a contribution. Expert supporting cast, down to the youngest; imdb trivia hounds will note that a teenage Paz de la Huerta, the snaky temptress on "Boardwalk Empire," turns up as a flirty girl orphan.

I never dreamed we'd be watching a show where unreliable narrator Sigourney Weaver reminisces about having it off with a swagman who's camped beside a billabong (almost as weird as her one-night stand with Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, am I right?).

Having said that, I'll immediately add that Alice is a very entertaining Aussie series, a 7-part adaptation of an Isabel Allende-type family saga with an interesting spiritual dimension. Sigourney's no Meryl "A dingo ite my byby" Streep where it comes to the elusive Aussie accent (though she does make an effort by not coming down too hard on her Rs at first, and by ep 5 she's almost got it), but she played a similar role as the harsh, unforgiving matriarch in Paul Schrader's The Master Gardener not long ago, and the character of this particular matriarch, dressed like a bushwhacker in boot-cut jeans instead of a Southern grande dame, suits her right down to the ground.

Other cast members may be familiar to non-Aussie viewers, notably Asher Keddie and John England (Offspring), though the standout is Alyla Brown as the young Alice, whose confident performance does a lot to cement the connection between the world of fairytales and flower petals and the brutal family tragedy that sets the plot in motion

Members of the reality-based community are advised to ignore some of the less logical plot points (mostly information that's withheld not just from the audience but from the characters themselves, often for no apparent reason) and just go with the flow. (OTOH, I was a little bothered by the suggestion that the child and grandchild of felons might turn out to be a felon herself, which seems like something out of The Bad Seed or the works of 19th-century grumps like Zola or Strindberg, a weird contrast to the cutting-edge 21st-century 'tudes of the rest of the series.)

As a 75-year-old white cis-het North American male, I'm here to say that I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly, despite the feminist polemics and woo-woo underpinnings. My only regret is that the set designer didn't commission a full-length reclining nude portrait of Ms. Weaver for this one too, the way they did for The Master Gardener. It really did tie the room together, IMHO.

PS--2 out of 12 found this review helpful so far? Okay, fine... that which does not kill me only makes me stronger, as a famous crazy person once said.

TBH we *were* curious why this handsome PBS costume drama about some peculiar goings-on at a Cornish artists' colony in 1913 had gotten such crappy reviews (1 star on Spectrum, 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, 5.6 on here). To start with, the "true story" it's based on turns out to be pretty bleak and could have used some Downton Abbey-style tweaking IMHO to make it more accessible to a 21st century audience.

The basic story arc reminds me a little of Henry James's (and esp. Jane Campion's film adap of) Portrait of a Lady, inasmuch as the naïve virginal heroine¹ impulsively marries a creepy, controlling narcissist--although James's elaborate psychologizing shows us quite a bit more of the characters' interior lives than the screenwriter's just-the-facts, ma'am approach. (The screenplay's adapted from a novel that's "based on" a diary kept by Captain Gilbert Evans, the estate agent for the local squire and one of the vertices of the triangle the movie's plot takes off from.)

The narcissist in question is A. J. Munnings, portrayed by Dominic Cooper as a noisy enfant terrible type who entertains his fellow bohos with recitations of works by dead American poets (we get to hear bits of The Raven and Hiawatha, plus some bonus W. E. Henley). Florence, a porcelain-skinned beauty who's just come down from London, agrees to pose for one of A. J.'s trademark equestrian portraits in return for painting lessons. Florence's more presentable suitor, Captain Evans, a reserve officer in every sense of the word, is too diffident and bumfuzzled to keep A. J. from sweeping her off her feet. Tragic complications ensue....

Perhaps all this might mean more to an audience in the UK, where Munnings is still remembered as a talented realist painter (and a Blimpish critic of "Piss-caso" and 20th-c. Modernism in general). A brief online reconnaissance reveals that he's been rescued from the dustbin of art history by 21st-c. Dealers and curators, though, as with many great artists, I expect the less you find out about his personal life (including his behavior towards women and possibly including by watching this movie), the better.

!. There's a cute scene where Florence sees an uninhibited artist's model frolicking suitless in the surf and goes back to her cottage to check out her own less bodacious endowment in the mirror, looking dismayed.

If you'd heard that a movie from back in 2001 starred Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Joseph Fiennes, you might think it was about a throuple of merchant bankers running wild in Tony Blair's London. But add Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins and especially Ron Perlman, and you've got the kind of movie the Hollywood Ten were turning out for the studios after the Hitler-Stalin Pact went kaputt in 1941. The opening scene--a Bizarro World version of the D-Day landing in "Private Ryan"--really gets your attention: fresh troops are ferried across the Volga, issued rifles (one for every two men in expectation of horrendous casualties) and herded toward the German lines by pistol-packin' commissars. Anyone who wavers or retreats is gunned down by better equipped NKVD men... (Seat-of-the-pants fact check: I've read about such things happening on the Russian Front, but this version may be a little OTT.)

JL plays Vassili Zaitsev, a legendary sharpshooter and a real-life Hero of the Soviet Union, JF's the Party propagandist who turns him into the poster boy for dead-shot Russian marksmanship*, RW's the German-lit major who spends her days and nights typing up field-telephone intercepts but yearns to get back to the action. Both men are attracted to her, of course, but only Vassily gets to spoon with her in a bunker full of snoring comrades (a surprisingly sexy scene). Ed Harris is the (fictional) German sniper, Major König, who stalks Vassili through an urban hellscape reminiscent of the sets for The Last of Us... hold the fungus. (The names "Vassili" and "König" derive from the resp. Greek and German words for "king," FWIW.)

TL;dr: What my bro and I used to call "the love stuff," the perfunctory flashback-origin story and the rear-echelon intrigue are predictable but watchable enough; the sharpshooters' duel--pitched by Joseph Fiennes's propaganda as "the Bavarian nobleman who hunts wild boars" vs. "the shepherd boy from the Urals," a textbook example of class struggle--is genuinely suspenseful. "Enemy at the Gates" turns up on cable from time to time. If you like this sort of thing, why not give it a look?

* Disappointing that a reviewer of the original release beat me to the obligatory "Marxmanship" joke by 20+ years.

I enjoyed thinking about this one and talking about it with my wife afterwards much more than I enjoyed watching it, I have to say. The reviews were encouraging, and the principals have a pretty good track record: Aubrey Plaza's bottled-up intensity is always welcome; Sarah Gadon was amazing in "Alias Grace," an adaptation of a spooky Margaret Atwood tale, and the only other film by W/D Lawrence Michael Levine we've seen, "Wild Canaries," a low-budget caper about a pack of Brooklyn hipsters playing amateur detective, was sloppy but quite entertaining.

The problem here, IMHO, is that, though Levine does toss out a couple of breadcrumbs to guide us, the characters' behavior and motivations really only start to make sense in light of the tricksy reveal in the final scene. The first segment was intriguing; though the rapid descent into melodrama and screaming "Virginia Woolf"-like hysterics seemed a bit contrived, they still had our attention. The second segment--though once again, the setup showed promise--started to get messy and chaotic pretty quickly, and not in a good way. I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say that the whole thing reminded me of the notorious tacked-on ending to the classic horror film "Doctor Caligari," in which the account of the sinister goings-on we've just witnessed is revealed to be the paranoid vision of a mental patient. (That's just an analogy, btw, not what happens here, I don't think....) Anyway, if you watch this one in a state of indulgent suspended disbelief and don't ask too many questions till it's all over, you'll probably get more out of it than we did.

TL;DR: I guess, like the poet says, a dude's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Sundance for, amirite?

I'm all for the "based on a true story" stuff, but I'm glad they brought Anna Maxwell Martin on board to play the (fictional) striver with the crunchy Northern accent (and studly West Indian doctor husband) to add a little class and gender diversity to this Old Etonian sausage fest*. That's not to say that Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis aren't totally convincing as Kim "Third Man" Philby and his longtime drinking buddy/nemesis Nicholas Elliott, likewise Stephen Kunken as CIA guy James J. Angleton, an alum of a lesser public school who, at least accd'g to this account, went nutso after his epic fail on the Philby op and almost destroyed the Company.

