It’s true: Nicolas Winding Refn is an acquired taste. It’s true also that after Too Old to Die Young, the ferocious Amazon Prime series he co-created with comics writer Ed Brubaker, the acquisition of that taste should be required by law. An experiment in bold colors, long takes, laconic performances, tedium, horror, disorienting bursts of the supernatural, and no-bones-about-it criticism of the police as a fascist vanguard, TOtDY is, without qualification, one of the very best television shows ever made. NWR 1, his critics 0.

So what does the guy responsible for Drive and The Neon Demon do for a small-screen encore? He makes Copenhagen Cowboy, his first effort in his native Danish since before Ryan Gosling was even a glimmer in his eye. He shifts the scene from the dying American empire to the equally moribund European project. He makes his protagonist a nearly mute magical female sex worker instead of a nearly mute pedophile male cop. He cuts the running time way, way down. He moves from Amazon to Netflix. And he still knocks it out of the fucking park.

I’m so excited to be covering Nicolas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

More shows should be insanely, insanely violent with people crying about how much they love each other all the time. Maybe all shows should be that way? At least that’s how I feel about watching this season finale. It clocks in at an overlong 75 minutes or so minus the credits, its central conceit is an hallucinatory dream-within-a-dream the solution of which you can see coming from a mile away, it concludes with basically hand-waving away the entire series to date Wizard of Oz style before one last “…or is it?!?” twist, and guess what? I still loved it. Didn’t you?

I reviewed the season finale of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

Let’s get a few things out of the way right up front.

Do people who aren’t gymnasts or trained professional wrestlers fly a dozen feet through the air turning corkscrews all the while after being kicked or thrown by even a very strong person? No, they do not. 

Can someone survive being strafed by an automatic weapon at point blank range, long enough to crawl around and pine for the person they love? No, they cannot. 

Is it feasible for — let me count here — nine major protagonists and antagonists to survive being shot, stabbed, beaten, run over, bashed against concrete, set on fire, blown up, launched through a plate-glass second-story window, or all of the above, and live long enough to tell the tale, or at the very least have poignant last words before they die? No, it is not.

Does any of this make this episode of Alice in Borderland any less badass? No, it does not.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Alice in Borderland Season 2 for Decider.

It would be a mistake to kick off this review of by saying “shit is getting real.” On Alice in Borderland, shit has been real since the very first episode, or certainly since the main-character bloodbath in Season 1 Episode 3. It’s just that the episodes seem to be getting longer — this one clocks in around 70 minutes minus the lengthy closing credits — and more jam-packed with stuff, as the scattered cast continues pursuing their own, uh, pursuits. Some of these end in naked makeout sessions in a hot springs while elephants bathe nearby. Others end with people getting melted by sulfuric acid. Such is life in the Borderland.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Alice in Borderland Season 2.

Rather than start with a plot summary, I just want to point out director Shinsuke Sato’s eye for spectacular imagery and his team’s ability to pull it off. Arisu walking around the outskirts of the city and discovering that entire streets and skyscrapers have been somehow overrun with vegetation. Usagi and Arisu playing a lethal game of tag in a huge open-walled power plant or something, the camera gliding around outside it as we watch players wearing red and blue light-up vests run and climb and dodge like crazed worker ants in an anthill someone’s spraying with a hose. Ann (remember her?) traveling as far as she can away from Tokyo only to discover a mountain range that would give Mordor a run for its money. (It’s a better shot than anything I saw in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, that’s for sure.) This is the kind of shit that keeps you coming back.

I reviewed episode five of Alice in Borderland Season 2 for Decider.

The second episode in a row to feature a sort of halftime break between different stories, this installment of Alice in Borderland is, I think, the least relentless ep in the second season so far. Which is fine! Everyone needs a breather now and then, and that extends to the audience as well as the players. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of murder going down, but following the intensity of the three-episode-long King of Clubs arc and the Saw-like start of the Jack of Hearts game, this is relatively — relatively — chill stuff.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Alice in Borderland Season 2 for Decider.

The third episode of Alice in Borderland’s second season is a terrific hour of television that should probably have been two terrific half-hours of television.

I reviewed Alice in Borderland Season 2’s third episode for Decider.

Well, this may be the simplest Alice in Borderland episode of all time. Not the rules of the game that Arisu and company are playing mind you — those are the most convoluted in the history of the series, though you can get the hang of it quickly. (The players do!) The plot, rather, is streamlined and straightforward. There’s a game, they play it, they don’t leave the arena, they don’t even finish the game and move on. The result is an Alice in Borderland that reads as 100% pure and uncut Alice in Borderland. This is what it’s all about.

I reviewed the second episode of Alice in Borderland‘s second season for Decider.

So here’s the pitfall for those of us who want to sound smart while enjoying Alice in Borderland. You know how Squid Game, the similarly themed Korean show about average joes forced to kill or be killed by mystery-shrouded game masters, is sort of about the dehumanizing power of capitalism? Alice in Borderland is pretty much just about the pleasure of watching gorgeous actors run around killing and rescuing each other.

