Reviews
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Is as Funny, Charming, and Occasionally Awkward as Its Heroine: Review
The Pitch: What if there was a lady… who was also a Hulk? And also a lawyer? Yeah, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law pretty much tells you exactly what the show is from the start. Quite literally, in fact: The newest Marvel series to come down the Disney+ pipeline features newly minted meta-human Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) speaking directly to the audience about how her life recently got upended by an accidental exposure to her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo)’s blood. Because Jen and Bruce are related, Jen’s able to survive the sudden infusion of gamma particles into her system, and she also manages to get a handle on being a Hulk with a working human brain relatively quickly. But while she’s learning control over her new persona (with the advantages and disadvantages that accompany it)...
Echo & The Bunnymen’s 40th Anniversary Tour Off to a Rough Start Due to Ian McCulloch Illness: Review
Echo and the Bunnymen have embarked on a long-awaited tour in celebration of their 40th anniversary, though things were off to a rocky start at Atlanta’s Tabernacle concert hall on Monday night (August 15th). Dubbed “Celebrating 40 Years of Magical Songs,” the tour (grab tickets here) kickoff saw both longtime and Gen Z-aged fans rubbing shoulders with each other like friends, with everyone seeming to be in agreement that the Liverpool act won’t be on the road forever. Save for a few festival sets, the Atlanta gig marked the band’s first outing since a UK tour in March, and anticipation Stateside has been high. Unfortunately, vocalist Ian McCulloch was under the weather, as the band confirmed on social media after the set. At one point, McCulloch left the stage for about 20 minutes, while ...
The Undeclared War Is a Prescient But Ponderous Cyberthriller: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2024, and a post-Brexit Great Britain faces a general election beset on all sides with misinformation, anti-government grievance, and stark division on all sides. What’s more, a foreign cyberattack hits the country’s Internet access, hitting everything except social media. Luckily, it hits the same day 21-year-old student Saara Parvan (newcomer Hannah Khalique-Brown) starts her work placement stint at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s first defense against cyberterrorism. She quickly figures out how to disable it, and even finds a second exploit that would have further crippled England’s infrastructure. It’s a hollow victory, though, as the young Muslim woman struggles to fit into the “tediously male, stale, and pale” organization even after her im...
Megan Thee Stallion’s Traumazine Is a Kaleidoscope of Pain and Gain
Do not let the title of Megan Thee Stallion’s sophomore album, Traumazine, fool you — she is stronger than ever, even as she processes her pain through vulnerability. Honesty is at the heart of working through any kind of trauma, and Megan has decided to let us into her process. Meg comes out swinging with “NDA,” finding pockets within pockets of the beat — one of her greatest assets as a rapper. “I ain’t perfect, but anything I did to any of you n****s, y’all deserved it/ You see me in that mode, don’t disturb me when I’m workin’,” she declares. She’s focused over the entire 51 minutes of the project, zeroing in on the intensity that pulsed beneath the surface of her earlier mixtapes Tina Snow and Fever. Traumazine (released Friday, August 12th) is absent of obvious club bangers, which wi...
Better Call Saul Series Finale Review: This Is How They Get You
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the series finale of Better Call Saul, “Saul Gone.”] Sometimes you hit play on an episode of television and see the runtime and groan to yourself, “This did not need to be longer than an hour.” But with the Better Call Saul series finale, coming in at a cool 70-plus minutes (per AMC+, anyway), every extra second of goodbye was quite welcome. After Gene Takovic (Bob Odenkirk)’s unsuccessful attempt to flee the law, as summoned by that nice old lady Marion (Carol Burnett), the identity of Gene is shed forever (following one last diligent phone call to Krista at Cinnabon). Instead, Saul Goodman suits up (eventually literally), using his formidable weaseling abilities to weasel out of “life plus 190 years” for the many, many crimes he com...
Orphan: First Kill Is the Most Bonkers Horror Prequel In Years: Review
The Pitch: Remember Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the precocious tot who turned out to be a thirtysomething psychopath from Estonia with hypopituitarism? The one who terrified Vera Farmiga and her well-to-do New England family in 2009’s surprisingly chilling Orphan? In the grand tradition of Annabelle: Creation and Ouija: O-ouija-n of Evil, The Boy director William Brent Bell takes us back to Esther’s beginnings, thirteen years later and with a fraction of the budget. Perhaps “beginnings” is a bit of a stretch, to be fair: a more accurate title would be Orphan: Second (or Maybe Third?) Kill, as we’re introduced to little Leena in 2007 Estonia, two years prior to the first film’s events. She’s not Esther yet, but she has already offed her first host family, the one Ver...