The story line is complex and sometimes murky, as befits the spooky subject matter; it's often hard to tell where fact shades into fiction--did Philby really punch out Guy "Second Man" Burgess in a palatial Moscow men's room? (Either way, it was well deserved.) The slinky CIA babe who slips Philby a note in the adjoining dining room may put older viewers in mind of Natasha from Rocky and His Friends, but she's essential to the CIA subplot, so that's okay too, I guess.

At any rate, big props to author Ben Macintyre and writer/director Alexander Cary for the fact-based and fictional, respectively. The subplot involving Anthony Blunt (curator of the Queen's private art gallery and inactive Soviet agent) hadn't really been made public when I was reading up on this stuff and only Men 1-3 had been ID'd, so I found that especially interesting. It seemed to me that the writing lost momentum a bit in the last two eps, but that's partly because the Philby affair ended inconclusively IRL, with Philby safe but miserable in Moscow, Elliott subjected to another few years' harassment by MI-5 and Angleton licking his wounds back in the US and presumably losing his mind. (I also blame MGM+ for not making the whole series available right away--until the free part of our trial sub had expired, btw--so it was hard not to lose the thread just as things were getting interesting.)

* Trigger warning: Anna Maxwell Martin's character seems like she might be based on Fiona Hill, of Trump impeachment inquiry fame, who also has a crunchy Northern accent (Tyneside, not Durham) and who realized early on that she could never have a career in the UK intelligence service. If, like my boy >turnedgood< down below, you're bothered by her fictional counterpart turning up in a series set back in the 60s, then you may be happier watching something from back in the day (pre-'85) when M was still a man and Miss Moneypenny was the highest ranking woman in MI-6.

I really enjoyed this extended mashup of "characters and settings created by Stephen King"; may watch again. S1 gets a lot of mileage out of King's notion of a "thinny," a porous border between alternate realities--so that, for example, one notch over from the godforsaken hellmouth of Castle Rock, there's a bustling, prosperous little town ruled by a benign Melanie Lynskey (not the mean, trigger-happy Melanie we saw in a recent ep of The Last of Us). Sissy Spacek is the standout in a very strong cast, as Ruth, a still-vigorous woman who's been pushed "outside of time," like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, by early-onset dementia. She timeshifts with impunity until her failure to keep the decades straight results in a fatal misunderstanding. (No problem though, in Lynskey World, as we find out a little later, it's all good.)

S2 tries for a more ambitious parlay: a crypt full of undead Satanists awaiting reanimation, a packrat storekeeper (Tim Robbins!) and his unruly adult children (two Somali war orphans and a sorehead white guy, played to perfection by Paul Sparks), plus fabulous Lizzy Caplan cast against type as a pill-popping fugitive. The writers have to struggle a bit to work the Satanists into the mix, and their subplot wraps up with a routine zombie-apoc-style shootout that made me wonder if the writers room had just gotten word that FX wasn't going to renew for another season. Also, TBH, I didn't really get the ending of the series finale (the book-signing scene). Was this a setup for that phantom S3 they decided to leave in just for the hell of it?

Having said all that, I'd strongly recommend, esp. S1.

Outside-the-box thinker Leslye Headland (Russian Doll) tries to cut through the romcom bushwa with an inventive premise--Jake and Lainey, a hyperverbal couple who hooked up once in college and clearly have massive chemistry, vow to keep each other in the friend zone because they both suck at relationships, and they're afraid to get involved with someone they couldn't bear to lose. He's a commitment-shy tech bro; she's obsessed with her cold, unattainable college crush (Adam Scott, with a nasty little mustache) who still obliges with an occasional booty call.

You know they're going to violate their prime directive by the time the credits roll, but I give writer-director Headland big props for coming up with a plausible pretext for keeping them apart for close to 100 mins. She gives great "repartee" (as Jake calls the mostly hilarious chatter that everyone engages in pretty much nonstop), and we actually L'd OL at a couple of the sight gags, especially the one that sends Jake to the ER. The supporting cast is outstanding; special mention to Natasha Lyonne as Lainey's straight-talking lesbian confidante and Andrea Savage and Jason Mantzoukas as a married couple baffled by the antics of their single friends. (They get their own little bonus feature right after the credits finish, so wait for it...)

After we were blown away by this one, we watched an earlier Headland effort, Bachelorette, which was too mean-spirited and chaotic for our taste; Russian Doll got a lot of attention in its day, but we found it a bit too cold-hearted and contrived to really get into. Sleeping with OPs OTOH, is just about right. Available from Amazon Prime.

I just read that this excellent, overlooked series is about to disappear from HBO Max*, so I'll keep this brief so you can get right to it. The first season is essentially a rollcall of young arts pro Darby Carter (Anna Kendrick)'s romantic missteps and false starts, beginning with a high-school trauma and ending up on the day she finds her bashert. (You'll have to take that on faith, though some might say that the dude looks kind of sketchy.) The dialogue's smart and funny, the supporting cast is great (especially Zoe Chao, who gets a whole meltdown episode to herself), the characters have relatable human flaws instead of just sitcom "quirks," and the writers keep it real, for the most part, the occasional flicker of disbelief triggered by Darby's impossibly costly wardrobe notwithstanding.

In season 2, Marcus (William Jackson Harper) is a book editor whose 7-year-old marriage can't quite compete with his flirty text exchanges with a goddessy new friend (Jessica Williams). The first half of the season's pretty good--Harper and Williams have great chemistry (that's the problem essentially), and the Black characters' dialogue seems especially fresh and authentic, from the novelists and professors to the motor-mouthed MSG concessionaire played by comedian Christopher Powell. The plotting seems to lose momentum at around ep 5, I have to say, though maybe that's because we'd just watched an episode of Fleishman's in Trouble, the best show currently on TV (IOHO), and the best is famously the enemy of the merely very good.

* Too late! Just checked yesterday and it's already migrated to Amazon Prime, where they want $2.99.per ep for it.

Elevator pitch: Stephen King meets The Exorcist, with maybe a hat-tip to the Rev. Jim Jones. The setup involves an unholy spirit conjured up from its desert hiding place by an elderly Catholic priest; the setting's a hard-luck fishing village on a tiny island devastated by an offshore oil spill. Hamish Linklater's earnestness and intensity are perfect for Father Paul, the charismatic priest who causes all the commotion. Some may start to fidget during the lengthy dorm-room- (or even first-night-at-sleepover-camp-) grade discussions of what happens to us when we die, though Zach Gilford and Kate Siegel (Mrs. Mike Flanagan) manage to emote their way through theirs like a couple of troupers.

The atmosphere of vague menace building up over the first few eps, along with Father Paul's increasingly death-con-3-level sermons, are a lot more involving than the apocalyptic blowout that follows, IMHO, when it gets a little difficult to keep track of the low-flying metaphors and off-the-wall allegories. A basic knowledge of Roman Catholic theology may be helpful, with a reminder that false prophets may arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. (Matthew 24:24)

We decided we had to watch this one again after Eliza Scanlen's amazing performance in Babyteeth, and we actually liked it better the second time around. Great cast, powerful atmospherics--there's a strong Tennessee Williams vibe from the downstate Missouri setting, with a whiff of old Confederate money, not to mention the hog lagoon outside the slaughterhouse.

Starts out as a conventional "dark" suspense drama--journalist lured back to the small-town weirdness that's left her, literally, scarred for life, long-buried family secrets, etc.--slowly ripens into full-blown Southern Gothic. The last two eps were a little bit OTT for us, and the delayed resolution may seem too clever by half, but by then there's no turning back. Looks like they tacked on a deleted scene at the very end in case we didn't get it, then added a bonus-feature interview with the head writer and the director in case we still didn't get it. No worries. I was glad to have some explanation of the killer's far-from-obvious motive at last, even if it didn't feel entirely "earned," as Gillian Flynn might put it.

Charming, profound, bingeworthy Canadian series written and performed by a couple of veteran sketch-com guys, Bob Martin (as Dr. Storper) and Matt Watts (who gets a credit for "neuroses") as Michael. Sorry to say that it stiffed on the CBC 10+ years ago, a promised third season never materialized, and it isn't getting a whole lot of love on this forum right now, tbh. My clever wife discovered it on Netflix and we gobbled it up just like that.

Dr. Storper's a cognitive behavioral therapist, which means he nudges his "multiphobic" patient into real-life situations that trigger his anxiety, a technique that's not all that different from improv, it seems to me. When that vein's played out, subplots involving Dr. Storper's efforts to cash in on Michael's shaky recovery with a self-help book, plus some workplace stuff where Michael gets sabotaged by a rivalrous normie, are both quite entertaining. Scripts are consistently well worked out; jokes are delivered with deadpan Canadian subtlety, and the supporting cast (including a recurring role for Ed Asner and cameos by Sandra Oh and Samantha Bee) is first-rate. Cougarish Jennifer Irwin ("Eastbound and Down") returns to her Canadian roots as Storper's very hands-on editor; horror-show stalwart Tommie-Amber Pirie gets to stretch as the doctor's ditsy receptionist and Michael's on-and-off GF, on the well known theory that a 30-something protagonist who's a 5 at best deserves at least an 8 as his love interest.

The premise may seem a bit farfetched at first, but everything clicks into place pretty quickly, and by then there's no looking back. It's entertaining to watch Michael Kitchen, the unflappable DCI from Foyle's War, scurrying around on the wrong side of the law, and Sophie Okonedo is appealing and expressive, as always, as a random cater-waitress who impulsively throws in her lot with him.

We liked the way the protags' backstories and psychological makeup are sketched in subtly, without too much obvious effort at reverse engineering. Sophie O's character and motivation remain a bit of an enigma, but we're left with plenty of clues to sort through when the dust is settled.

It's a rare murder mystery that doesn't lose momentum after the setup is in place, but the script (by Paul Abbott, the creator of the original UK Shameless) certainly keeps things moving, and he wraps things up very neatly in three compact eps.

Make that 9½*s actually...

Downtown NYC creatives are lured out to Marfa, TX, by a fellowship offer from a wealthy established artist (based on Donald Judd, I guess, and played to the hilt by all 6° of Kevin Bacon). We love us some Jill Soloway and Kathryn Hahn, and one of us once had a brief telephone convo with the RL Sylvère Lotringer (who was looking for someone to translate some difficult French critical texts for his magazine, for free), but the first time around, the series just seemed too niche and self-indulgent, and we bailed after a couple of eps.

Maybe we've gotten smarter and more sensitive over the last few years, but the second time around "Dick" really connected. Based on the real Chris Kraus's cult novel, the series has a lot to say about long-term relationships and how they grow and wither, the creative process (and creative blockages) and crazy crushes (and how they grow and wither). I can't think of another actress who's as sexy and unselfconscious as Kathryn Hahn and has such perfect comic timing.

Griffin Dunne is game and really quite affecting as the much put-upon (and putting-upon) Sylvère, and the subplots involving other members of the Marfa arts community--a would-be playwright, a frustrated curator, a theorist of hardcore porn--are developed just as much as they need to be and charmingly dramatized. The episode where they all start writing letters to Dick, explaining how they got to be the way they are, is a series highpoint, and the "ritual" dance (choreographed by the trans playwright and performed by a bunch of cowboys and oil roughnecks) is a perfect illustration of the kind of vibe-based communal art the series is trying to celebrate.

Anyway, that's it. There's not much else to watch these days. Check it out!

Mark Rylance does his understated Mark Rylance thing to great effect. Sans opening credits, we're slowly eased into the premise that a high-end expat "cutter" (a skilled craftsman who cuts the fabric for bespoke gents' suits and is *not*, he disdainfully explains, a mere tailor) might have a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious Outfit that maintains a dropbox in the back room of his shop so the local wiseguys can kick up a share of their earnings. I assumed this intriguing puzzler must've started out as a play like "Sleuth" or "Deathtrap" because of the tiny cast and the unities of time and place, but it's an original screenplay.

The script of Graham Moore's previous effort, The Imitation Game (the Alan Turing bio with Cumberbatch), had plot holes you could pilot a U-boot through, but this one's very cleverly worked out and beautifully performed by a first-rate cast (we stumbled onto it while were looking for something else with Zoey Deutsch after Not Okay). It's all sleight of head basically, with no emotional impact but lots of turns and trickses, so you probably won't give it a moment's thought after the credits start to roll--except maybe to take note of which of the wiseguys were actually played by Brits*. (And also maybe to reflect that Moore and his co-writer should've tidied up that final scene where Len the Cutter blurts out his entire backstory and everything else he's kept so close to the vest so far....) Nevertheless, IMHO, it's well worth the $5.99 that Jeff B is currently charging for it on Amazon Prime.

