Tag: Apple TV

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 Pigeon Tunnel’

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

My review of Errol Morris’ new documentary about master spy novelist and professional faker John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel, which premieres on Apple TV this Friday, is at PopMatters:

A run-of-the-mill con artist steals from you with a clever ruse or when you look the other way. The top-notch con artist can look you in the eye, explain he is about to deceive you, and then get away with it anyway. After watching Errol Morris’ sleekly enrapturing John le Carré documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, you cannot help but think what a clever truth-telling chap the film’s subject is, with all his talk about the fungibility of truth and the art of deception and forget he might be pinching your wallet at that moment…

Here is the trailer:

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: ‘Slow Horses’

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

The new Apple TV series Slow Horses is an adaptation of the first entry in Mick Herron’s superbly semicomic spy novels. It stars Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas and premieres this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

The six-episode series at times recalls The Americans, with which it shares an executive producer, Graham Yost, and an appreciation for the workaday realities of spies’ tradecraft, as well as a tendency to resort to sudden bloodletting. Slow Horses similarly breathes life into a somewhat moribund genre due to its grumpy antihero, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), and the nontraditional gaggle of spies whom he has to rely on to save the day…

Here’s the trailer: