Category: streaming

Screening Room: ‘Ballad of a Small Player’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

My review of the latest confection from Edward Berger (Conclave) is at Slant Magazine:

Ballad of a Small Player is a fevered, neon-drenched film about a man on the run from his crimes and himself, and it wants to simultaneously revel in the glamor of high-end gambling and critique the unending gluttony that fuels it. This isn’t an unusual tack for Berger, as his All Quiet on the Western Front has a similarly confused relationship to the industrial violence that it lasciviously depicts. But this film, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name, is all about the possible spiritual redemption of spiraling gambler Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), and its ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of his world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him…

Ballad of a Small Player will be available on Netflix tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Woman in Cabin 10’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

I reviewed the adaptation of Ruth Ware’s mystery The Woman in Cabin 10 for Slant Magazine:

Simon Stone’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is a locked-room mystery in which Laura (Keira Knightley), an investigative reporter for The Guardian, is invited by mysterious billionaire couple Richard (Guy Pearce) and Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) onto their luxury yacht. The cruise to Norway, doubling as self-regarding announcement of a massive philanthropic venture and a last big party for the deathly ill Anne, has barely begun when Laura sees a woman fall overboard. Told everybody on the yacht is accounted for, Laura at first thinks that she’s being gaslit. Later, after an unseen person shoves her into a pool where she almost drowns, Laura starts to believe that she’s the next to be murdered…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Mountainhead’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

Jesse Armstrong’s new movie Mountainhead premieres on HBO May 31. I reviewed it for Slant Magazine:

By following Succession with another acid-singed comedy about a slightly different subset of 0.01 percenters, Armstrong is sticking to a kind of satire he knows well. Mountainhead’s tech bros have many pathologies familiar from the Roy family in Succession, but even though just two years have passed since that show’s finale, the landscape of wealth and power mapped by Armstrong has changed immensely—though it feels more like devolution than progress. Vicious and powerful as the Roys were, the bros of Mountainhead would have annihilated that old-tech clan’s business and net worth with the flick of an algorithm, followed by laughter…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Disclaimer’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the new Apple TV series Disclaimer was just published at Slant Magazine:

Alfonso Cuarón’s potboiler Disclaimer, an adaptation of the Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, begins with famed documentarian Catherine (Cate Blanchett) being fêted at an awards ceremony. Scenes of Catherine and her husband, Roger (Sacha Baron Cohen), living a posh life in their gorgeous London rowhouse are intercut with a storyline about a pair of students, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and Sasha (Liv Hill), having a gap-year escapade in Italy. Meanwhile, a gloomier third narrative tracks Stephen (Kevin Kline), a widowed schoolteacher who seems to have lost every reason for living except for the drive to exact vengeance on Catherine for a crime that he believes she got away with…

The seven-part series premieres October 11. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Accountant 2’ Anybody?

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Upcoming, streamingLeave a comment

After 2016’s extremely baffling action flick The Accountant found new life on Netflix and has a sequel on the way, I took a look back at the original.

An updated version of my first review is at Eyes Wide Open:

Back in April, the most popular film on Netflix was The Accountant. Subscribers were not clicking on new work like Zack Snyder’s damn-the-budget Star Wars fanfic Rebel Moon or Adam Sandler’s Spaceman. Instead, they wanted a 2016 thriller best remembered for all the popcorn it unintentionally caused audience members to spit out in baffled laughter…

TV Room: ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the new adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres this Friday, ran today in Slant Magazine:

Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow was published in 2016, five years before Russia’s top opposition leader (and Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe) Alexei Navalny returned to his homeland and was immediately imprisoned. Showtime’s eight-part adaptation of Towles’s novel, about a Navalny-like political prisoner in Russia, serendipitously makes its premiere not long after Navalny died in a Russian prison camp. But the comparisons between reality and fiction largely end there. A Gentleman in Moscow is a glossy, romanticized series that mostly suggests rather than shows the horrors of a totalitarian regime…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: Best Shows of 2023

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment
Reservation Dogs (Hulu)

Slant Magazine just published their big year-end TV roundup for 2023. I contributed the intro and wrote about one of my favorite shows from the past year, Fleishman Is in Trouble.

Read it here:

We’re well into the so-called post-Peak TV era. Tightening budgets and consolidating streaming platforms suggest an uncertain future for the medium. With the exception of new staples like The Last of Us and Poker Face, many of the best television shows of 2023 wrapped things up with their final seasons (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Succession, Barry, Reservation Dogs) or had only limited runs (Dead Ringers, Fleishman Is in Trouble). And due to the Hollywood strikes, the TV landscape could look quite different by this time next year…

Screening Room: ‘Pain Hustlers’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

My review of the new movie Pain Hustlers is at Slant:

David Yates’s Pain Hustlers puffs itself up as a dynamic epic about the American dream but ends up glorifying some truly grotesque characters. Wells Tower’s script pulls loosely from Evan Hughes’s book about how executives at pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics were convicted in 2019 of conspiring to bribe doctors to overprescribe the fentanyl spray Subsys. The story has every ingredient for gripping melodrama: greed, timeliness, money, drugs, death, betrayal, and an Icarus-like fall. Thomas Jennings’s Frontline episode “Opioids, Inc.” and the second part of Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century have already turned the sordid tale into powerful, infuriating nonfiction. But in the course of fictionalizing the Insys story, Yates and Tower lose sight of what made it compelling to begin with…

If you want the better nonfiction take I mentioned, The Crime of the Century is on HBO. If not, Pain Hustlers is on Netflix right now.

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: 10 Best ‘Community’ Episodes

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

So what were the ten best episodes of Community? Glad you asked! I made a stab at ranking them for Slant:

The most common criticism levied against NBC’s Community during its chaotic and generally acclaimed six-season run was that it was all snark and no heart. It’s a complaint that’s been levied at many self-aware, pop culture-literate works by Gen Xers. But in this case, it was flat-out wrong. Threaded alongside creator Dan Harmon’s meta-sitcom-as-sitcom commentary was a poignant and gut-twisting look at loneliness and purpose that suggested that even being part of a co-dependent hot mess of a friend group was better than navigating life solo…

Final word goes to Troy and Abed:

Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘Six Seasons and a Movie’ is on Sale!

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, DVD - Television, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

So it’s official, the latest book that I threw words at is in bookstores and on all your better Internet-y sites. Co-written with my Monty Python FAQ fellow travelers, Six Seasons and a Movie: How Community Broke Television is an episode-by-episode trawl through one of the greatest sitcoms too many people have never heard of.

It also includes scads of research into the cast and crew, including creator Dan Harmon who went on to do a wee little thing called Rick & Morty and Donald Glover who went on to do just about anything he wanted.

Here’s what our publisher says:

Covering everything from the corporate politics that Harmon and his team endured at NBC to the Easter eggs they embedded in countless episodes, Community: The Show that Broke Television is a rich and heartfelt look at a series that broke the mold of TV sitcoms…

Indeed! Watch the show, read the book, enjoy.

Last word to Troy and Abed (books!):

Screening Room: ‘El Conde’ Dilutes the Horror of Pinochet

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-Foreign, streamingLeave a comment

The new movie from Pablo Larrain (Ema, Spencer) has a decidedly different take on the horrors perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet during his reign of power in Chile.

My review is at PopMatters:

El Conde, an alternately ambitious and maddening attempt to reckon with one of the 20th century’s ugliest villains, does not take Pinochet at face value. Larraín and his frequent co-writer Guillermo Calderon do not dwell on the free market capitalist, career army officer, and power-mad dictator known by the world. Instead, they imagine Pinochet as a 250-year-old French vampire who nearly gets staked to death in the revolution. A reactionary from the jump, he wanders the world as a mercenary helping to put down revolutions in Russia and Haiti before ending up in South America under a new identity…

El Conde is on Netflix now. The trailer is here.

TV Room: ‘The Afterparty’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

The second season of The Afterparty ran its last episode this week. I wrote about the show as an example of the maybe-soon-to-disappear peak streaming show for PopMatters:

Shows like The Afterparty will probably not even get greenlit in a few years. Once the streaming services start merging and slashing production schedules, things are more likely to revert to the televisual mean: Simple, easily replicated formulas generated on an industrial scale. (Tiffany Haddish in a Murder, She Wrote reboot, with self-contained mysteries solved in a half-hour, sprinkled with a handful of slightly self-aware jokes to pretend at relevance? That will get picked up for 30 episodes.) An odd, ornately designed, low-key funny, and highly expensive concept like The Afterparty is unlikely to be seen as a good investment in the near future…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Extrapolations’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations ran on PopMatters:

One difference between The Day After Tomorrow and the release of Scott Z. Burns’ eight-episode Apple TV+ climate change anthology series Extrapolations in 2023 is that now the human causes of environmental disaster can be openly discussed in a big-budget science-fiction production. The issue has become less contentious as the potential for catastrophe looms. A broader swath of the public now understands that human activity is heating the planet. Even some diehard denialists have started to acknowledge the fact of sinking coastlines and scorching summers. While such half-hearted converts are often still resolutely opposed to conservation, preferring techno-solutions (cloud seeding, fusion reactors) or reality-detached boosterism (warming temperatures mean farming in Greenland!), this mind-shift is still progress…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

The last season of Amazon’s highly addictive The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a screwball comedy as filtered through Mad Men and mid-1960s Broadway farce, starts this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

Through its first four seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kept an increasing number of plates spinning at a speed that could leave you at once in disbelief and laughter, and always felt on the brink of losing sight of its main story and character. The fifth and final season of the Amazon dramedy is a course correction of sorts, paring back the clamorous side plots that had started taking up too much of the show’s oxygen while retaining its electric spirit…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Escape from Kabul’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film-Documentary, streamingLeave a comment

The new documentary Escape from Kabul premieres this Wednesday on HBO.

My review is at The Playlist:

Jamie Roberts’ terse, painfully precise documentary “Escape from Kabul” zooms right in on one episode—the massive last-minute airlift of Afghans and remaining American personnel from Kabul in August 2021—and never looks away, even when you might wish that it did. It’s a close-quarters kind of war film that moves in tight and leaves little room to breathe. This seems an appropriate stylistic decision for a movie that is mainly about tens of thousands of people trying to escape a country as it is being reclaimed by medieval fanatics whose promises of equitable treatment were not widely believed…

Here’s the trailer: