MobLand is not thinking deep thoughts. That’s a compliment. Unlike, say, The Last of Us, this show about violent people doesn’t spend its runtime weeping and sweating and getting stress hives as it LarryDavidCantDecide.gif’s the morality of torture and murder. Turns out it’s not that deep. The characters on MobLand revenge-kill each other in painfully theatrically ways because they’re not good people. Simple as. Creator Ronan Bennett and his cowriter Jez Butterworth have no interest in trying to persuade you otherwise. After the carnage of this particular outing, they couldn’t if they tried.

[…]

I’ll tell you what is good, though: Tom Hardy, action antihero. I never wanna see this actor do this kind of bang-bang shoot’em-up style stuff wearing a uniform or a badge, unless he’s explicitly playing a bad cop. As all his best roles prove, Hardy is an agent of chaos, a fly in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench, a pain in the ass. He shoots people to prove he means business, he uses unarmed men as human shields to open doors he knows are heavily guarded, he interrogates a man he disemboweled. The closest this man should ever get to playing a cop is if they ever need to reboot the Punisher. 

And for what, by the way? For what reason is he killing a couple dozen people, creating scores of grieving wives and husbands and mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and friends and coworkers? Why is he giving dozens of families just as much cause to launch a vendetta as the Stevensons and the Harrigans themselves have? Because he’s a Harrigan soldier, and Harrigan lives are more important, and he’s gonna kill and torture whoever he has to in order to save those Harrigans. Again, simple as. We’re not asked to understand, we’re not asked to excuse, we’re not asked to forgive. This guy’s a scumbag. It’s just that because he’s the star of the show, he’s our scumbag.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

To sum up: This episode is a dull recreation of a kind of gameplay that’s a lot more exciting when you’re actually playing a game, culminating in the hero of the piece torturing a helpless woman. I can only envy you if you find this diverting.

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.

UNCONTROLLABLE URGES: HORNY PUNK 1969-1983

Sweaty, desperate, down bad tracks that need it all through the night, from in and around the punk explosion

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

For a while now I’ve been making playlists exploring certain (mostly nocturnal, mostly sexy) vibes. Each one is 23 tracks and each one is straight fire. I’ve been sharing them with my friends and on Bluesky, but it occurred to me I’ve never done so here. Let me rectify that!

NIGHT YACHT

Yacht rock and yacht rock adjacent music for a moonlit pleasure cruise

Apple Music | Spotify | Youtube

NIGHT YACHT 2

A second soundtrack for romance and glamour at sea after sunset, in the key of yacht rock and its fellow voyagers

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

NOW APPROACHING MIDNIGHT: AMERICAN TRIP-HOP

Hazy, smoky, sexy pre-millennium grooves from across hip-hop, r&b, and alternative, all made in the USA

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

DOIN’ IT AFTER DARK: DISCO NIGHTS 1972-1981

Select classics from a nocturnal genre, more or less chronologically

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

80s SEX BOT POP ROCKS

Mirror-shiny dance/rock/pop with an aggressive strut and a one track mind

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

RETURN OF 80s SEX BOT POP ROCKS

More chrome-plated, hot-blooded dance/rock/pop classixxx

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

Happy listening! And if you celebrate, Happy Mother’s Day!

When a murderous campaign of wholesale destruction abroad is used to justify widespread repression at home, when few members even of the nominal opposition party will say the things we know to be true, when no one seems willing to use the words we know must be used…I’d like to say it’s heartening, even thrilling, to hear the word “genocide” used by a fictional senator on a television program. But it’s also humiliating that our leaders don’t see fit to talk to us with the honesty of a Star Wars character — and frightening to see how rapidly speaking honestly about what is happening both in Gaza and here at home is being criminalized.

I reviewed the ninth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

It’s frankly astonishing how well writer Dan Gilroy and director Janus Metz create a taut and tragic political action thriller, working within the contours of the Star Wars sensibility and aesthetic while making them feel fresh and new. In much the same way that the previous episode recaptured the magic and mystery of the Force, this one conveys the menace of the Empire as though we’d never seen it in action before.

The stormtroopers’ death’s-head helmets are menacing, their meaning plain. When Syril walks into a safe room in the Imperial building only to find it primarily occupied by hulking security droids with their own skull-like faces, his fear is easy to relate to. The TIE fighters screeching overhead once again come across like the cries of the sorcerous Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings. This is the machinery of death, and not even Syril and Dedra can deny it any longer. 

But the superb costuming and sound design put a new spin on the look and feel of the Rebellion, too, from the World War II–era costuming to the unique and unsettling noise of the airhorns the protesters blow on their way to the plaza. Syril and Cassian’s brutal, sloppy fight scene is unique in the entire history of the franchise, a Duel of the Fates set in a hotel bar with glassware instead of dual-bladed lightsabers, thrumming with the violent energy of a Sopranos beatdown rather than a wuxia showcase. Actor Kyle Soller makes these final moments of catharsis feel appropriately out of control, as if this one man, this fascinating character study in how functionaries function, is a stand-in for a galaxy on the edge.

