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Let's face it, there've been so many bad Godzilla movies... and Jurassic World movies... and just about any movies that qualify as "franchises"... that you have to feel relieved that this entry in the Kong saga turned out to be so unexpectedly charming.

The hero, played by Tom Hiddleston, could easily have been a swaggering macho type, or a wisecracking smartass, or an insufferable prig... but he isn't. The heroine, played by Brie Larson, could easily have been an airhead, a sexpot, or one of those ridiculous kickass superwomen who outfights men... but she isn't. The producer, played by John Goodman, could easily have been a crass caricature... but he isn't. The military characters could easily have been turned into gun-toting cartoons... but they're not.

The reptilian monsters are actually original in conception, appropriately hideous, and scary. The comic bits (and there are a number of them) are actually funny. Kong himself is sympathetic without being sentimental.

We should all be thankful. The movie is thoroughly satisfying -- all the more so because it could easily have been a bomb.

The title above echoes the one I gave my review of the Chinese TV series "Three-Body," based on the same novel. I found both versions, Chinese and American, unwatchably stupid and eventually bailed out.

The only virtues this American series has are a bigger budget and a blessedly faster pace. Plot points that took three hours (i.e., four episodes) in the Chinese version were dispensed with in the first hour of the American.

The casting is ludicrous, in a typically woke Netflix way. Most absurd of all is Eiza Gonzalez, with the sculpted cheekbones and huge puffy lips of a lingerie model. Cast as a world-class nanotechnology inventor, she's a joke. Jovan Adepo plays a top quantum physicist, a potential young Einstein. Likable? Very. Believable? Never.

The main problem is that almost all the characters are supposed to be genius-level science whizzes, yet all too often they talk and behave like college sophomores. And the world's other top scientists, we learn, are so irrational, so mentally fragile, that it's easy to drive them stark raving mad and eventually to suicide. All that's necessary, it turns out, is to baffle them with some unexplained visual hallucinations ("the countdown") and to mess with the expected results of their research projects -- at which point they tear their hair out, declare that physics is dead, and proceed to off themselves. Their behavior seems ridiculous; anyone possessed of natural scientific curiosity wouldn't go this haywire when confronted with these mysterious new phenomena -- a true scientist would attempt to study and explain them. Sci-fi should be smarter than this.

Some flashbacks set in Maoist China during the 1960s were handsome and packed more power than the contemporary scenes. Still, an opening Red Guard rally rang false, the huge crowd suddenly falling silent and contrite as if on cue. In another early scene, a prisoner in the Chinese equivalent of a Gulag passes a heavy hardcover book -- "Silent Spring," no less -- to a woman prisoner, outdoors in broad daylight with other people around, while cautioning her not to dare let the authorities catch her with it!

Since I bailed out early from this disappointing series, I've avoided giving it a star rating.

I've watched only the first four episodes of this exasperatingly slow-moving Chinese series. The action and plot development that these episodes cover -- in around three hours of screen time -- would have been covered by an ordinary unpretentious Hollywood sci-fi movie in less than twenty minutes. This series pads out the story with flashy (but unnecessary) visual effects, unusually lengthy (and unnecessarily elaborate) opening credits, and shots and sequences monotonously repeated from earlier episodes.

Most annoying of all, the story is prolonged because it depends on characters -- supposedly brainy scientists -- keeping crucial information to themselves rather than talking about it to colleagues and family. These scientists are also depicted as so irrational, so mentally fragile, that it's easy to drive them stark raving mad and eventually to suicide; all that's necessary, it turns out, is to baffle them with some unexplained visual hallucinations and to skew the expected results of their research projects, at which point they tear their hair out, declare that physics is dead, and proceed to off themselves. Their behavior seems ridiculous; anyone possessed of natural scientific curiosity wouldn't go so haywire when confronted with these mysterious new phenomena -- they'd attempt to study and explain them.

The acting -- at least to these Western eyes -- is stiff and robotic. In an obvious attempts to generate tension, the music is loud, pretentious, and ominous.

Okay, it's plainly time for me to check out the more recent American version. I hope it's an improvement.

I've watched this droll documentary three times, each time finding it hilarious, horrifying, and appalling -- and also quite touching. I wish it were twice as long, as there were no doubt additional memorable anecdotes worth recording among the cast and crew (all of whom, incidentally, come across as astonishingly articulate and likable). It certainly confirms all the negative stuff I've read over the years about Val Kilmer, described in this film as "a prep-school bully."

It occurs to me that that this film probably should be seen along with another documentary, Peter Medak's "The Ghost of Peter Sellers," about another horribly misbegotten production destroyed by outsize egos.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was one of the oddest-looking men in Lincoln's administration, a pudgy-faced, unattractive fellow with a distinctive (and distinctively ugly) beard. He's one of the few Civil War figures I always assumed I'd have no trouble picking out of a lineup.

But in this TV series, he's portrayed by a lean-jawed, clean-shaven Tobias Menzies, who races around playing Sherlock Holmes, even going so far as to measure, like a Hollywood detective, a mysterious boot print in the mud.

In the key scene in the first episode from which all the action starts -- Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre -- this series doesn't even bother to get the details right. The president and his wife were seated in a box along with friends -- a young couple, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancee -- but as depicted in this episode, the Lincolns are sitting alone.

To say the least, this sort of nonsense shakes one's faith in the historical authenticity of the series.

So does Patton Oswalt, who seems to be playing his Union officer for laughs.

I liked, as always, Lili Taylor and Matt Walsh, as, respectively, Mrs. Lincoln and Dr. Mudd.

The art direction, the CGI, the decor, the costumes, the vistas of Italian landscape -- they're all quite beautiful, as befits big-budget modern TV.

But as a way-too-flamboyant Da Vinci, Tom Riley struts and shouts, postures and capers, like an Errol Flynn pirate, or like Joseph Fiennes playing young Shakespeare at the top of his voice. God help us if Leonardo had been a gesticulating clown like this. The history in this series is dumbed down, the characters cardboard, the dialogue too clever by half, the nudity too gratuitous, and the various conflicts and acts of violence too predictable. Everything about this series is aimed at the stupidest of viewers. No doubt that explains its success, in that it managed to survive through three seasons.

Obviously, in this case, I think it can.

But it can also be argued -- indeed, it's something I would argue, most of the time -- that a thriller is only as good as its ending. If that's your criterion, I'd suggest you avoid this series. (And it's why I won't recommend it to friends.)

However, despite all the annoying plot holes (admirably laid out by several commenters on this site) and lapses of plausibility, and despite the fact that the final episode, for all its drama, will probably leave you somewhat disappointed and baffled, I had a rather good time binge-watching this series with a friend. It's well-acted, well-directed, and, for most of the way, enjoyably creepy, atmospheric, and intriguing. In fact, it was so well done that, in this particular case, the journey was worth it, even though the destination was not.

Brilliant? No. Hilarious? Rarely. But the show is amiable and light-hearted, it goes down easy, and it keeps me smiling, which is rare. It even raises a couple of chuckles per episode -- also rare.

You have the sense that the entire crew had a lot of fun putting the show together. Still, it mainly depends on Nick Frost and Amanda Hart, and they're extremely endearing together. I didn't realize that Frost could be funny when not teamed up with Simon Pegg, but he's actually terrific -- great line delivery, timing, facial expression, and physical comedy.

Of course, I'm speaking about a show nearly two decades old. I wish I'd known about it sooner.

This is the sort of movie in which someone sitting motionless in a chair, or sleeping in bed, is filmed with a deliberately jerky hand-held camera in an attempt to generate a feeling of tension and suspense. (What it generates, of course, is confusion -- and ultimately a headache.)

I know teaching, police work, and New York City. All of them are elements in this movie, and none feel remotely authentic. The city is filmed in that same jerky, fragmented style (we can call it, to be generous, "impressionistic"), with a heavy emphasis on garbage and graffiti. It feels like a student film. Meg Ryan is supposed to be some sort of college-level English instructor or adjunct. She isn't believable, not for a single moment. Mark Ruffalo and Nick Damici are supposed to be NYPD detectives engaged in a murder investigation. They are ridiculously crude, foul-mouthed, and slobbish; even cops at their worst would never be so unprofessional. The investigation never seems real, nor does the creepy masochistic relationship that immediately develops between Ryan and Ruffalo. (Nor does the fact that the Hollywood-beauty Ryan is so available, so up for grabs, that she and her half-sister actually discuss what big news it is that a man wants to go out with her.) And then tack on, to your wasted two hours, a solution to the crime that feels illogical and unexplained, and you have the makings of an extremely unsatisfying film.

And for Missi Pyle. And Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson.

Okay, it's not for everyone. It's not even for me, exactly. But you know how, when you go to to kids' movie with a little child who absolutely loves it, YOU end up having a good time? Well, I saw this movie in the theater when it came out, with a young woman who'd grown up on Josie & the Pussycats comic books, and she was utterly entranced by it. Maybe because of that, I enjoyed it, too, especially Alan Cumming and Parker Posey, old pros who seem to have a great time playing the villains. When you're not looking at them, or at Tara Reid's cleavage, you can look at Missi Pyle, who steals every scene she's in. (I wish I could say something nice about Rachael Leigh Cook in the title role, but her casting is a bit of a mystery.)

Yes, the legendary Season One of "True Detective" was guilty as charged, especially in the feminist playbook, for all sorts of illicit macho fun. As some hostile critics pointed out, that opening season really did exploit women; all the women in it (except maybe Ann Dowd) were young and gorgeous and of easy virtue.

This time out, the women are anything but gorgeous, to say the least, and they're tougher than the men. In the opening episode, the hulking, tattooed, perpetually aggrieved trooper played by Kali Reis easily trips and cuffs a struggling man bigger than herself, and even manages to answer her cell phone while doing so. It's the sort of familiar Hollywood fantasy -- woman beats up stronger guy -- that Emily Blunt once described, correctly, as "cheesy."

Familiar, too, is the bleak arctic landscape. Season Four recycles elements from "30 Days of Night," "Fortitude" (a weirder, woefully unknown series from 2018), "Smilla's Sense of Snow," the Icelandic series "Trapped," and all three versions of "The Thing" -- only this time out the story is heavier-handed, slower-moving, and not half as much fun.

The first season of "True Detective" moved slowly, too, but the fantastic acting of the two leads made every one of its eight hours a pleasure. Season Four runs just six hours long, but the hours just drag by. And the resolution is so ridiculously unsatisfying that you'll regret having wasted those six hours.

In fact, I attribute the warm critical reception "Night Country" enjoyed to three things: (1) the fact that it checks all the right woke boxes; (2) the residue of good feeling we have, after "The Silence of the Lambs," for Jodie Foster in another crimefighting role; and (3) the probability that the early critics reviewed it without having viewed the weak, disappointing conclusion.

Season One was also, at times, quite funny, thanks to Woody Harrelson. This fourth season is totally humorless. (To be fair, there was a Netflix quip and one about "Mrs. Robinson" that brought a smile.)

Where Season One gave us nice atmospheric Southern blues, this season gives us tinny, jarring, annoyingly intrusive radio rock.

Even the details seem recycled. That clue we keep seeing, the mysterious spiral tattoo (a nod to Season One), feels like something out of the Hardy Boys. The conflict of whether the local police will be granted time to solve the crime, before higher authorities from outside take over, is the tritest of clichés. (Why should we care whether Jodie Foster loses control of the case to "Anchorage"?) The dialogue is clumsy with exposition, a frequent problem with TV. The special effects -- the frozen corpses -- are so amateurish that I found myself looking away.

Which also goes for the sex. The sex scenes in both Season One and Season Four are embarrassingly gratuitous, but in Season One they were...sexy! Here, you just avert your eyes and wish they'd been deleted.

Making a light, entertaining comedy apparently wasn't enough for Gerwig and Baumbach. For some reason -- maybe to maintain their intellectual bona fides -- they couldn't resist weighing the movie down, after its light-hearted beginning, with increasingly serious Messages -- a whole heap of Messages, in fact, about Patriarchy and Feminine Self-Realization and What It Means to Be Human, blah blah blah, to the point where I tuned out all the sermonizing, all the earnest Life Lessons, and was simply grateful for the occasional chuckle.

In support of one of its Messages, the filmmakers pretend that the toymaker's managing board is 100 percent male. (It's actually half female.)

The high point of the movie comes in the opening minutes. I fell in love with that spot-on "2001" parody, even though it feels like an inspired afterthought. (So does Helen Mirren's brief narration.)

The entire first third is amusing. After that, it's all downhill. "Barbie" becomes increasingly sour and eventually downright tedious. It's at least half an hour too long.

I confess to being somewhat baffled by its success, both with critics and the public.

Alexander Payne's 1999 comedy "Election," set in a Midwestern high school, was brilliant, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious. Best of all (I say this as a onetime high school teacher), it felt refreshingly authentic.

"The Holdovers" is quite the opposite: contrived, predictable, and intended to teach -- you guessed it -- a little lesson in compassion. An hour into it, I realized that it hadn't yet contained a single moment that seemed genuine, much less surprising. Every line of dialogue sounds phony. Characters speak in little announcements, spelling things out for us. Some of the characters -- a couple of menacing townies, for example -- are mere cartoons.

Giamatti's protagonist is a wholly artificial creation, designed as if in a screenwriting course to follow the approved character arc -- initially stuffy and unsympathetic to the point of caricature, ultimately vulnerable. Ironically, an early scene between him and the school's headmaster violates what's sometimes regarded as a screenwriting rule: Do NOT, even in the interest of exposition, have people telling each other what they already know. (The by-the-numbers triteness of that conversation -- meant to show us that the instructor is uncompromising and pedantic but possesses old-fashioned integrity, blah blah blah -- put me off from the start.) The scenes between Giamatti and the school's cook -- in which, with the audience in mind, the two provide personal backstories and reveal their inner selves -- are painfully heavy-handed and at times so gooey that I felt sorry for the actress: "You can't even dream a whole dream, can you?" she is made to say at one point. "What are you afraid of?"

Yes, I know, everybody seems to love the movie. I could barely stomach it. But do check out "Election."

The notion of the young Princess Elizabeth disguising herself on VE Day, abandoning her chaperone, and sneaking downstairs at the Ritz to dance a joyful jitterbug is cringe-making enough, but as the "Crown" writers envisioned it, she is also shown, most implausibly, striking an unlikely 2023-ish blow for diversity while surrounded by a cheering, implausibly diverse crowd. And of course, this episode turns the incident into a sort of epiphany, a precious moment of liberation.

This ranks with that ridiculous key dramatic scene in "Darkest Hour," when Churchill, totally against character, wanders down into the London tube and, in a p.c. Epiphany similar to that of "The Crown," gets his spine stiffened in the fight against the Nazis by a passenger quoting from Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome." He goes back upstairs, resolved to carry on the good fight.

It is really amazing, the shameless, pernicious nonsense that filmmakers are foisting on us!

But honestly, aside from the decor and the resulting atmosphere, what a waste of half an hour! The story is downright simple-minded, like something a schoolboy horror fan would dream up, with no attempt to make it more believable or to explain why any of the characters behave as they do. And in the end you're left saying, "Wait. You mean, that's IT? That's all there IS?? Where's the story?"

I should add that "Oxford," as depicted in this little tale, seems to be -- even in an age before electricity -- a place badly in need of lights, since virtually all the rooms and corridors we see are shrouded in darkness.

Fennell's previous film, "Promising Young Woman," was a hate fantasy about wreaking vengeance on a bunch of abusive guys (and one woman administrator) responsible for the death of the heroine's friend. As happens in such fantasies (and ONLY in such fantasies), every step of her plan went way too smoothly; the avenging heroine easily tricked all the men -- reducing them, one by one, to contrite weeping wimps -- and humiliated the woman administrator, leaving her crushed.