*Answer: All but one AFAIK, and he's from NYC, so nobody even attempts a Chicago accent.

Just finished watching the Upstairs Downstairs reboot from 2010-12, which got mostly admiring reviews when it came out, some even comparing it favorably to the original series. I'd forgotten how weird and randomly plotted the second season is--the household at 165 Eaton Place gradually comes to include Sir Hallam Holland's mother's Sikh manservant (played by a heavily bearded Art Malik, so no problem there); the little daughter of a German Jewish refugee who collapses and dies shortly after getting triggered by the chauffeur's Union of British Fascists blackshirt getup (the daughter suffers from traumatic mutism for a couple of eps as well); Sir Hallam's long-lost sister, who has Down syndrome and has been tucked away in an asylum for most of her life; his mother's much younger half-sister (who was her father again?), a lesbian archeologist whose ex-lover writes a sexy novel that causes a terrible scandal; and Lady Holland sr's monkey, Solomon (looks to be a rhesus macaque), who outlives his mistress by a couple of episodes, for reasons that have nothing to do with the story as such (see below).

The Duke of Kent, a bisexual aesthete who really did exist, keeps us updated on the gathering storm in Europe, so no complaints there either. A Jewish-American millionaire (who made his fortune selling a product that sounds like Alka-Seltzer just in time for the repeal of Prohibition) conveniently opens a garment business in the East End so Lady Agnes (Keeley Hawes, always fabulous) can embarrass her husband, yet again, by posing for a sexy ad for nylons. Claire Foy, future ER II in The Crown, draws the short straw as Lady Persephone, Lady Agnes's younger sister, a Nazi sympathizer who prefers to live in Germany, like the RL Unity Mitford, and gets into all kinds of scrapes when she returns.

No surprise then that Dame Eileen Atkins, co-creator of the original series who played Lady Holland sr in S1 of the reboot, refused to have any part of S2. The cast is uniformly excellent, except possibly for Sir Hallam himself (Ed Stoppard, son of Tom), who's meant to be what the English call a bit of a stick and doesn't get much of a chance to stretch. (He spends most of the series fretting about Why England Slept and being mortified by the outré antics of his household.)

I'm not saying the show's not entertaining, just that the storyline's really herky-jerky and OTT. The writers seem to be straining to pander to current notions of diversity and inclusiveness, which, I'm guessing, may be the reason that Dame Eileen just wasn't into it. IIRC the show got clobbered in the ratings by a soapy competitor, Downton Abbey, and was canceled after the second season.

Watchable but unsatisfying period piece, mistakenly listed on Amazon Prime as a current film; actually it's from 2002. Based on novelist Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove, which in turn was based on Lehmann's nine-year affair with poet Cecil Day-Lewis (father of Daniel). IRL Day-Lewis dumped both Lehmann and his wife and took up with actress Jill Balcon (mother of Daniel), which might've made a more interesting movie.

On-the-nose casting of Olivia Williams as the straitlaced, conventional sister and Helena Bonham-Carter as the unstable, bohemian sister ensures the best possible outcome for the creaky plot. Nice to see Elinor Bron (Dudley's Moore's unrequited crush in the original Bedazzled) again as the sisters' interfering mother. Paul Bettany does his best with the thankless role of the sisters' wavering husband/lover; the fact that he's so easily bamboozled by his mother-in-law suggests that Lehmann came away from all this with a poor opinion of C. Day-Lewis, which certainly seems understandable.

Looks like we may never get to the bottom of the sci-fi fantasy side of this heartland family drama, which was only lightly sketched in by the end of season one (just weeks before the news arrived that Amazon wasn't going to spring for a second season). Be that as it may, Sissy Spacek and J. J. Simmons are their usual irresistible selves as Irene and Franklin York, an elderly couple who get an unexpected gift from the universe to help them cope with the death of their troubled adult son. The scene shifts from time to time to a desolate part of Argentina, where an intense single mom and her daughter tend their llamas (¿guanacos?) and bicker till their path finally converges with the Yorks' in the season closer.

Fans of fantasy series with cryptic, complex plots will no doubt be okay with the teleportation chambers and battling cultists. My wife almost bailed after a minor character rattled off some Jeff Goldblum-style bushwa about quantum entanglement and "spooky action at a distance" (in an effort to explain how the bickering mother and daughter could teleport themselves from Patagonia to Newark, NJ). The twenty-something ingenues (a bloodstained fugitive from the black-hat cult and the Yorks' cute grand-daughter, who's had enough of biz school--relatable!) have pretty good chemistry, the writers maintain suspense quite well (though often via the shabby trick of withholding basic info, just like the Patagonian mama does when her daughter keeps asking why their family's so weird), and I'm guessing you'll want to make sure the Yorks are still okay by the time the credits roll.

PS--Just read online that "Los fanáticos de Night Sky exigen la temporada 2 después del final del suspenso." ¿Cómo no?

The trailer makes this fine Canadian film seem like a three-hanky Existentialist chick flick, which it is to some extent. I'm sorry it doesn't include the scene where a Mennonite preacher calls on Elf(rieda), the suicidal concert pianist sister, in her hospital room. She gets out of bed while reciting Larkin's "Days" and taking off her clothes (patients on suicide watch aren't allowed underwear, we're told in a masterly bit of foreshadowing); the preacher flees.

Fun fact: The one-line Valéry "poem" the sisters recite is actually just a line and a bit from "La Dormeuse," but now it's banging around the internet as a meme all on its own.

We didn't pay this one much mind when it was on PBS back in 2015 (probably at 9 pm on Sunday opposite GoT or some such unmissable delight...). The gold standard for a show like this that's set during the waning years of the British raj (1932-5 in this case) is clearly The Jewel in the Crown, and Indian Summers doesn't have the epic sweep of the latter, nor was screenwriter Paul Rutland, who first came to India as an English teacher in the 90s, a witness to all that history like Paul Scott. Nevertheless, Summers is an involving psychological drama with some of the trappings of an old-fashioned ripping yarn like a late Dickens novel, maybe Bleak House, especially toward the end of season 2, when that s___ starts to get real.

Nikesh Patel (Starstruck) and Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Killing Eve) are perfectly cast as our hero and antihero--Aafrin Dalal, an ambitious Parsi "clark" who's mentored and befriended by Ralph Whelan, the viceroy's private secretary, a cold-hearted fixer from an old India family (a glowering portrait of Great-uncle Toby, who "was shoved down a well by sepoys in the Mutiny," looks down from a wall of the ancestral bungalow). Julie Walters is scarily good as Cynthia Coffin, upholder of "British values" and the color line at the Royal Simla Club, on the settlement's highest hill, and though gorgeous Jemima West may seem a little too awesome and empowered to play fragile Alice Whelan, much put upon by her brother and awful husband (again, like a Dickens or Wilkie Collins heroine), she and Nikesh Patel make a fine pair of star-crossed lovers after the sparks start to fly.

The writing has a contemporary, post-colonial POV that doesn't hold back in depicting the arrogance, bigotry and cruelty of the sahibs and mems at the Simla hill station, "the summer capital" of the raj, but at the same time Rutland and his co-writers aren't too proud to indulge in some old-school OTT melodrama--long-buried family secrets, children of mysterious paternity, a self-sacrificing "tragic mulata" (IRL gorgeous ½ Ashkenazi, ½ Indian Amber Rose Revah), a suave maharajah with a jeweled turban and an Oxbridge accent (Art Malik from TJitC, no less), a sneering bad guy who does everything but twirl his wispy little mustache, and finally a welcome bit of karmic payback in the series closer.

The show was filmed in Penang, Malaysia (another former outpost of the Crown, though the majestic backdrop of the Himalayas had TBD'd with CGI), and I LOl'd when a monkey moseyed across the verandah during some very intense goings-on in the foreground. Admittedly the quality of the writing falls off a little when creator Paul Rutland hands over the scriptwriting chores to others halfway through S2, plus TIL from "Trivia" that the five seasons originally planned were cut down to two, so the closer has to struggle to tie off the various subplots before the credits roll.

TL;DR: It's great! Watch it! Available via the PBS channel on Amazon Prime.