Moving, beautiful, angry, and desperately sad, Andor has done something very special here. That song is still ringing in my ears.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Cassian Andor has flown from one end of the galaxy to the other. He’s seen a lot of strange stuff. But he’s never seen anything to make him believe there’s some all-powerful Force controlling everything.

Han Solo’s doubting Thomas routine, paraphrased above, applies both to the hardened Rebel soldier and the show that tells his story. The Force, the Jedi, the Sith, Darth Vader — maybe I’m forgetting something, but I’m not sure any of these mystical elements of the Star Wars legendarium have been so much as mentioned, let alone factored into the plot. Star Wars in general is science-fantasy, or space opera; Andor is science fiction.

This has worked well for Andor. In the real world, there’s no such thing as a verifiable religion, no magical power that can be wielded either to fight or to heal. By eliminating these elements from the story while still looking and sounding and feeling very Star Wars — this despite its comparatively adult approach to the material — Andor has brought Cassian’s experience of oppression and rebellion more in line with our own. 

But keeping the Force out of its Star Wars story makes Andor‘s sudden introduction of it feel more magical and beautiful than it has since Yoda lifted Luke Skywalker’s X-wing out of the swamps of Dagobah. 

I reviewed episode 7 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Still, I think turbo-charging Ellie and Dina’s relationship, kicking it off the episode after they set out on their quest rather than saving it for some climactic moment down the line, is smart. It adds some verve to things, some spice, and that’s needed in the absence of Joel’s quiet charisma. And for all the hoary action-game tropes it employs, the long escape from the infected keeps the pace elevated. Even the sudden and brutal violence inflicted by Isaac, first on his squad and then years later on his prisoner, serves the additional purpose of simply keeping us in the audience alert, anxious, uncomfortable. These are exactly the kind of emotions a post-apocalyptic horror show should be aiming to generate. No offense to voting on motions brought before the town council, but that was no way to follow up the death of your main character. Thrills and chills are more like it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

MobLand isn’t swinging for the fences or plumbing the depths, but it’s not trying to be The Sopranos and failing, it’s trying to be a show in which a bunch of cool attractive people bark orders or dodge bullets, with Tom Hardy’s deadpan machismo as its center of gravity. It’s easy as pie to assemble a great cast, write a big genre piece for them to perform, and call it a day, counting on familiar beats and familiar faces to carry the project. It’s much harder to do this well. (Does anyone else remember Zero Day?) 

On the big screen, there’s a reason Conclave last year and Sinners this year caught on the way they did: big beautiful costumey pulse-pounding thrillers starring beloved actors that actually work are rarer these days than hen’s teeth. Both of those films are a sight more serious-minded than MobLand has shown itself to be, but the principle remains the same here. There’s a lot of unclaimed territory between tenderloin steak and fast-food franchise crap. Sometimes people just want to eat a goddamn burger. Give it to them!

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

I can’t tell you how much good it does my heart to watch a Star Wars show that’s horny. Actually horny, not just “oh look, it’s a hunky guy with his shirt off, aren’t we all excited” Kylo Ren/Steve Rogers/Disney horny. Horny enough to make Dedra Meero topping Syril Karn more or less canon. Horny enough to finally, finally have a queer kiss onscreen because, despite their danger, it’s been years, and Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz can’t keep their hands off one another. Horny enough for Bix Caleen to only semi-jokingly ask her boyfriend, Cassian Andor, to bring his glamorous fashion-designer cover identity home with him one night so she can have sex with someone “very, very pretty.” I’m all for a smoldering kiss between Han Solo and Princess Leia, don’t get me wrong, but this is something else. This is sex, not romance, or not just romance, and it makes Andor feel alive even in the midst of death.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Syril Karn is living the life of his dreams. He’s involved in highly classified work for the Imperial Security Bureau, pretending to chafe at the Empire’s yoke while secretly setting up its opponents for a sting. He’s working directly with his girlfriend, Dedra Meero, a relationship he has to keep a secret from everyone including his ghastly mother. In both cases, I can only imagine the thrill leading a double life gives to this man — particularly when one of those double lives involves Dedra in all black, commanding him to turn out the lights because they only have an hour together and they need to get down to business. Oooh-whee. Even though House of Cards creator Beau Willimon wrote this script, it feels like erotic fanfic where these two are concerned, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

I reviewed episode 5 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

But the highlight of the episode is quiet, wordless. It’s the moment of parting, when Cassian and Bix simply touch each other, hand to hand. Composer Nicholas Britell’s music is minimal yet lushly romantic here — like their love itself, I suppose, which they’ve forced into the tiny compartment left available for love by the world they inhabit. There’s something truly beautiful in that moment. These people are not deluding themselves that the world is okay, that life is okay, that their own lives are okay. But they love each other anyway, because while the government they live under does not value the things that make us human, we do, we can, and we must.

I reviewed episode 4 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There is an audience — a massive one, as Sinners proves — for forceful fuck-yous to fascism, racism, willful ignorance, gleeful sociopathy. There’s nothing delicate, nothing safe about any of it, either. People want to see antivax moms get yelled at by the guy from ER. People want a supervillainous politician as openly awful as the people currently occupying the White House and Gracie Mansion, and they want heroes who’ll take the fight right to him and his goose-stepping thugs. (You would be shocked at the sheer number of uniformed NYPD the Punisher murders alone.) They want to watch the Empire go down in flames not just at the hands of sword-wielding space wizards, but regular people who said enough of this shit and had the courage to walk the talk.

They want to see the Klan dead, and they want to see it happen at a Black man’s hands. They’re rewarding the movie that serves this up as its grand finale with history-making amounts of money. 

I wrote about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, as well as Andor, Daredevil: Born Again, and The Pitt, in a new piece for Welcome to Hell World on audiences’ voracious hunger for watching cool tough people stomp fascism into the dirt.

There are no bloody stabbings in this episode, no fight scenes, no gun battles. The only pyrotechnics to speak of — I mean, other than the car bombing — come from the tension between the Stevensons and the Harrigans, embodied in the gritted-teeth determination projected by actors Geoff Bell and Pierce Brosnan as their respective bosses. Tom Hardy remains excellent as a man who doesn’t necessarily always stay cool, but does alway stay under control. Helen Mirren is having a ball as Maeve grows increasingly ambitious and unhinged. As he did on House of the Dragon, Paddy Considine excels as a guy who’s doing a basically okay job as a figure of importance but who’d probably be better suited doing literally everything else. 

And director Daniel Syrkin peppers the thing with the occasional lovely vista: Conrad fishing as night falls over his country house, Harry on his balcony looking out over the nighttime city. The Fontaines D.C. theme song, “Starburster,” whips ass. In short, MobLand is good gangster TV.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

You can feel it right away. Even though it’s three months after the episode’s opening — in which a badly traumatized Ellie wakes up screaming in a hospital after witnessing her father figure Joel’s execution — and the good people of Jackson Hole are busy rebuilding in the spring sunshine, the sense of loss is palpable. I’m not talking about the dozens of citizens killed by the infected during their incursion into the fortified city. I’m not even talking about the death of Joel himself, not exactly. 

Pedro Pascal isn’t on this show anymore!

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.

Andor feels designed to prove that the Star Wars setting can do anything any other science fiction can do. If it’s ugly, if it’s sexy, if it’s violent, if it’s pathetic, if it’s human, it can be done way out there just as surely as it can be done down here. The Star Wars branding is just plausible deniability. This isn’t a show about the Empire and the Rebellion. It’s a show about us, because we’re both.

I reviewed the third episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

The second of three episodes released simultaneously as this season’s opening “chapter,” this episode doesn’t pack the wallop of its predecessor. That’s understandable: The thrill of being the first new episode of Andor in two years is something you can really only capture once, even if you’re debuting three of them at a time. Since the first episode already gave us the “where are they now” for almost all of these characters, there isn’t that same rush of new information to contend with either.

For the most part, anyway. Dedra and Syril forming a romantic relationship is a genuine shock. Dedra running her thumb tenderly around Syril’s mouth because her baby’s afraid of his mom is an even bigger shock. I genuinely didn’t think she had it in her! But fascists are human too, which makes this scene even creepier. Watching a genocidal space Nazi comfort the man who loves her is like watching a Black Lodge entity pretend to be human on Twin Peaks. It’s uncanny, and it only gets more so the closer to human they get.

I reviewed the second episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There comes a time when the price of inaction outweighs the price of action. There comes a time when the cost of living with your failure to do something outstrips the cost of doing something and paying the price. What Andor’s talking about is integrity — integrating your thoughts and your words with your actions. Anything less is a betrayal of your soul, and on some level you know it. That’s why committing to the fight against oppression feels so freeing. It’s not because you’re now in less danger, quite the opposite. It’s because it makes you feel like a whole human, maybe for the first time ever. Andor’s quest is to capture that feeling and transmit it to the viewer. What you do with it next is up to you.

I reviewed the season premiere of Andor for Decider. This is one of the best television shows of al ltime.

Sure, okay.

This is the big shocking episode of The Last of Us this season, I guess, the one designed to throw the viewer off balance and generate “I can’t believe they did that!” buzz. The problem is that nearly 12 years after the Red Wedding, that particular party trick is played out. I don’t mind that this episode, just the second of the show’s second season, kills off Pedro Pascal’s lead character, Joel — and that’s the problem. I don’t mind, and I don’t care.

I reviewed last night’s The Last of Us for Decider.

It occurs to me now that Harry is a Mike Ehrmantraut, as in the similarly employed cartel fixer from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Played by Jonathan Banks with the same kind of seen-it-all sad-sack professionalism Tom Hardy brings to Harry, he’s a character far more likeable than the things he does would lead you believe if you heard about them in a vacuum. Harry is a huge piece of shit, but he’s also Tom Hardy, making the most of his natural gift of coming across like a hard man with a heart of caramel. In wrestling parlance, he’s a tweener, a guy with heel tendencies who’s treated like a face by the audience. You want him to succeed, despite yourself.

I reviewed this weekend’s MobLand for Decider.