The hate fantasy in this new film succeeds with even more implausible ease. A homely, inarticulate, lumpish nerd at Oxford is -- implausibly -- befriended by a tall, handsome, immensely wealthy fellow student who takes him home to his lavish, implausibly underpopulated country estate the size of Buckingham Palace, where his aristocrat family lives with what appears to be a single butler and two footmen (except at one point near the end, where a gaggle of servants we've never seen before suddenly appear). This family -- implausibly sappy, since the success of the comic-book plot depends on their being a bunch of absolute patsies -- takes the lumpish young visitor to its bosom, lavishing upon him a totally unbelievable degree of attention and affection.... whereupon, halfway through the movie, the inarticulate young visitor is suddenly revealed to be a smooth-talking, Machiavellian, diabolical psychopath who neatly -- did I mention implausibly? -- murders the family members, one by one, and in the end inherits the estate.

So basically, the movie starts out as "Brideshead Revisited," only cruder and ickier, and midway through turns into "The Omen," only dumber.

There's one original surprise involving the young man's return home. I didn't even recognize the wonderful actress Dorothy Atkinson as his mother. And Archie Madekwe is all too believable as the sort of arrogant, racially privileged type we don't often see depicted in today's media.

Though handsomely produced and fairly diverting, this is ultimately a rather silly movie. Characters rise and fall and undergo drastic transformations at the whim of its simple-minded plot. (Mike Leigh's two-hander "Career Girls" seemed similarly unrealistic, but its characters were so endearing that it didn't matter.)

The biggest problem with "Crocodiles" is that it has a high school freshman's idea of what the workaday business world is like. The heroine's ascent is never believable, nor are the emotional changes she goes through. The three bosses we see -- a fussy, posturing little fellow played by Allan Corduner, a ruthless corporate CEO played by Patrick Malahide, and some pushy, fault-finding fat guy at the beginning -- are all ridiculous caricatures. The office Corduner presides over resembles a kindergarten class. The Damian Lewis character is treated by everyone there with inexplicable deference and indulged for months in ways no real-life company would put up with. (In fact, his character's imperturbable smugness throughout the film is increasingly hard to take.) And in light of what's happened in the real world, his success in establishing a string of old-fashioned bookstores seems sadly ironic.

The movie also forces us to watch too many long, lavish parties, and it's a reminder that -- for me, at least -- there's nothing more boring (although they were probably fun to stage).

On the other hand, Jodhi May remains fairly breathtaking in just about anything; and considering all the closeups and screen time she gets, I have the impression that Poliakoff was as enamored of her as I am.

There's a metaphor that's often trotted out to describe excruciatingly bad movies: They're like being "trapped at a weekend house party with a bunch of bores." It applies perfectly to "Stealing Beauty." In fact, it IS about a weekend house party, and the characters ARE a bunch of bores.

You're supposed to be interested in whether or not the Liv Tyler character is going to lose her virginity -- and if so, to whom? But it's awfully hard to care.

You're supposed to wonder if one of the older guys in the house is her real father -- and if so, which one is it? Hard to care.

You're supposed to wonder whether the ailing writer played by Jeremy Irons will stay alive till the end of the film. But he's so pretentious and obnoxious that you'll probably want him to die.

Those three not-very-interesting questions were the closest thing to a plot in this lethargic, talky, self-indulgent movie. I kept thinking, "Who cares? Get on with it!" The running time was two hours. It felt like four.

I suspect that people who praise this film and award it 9 or 10 stars are simply taken with the pretty Tuscan landscape and the picturesque stone farmhouse. There's nothing remotely appealing about any of the characters, nor is there a shred of drama.

Maybe my expectations were too high, because "The Conformist" is one of my all-time favorite films, and I also admire "The Last Emperor" and "The Sheltering Sky." This one, sad to say, is so dull and flabby that I've lost some respect for Bertolucci.