Archer Season 13 Retains the Show’s Signature Amusement and Absurdity: Review
The Pitch: Typically, the longer a hit program goes on, the harder it is for it to maintain its quality and relevance. Thus, Archer’s ability to mostly preserve its trademark wittiness, ridiculousness, and audaciousness across 12 seasons (and 12 years) is commendable. Admittedly, some fans and reviewers feel that it’s fallen from grace in some ways — and maybe it has — but it’s hard to deny that the show remains immensely clever, fun, and (at times) moving. The Season 12 finale “Mission: Difficult” cemented all of that very well. For one thing, it found its lovable band of dysfunctional spies dishing out plenty of biting quips and explosive action before ultimately being acquired by a rival company called the International Intelligence Agency, or IIA, run by British mogul Fabian Kingsworth...
Tales of the Walking Dead Somewhat Succeeds at Putting Fresh Paint on a Fading Franchise: Review
The Pitch: The Walking Dead, the flagship show of the long-running zombie apocalypse franchise, is finally coming to an end later this year after 11 seasons. But the Walking Dead universe is showing no signs of slowing down, with multiple spin-offs on the horizon, including ones for fan-favorite Daryl as well as Maggie and Negan, but the first to premiere is the anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead. The series, created by Walking Dead honcho Scott M. Gimple and franchise stalwart Channing Powell, gives a level of freedom never seen before in the Walking Dead universe, allowing new writers, directors, and stars to tell stand-alone tales of the zombie outbreak. As with any anthology, quality can vary wildly between entries, but the three episodes provided for review are more good than ...
Review: Aubrey Plaza Breaks Bad in the Tense Thriller Emily the Criminal
This review was part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Emily (Aubrey Plaza) just can’t catch a break. She’s a college dropout, reeling from a felony aggravated assault conviction that follows her to every job interview, tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt weighing her down like a ball and chain. It’s calcified her to the world, approaching each new interview just waiting for the next reason she’ll be rejected. All she’s got to her name are her wits and a can of pepper spray. But a rare opportunity appears when a coworker at her degrading catering gig turns her onto a way to make some extra money: show up at a warehouse at the proper hour, perform a small-scale credit card scam with boosted flatscreens, and you earn $200 in an hour. You ...
Day Shift Review: Jamie Foxx’s Vampire Hunter Movie Boasts Great Fight Scenes and Formulaic Comedic Beats
The Pitch: Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) is a San Fernando Valley pool cleaner, but his mundane job is a cover for other, more exciting work. Casing the house next door while skimming a pool, he puts on a ski mask, loads up on weapons, and storms inside. The resident, a frightened old woman, asks “Who are you? What are you doing in my room?” Without answering, Bud blasts away at her with a shotgun. The woman, revealing herself as a vampire and baring her fangs, stands up with a gaping hole in her torso, and begins fighting back. Day Shift is the directorial debut of J.J. Perry, a veteran stuntman who played Scorpion and other masked fighters in 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and choreographed the intense fight scenes in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. And the scene that opens the vampire hu...
Matt Stone and Trey Parker Celebrate 25 Years of South Park with RUSH, Primus, and Ween
A small girl sarcastically sang “JOE BIDEN TOOK OUR JOBS!” into a microphone while South Park co-creator Matt Stone laughed uproariously, Dean and Gene Ween provided backup vocals, Primus’ Les Claypool played bass and Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush sat silently smiling. The plumes of smoke emanating from the 9,545 fans jammed into Red Rocks Amphitheatre were especially thick at this moment on Wednesday night (August 10th). It was the second of two sold-out South Park 25th-anniversary shows, starring Stone and his partner, Trey Parker, as ringleaders of a circus in which Ween performed on stage left, Primus manned stage right and “Blame Canada,” “Uncle Fucka,” “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” and other profane “South Park” classics wafted from the middle. If the satire didn’t always come ...
A League of Their Own Review: The Series Adaptation Remixes the Classic Film From Overlooked Points-of-View
The Pitch: You might think you know this story… but you don’t. The Penny Marshall film A League of Their Own, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, was a landmark production as well as a damn great sports movie, chronicling the inaugural season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, despite the 1943-era sexism that had men chanting from the stands, “Girls can’t play ball!” As groundbreaking as the original film was, 1992 was a long time ago. So in creating a new take on A League of Their Own as a TV show, co-creators Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and Will Graham (Mozart In the Jungle) have effectively made a remix of the original film, fully centered in the underrepresented voices that, in the movie, only lurked at the edges of the frame. The story is still focused on h...