David Fincher's films tend to be technically proficient but cold, sadistic, and fairly unpleasant. "The Killer" is a case in point.

The hero -- or rather, the anti-hero -- is himself a cold, stony-faced, ruthless professional assassin who possesses, implausibly, near-superhuman skills. He seems able to obtain, with little effort, any information he needs, open any locked door, outwit any enemy, and beat up any opponent no matter how large, all while delivering, in voice-over, a stream of pretentious philosophical musings about mankind, justice, and the universe.

Also implausibly, we're expected to believe that this emotionless, robotic character nonetheless becomes hell-bent on revenge when his girlfriend is assaulted and hurt.

I found barely one pleasurable moment in this film's monotonous two hours, except for Tilda Swinton's single too-brief scene.

Each time I've seen this -- initially in the theater, then twice via streaming -- I've found it amazingly well made and irresistibly gripping, even though I now know what's coming.

The script is brilliant, without a wasted word. The pacing is marvelous -- at times rapid and economical, at other times slowly building suspense. The shifts in tone work perfectly too; the film is sometimes ominous or scary, sometimes thrillingly action-packed, with occasional moments of comic relief (e.g., Goodman with an ice cream cone, Goodman half dancing to rock music, etc.).

The acting is superb on the part of all three principals. Goodman, who's an asset in every movie, is truly outstanding here and deserved an Oscar nomination. (I was also pleased to see, however briefly, Suzanne Cryer, so memorable in "Silicon Valley.")

Despite the marketing, this isn't actually a thriller. It's basically a relationship movie, well-written, well-directed, and extremely well-acted (albeit, in the end, somewhat anti-male).

Unfortunately, it just isn't all that interesting.

And even though we're supposed to be rooting for the woman in the relationship, neither member of the couple is particularly appealing. They're both highly ambitious workaholic yuppies, they curse a lot, and they spend their days trading millions of dollars in stocks for a soulless high-powered hedge fund run by Eddie Marsan (the best thing in the movie).

The film starts off as an illustration of the old office warning "Don't s*** where you eat." (In fact, Emily, the heroine, quotes that very adage.) Office romances -- even when, as in this story, they're kept secret -- seldom turn out well.

Then the movie becomes a slightly-too-on-the-nose depiction of male jealousy and insecurity. Whether it's deplorable or simply a fact of life, not many men are comfortable with a woman who's more successful than they are. Luke, in this stressful competitive financial environment, is getting nowhere; Emily, somewhat too perfectly, is a poised, brainy marvel who gets everything right.

(The fact that, as we learn, she's a Harvard grad and that Luke went to Yale seems to open up the movie to some intra-Ivy joking: "See, it's a movie about how Yale is for losers!")

Luke is extremely hard to like, but he still comes off better than the other men in the film, all of whom are depicted as crass, shallow, and obnoxious. Marsan, as their boss, is a malevolent brute, though he does get the best lines.

As a portrait of the business world, "Fair Play" can't hold a candle to the brilliant, grippingly suspenseful Wall Street film "Margin Call," and it would seem to have rather limited appeal. Still, the women in the audience where I saw it seemed to like it.

This extremely slick entertainment stacks the deck in favor of "the little guy" against a billionaire businessman. It takes obvious liberties with the trial, depicts the billionaire businessman as saying things no successful businessman would actually say, and lets us hear one attorney's summation but does not allow us to hear that of his rival. Even on the movie's own terms, it wants us to celebrate what is clearly a travesty of justice.

The legal dispute, as presented in the film, is a relatively minor one: whether a Canadian firm delayed several months in delivering a promised contract. The movie makes clear that the Tommy Lee Jones character is in violation of Mississippi's business code, that he's facing bankruptcy, and that his lawsuit against a Canadian billionaire negotiating to buy three of his funeral homes is, for him, a desperate hail-Mary gesture. The movie also makes clear that his attorney, the Jamie Foxx character, goes judge-shopping for a black district with a black judge, and then proceeds to win his case -- along with a ridiculously large punitive amount -- by appealing to the black jury's resentment toward a white entrepreneur, especially the kind who owns a $25 million yacht.

Although these extraneous matters have nothing to do with the case -- which, we understand from the start, is a technical contract dispute -- we see that the jury is swayed by them and that it awards the Jones character half a billion dollars (later somewhat reduced) because it feels the Canadian has been charging too much for funerals. Here's the chance to stick it to a wealthy white guy.

We often read these days about the absurdly high judgments that irresponsible juries, swayed by emotion, render against perfectly legitimate businesses in defiance of a case's legal merits. This movie depicts exactly that sort of abuse -- and expects us to applaud it.

"A League of Their Own" is among my favorite films, and I'm not even a sports fan. It's one of those rare commercial Hollywood films that successfully inspire both belly laughs and tears.

There's one little exchange, between Tom Hanks and Geena Davis, that I've always liked and consider fairly wise. It comes toward the end, when she tells him that she wants to quit baseball. She says (and I quote from this website): "It just got too hard." He replies: "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great."

While those are truly words to live by, it occurred to me, on second or third viewing, that they really don't make much sense in the movie. The Davis character does NOT find baseball hard, and we never see her act as if it's hard. She is, in fact, a terrific natural athlete, and - unlike her sister - playing the game, winning in fact, is easy for her. It actually makes little sense that this exchange appears in the movie.

I can only conclude that the screenwriters were simply enamored of the thought and figured out a way of inserting it. And even though it seems out of place, I'm glad they did.

More than most long-running detective shows, "Vera" seems to have a remarkably consistent tone -- bleak!

This episode is no exception; it has all the usual dramatic strengths we expect from this series -- terrific acting, intelligent dialogue, vivid local atmosphere, abundant red herrings, and an intriguingly intricate plot involving a long-buried crime of the past as well as a current one. But in the end, like most "Vera" episodes, it's just another beautifully made downer.

I've never seen a detective show in which the "villains," when they're ultimately unmasked, so consistently turn out to be tragic and sympathetic and not villainous at all. I always end up feeling sorry for the killer!

I suppose that can be regarded as a good thing -- it's a reminder, maybe, that few people are thoroughly evil, that even good people may, in the right circumstances, turn to murder -- but it means that I invariably end up saddened rather than cheered when at last Vera solves the case. I certainly felt that here. The ending was utterly joyless.

Worse, it was also rather ridiculous, wrapping things up way too quickly, thanks to a convenient last-minute revelation. We learn just a few minutes before the closing credits, completely out of the blue, that the Liam Cunningham character is wanted for having murdered his abusive father 30 years ago. The revelation of this long-buried crime is slipped into the plot so hastily, without any proper hint or preparation, that it's practically a joke. And after an hour and a half of fairly pleasurable suspense, it leaves one -- it certainly left me --feeling a bit cheated.

Since this review sits beneath a Spoiler Alert, I'm going to say at the outset what I liked most about this movie: It doesn't demonize the CIA -- which makes it refreshingly different from most other spy movies. So many espionage thrillers have, as their ultimate revelation, that when you come right down to it, the West is just as cynical and corrupt, just as hypocritical and compromised, as the Reds. "It's a dirty game, we're no better than they are," blah blah blah. How nice, for a change, to see the Russians depicted as the heavies and Americans as the good guys! (I realize, of course, that in the real world, we're hardly saints; we have tons of things, both past and present, to be deeply ashamed of. Nor am I a fan of the CIA's recent meddling in politics. But in comparison to Russia, we're on the side of the angels, and it's nice when a spy movie gives us someone to root for.)

I can understand why lots of people hated "Red Sparrow." The brutality is highly disturbing, protracted, and perhaps overdone; the sex and nudity is pretty damn gratuitous. I can understand why friends might be offended by such stuff, and I would certainly not recommend the film to them. But for me, it was a fast-moving, intricately plotted, unashamedly salacious thrill ride that kept me entertained for two and a half hours, so I'm grateful.