This is not a complaint! That’s cinema, baby!

I’m covering the Japanese thriller Alice in Borderland‘s second season for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. Woo!

Well, you’ve certainly got to give it up for Jennifer Coolidge, that’s for one thing. A lot of Coolidge fandom is that weird performative thing that all actor fandoms seem to do at this point where it’s more like you want this person to be your parent or best friend than a dude who happens to be really good at acting, but let’s put that aside, because she really is good at acting! It’s hard to convincingly play a stupid person without it devolving into a million old jokes, and Coolidge has consistently pulled that off as Tanya. This episode in particular is the ne plus ultra of the role, as Coolidge portrays Tanya’s final realization that she’s surrounded by men who intend to murder her for her money like a cocker spaniel figuring out calculus.

I reviewed the season finale of The White Lotus for Decider.

Are there dramatic moments that moved me, or comedic moments that made me laugh? Very much so! Bert’s open distress as he connects his failed family reunion with the fact that he’ll never be romantically or maternally loved again. Quentin telling Tanya that doing coke after a prolonged period of abstinence is like “riding a bike.” Jack semi-drunkenly asserting that we live at the best point in history despite all the signs to the contrary, which have been brought up by Portia primarily to burst his bubble rather than to make any kind of real point. Harper and Ethan’s grueling conversation about whether or not their marriage is dead, the tightest and hardest-hitting discussion of relatable human misery in the show’s history, I think. Ethan’s increasingly insufferable stone-faced fury at it all. The revelation that Isabella and Rocco are engaged. The genuine sexual chemistry between Valentina and Mia.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.

My emotional journey with Season 2 of The White Lotus continues to take unexpected twists and turns. I’ve been entertained, bored, vaguely disdainful, but as of this week’s episode (“That’s Amore”) I’m disconcerted. Like, what if Mike White is right? What if people really are like this — all of them grasping, self-deluded, hypocritical assholes? What if my friends and loved ones are secretly like this. What if I’m secretly like this? How can I ever have a healthy, trusting relationship of any kind ever again? How can society survive???

I reviewed the fifth episode of The White Lotus Season 2 for Decider.

So it was a mixed bag, this White Lotus ep. In a way, I can’t help but admire White for trying to stuff so many different things inside that bag, and the result may have been the most entertained I’ve been by an episode this season. I just wish the results more consistently matched the ambition.

I reviewed episode four of The White Lotus Season 2 for Decider.

If anything ties Andor together, it’s this: a conviction that great things are made from small pieces, painstakingly assembled. It was true of the bomb, it’s true of whatever they were building in that prison (a post-credits scene reveals it to be components for the planet-killing weapons system on the Death Star), it’s true of the growing Rebellion, and it’s true of Cassian Andor himself, a lowlife who’s gone from scrambling to survive to fighting for something much larger than himself. It’s amazing to see a Star Wars story this thoughtfully constructed, adding brick to brick to brick until the most impressive story that universe has seen in two decades is right there before our eyes.

I reviewed the season finale of the truly excellent Andor for Decider.

Thinking about the show overall, the hamfisted, ill-fitting music cues seem part and parcel of Friese and bo Odar’s decision to abandon the slow and subtle approach that made their first Netflix series Dark so effective and affecting in favor of balls-to-the-wall pacing and storytelling. There are more MiNd-bLoWiNg ReVeLaTiOnS in any given 1899 episode than there were in Dark’s entire first season. While I respect the decision to just go buckwild in theory, in practice, it just didn’t work out.

I reviewed the season finale of 1899 for Decider. It’s a bummer this show isn’t better.

But the stars of this particular episode are, well, the stars of this particular episode. Virtually every actor stranded aboard the Kerberos seems to be going for broke in this one, digging into depths of grief and despair and hope and love only hinted at previously. Emily Beecham, Aneurin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann, Miguel Bernardeau, José Pimentão, Isabella Wei, Yann Gael, Mathilde Ollivier, Jonas Bloquet, Rosalie Craig, Maciej Musiał, Clara Rosager, Maria Erwolter, Alexandre Willaume, Isaak Dentler, Fflyn Edwards — just go-for-broke work from all of them, top to bottom.

I reviewed episode 7 of 1899 for Decider.

But behind the show’s genre elements are, ostensibly, human stories designed to give those elements heft and weight. Nothing we’ve seen thus far feels weightier than what we see Tove survive. What’s more, to the extent 1899 is serious at all about its by-now obvious allegorical resonance with real-world refugee and resource crises, accurately depicting an act of violence as hideous and traumatic rather than stylized and dramatic is necessary to get the point across. The show is treating this as the terrible crime it is, and not allowing the audience to look away. 

I reviewed the sixth episode of 1899, which took a turn for the brutal that was both upsetting and necessary, for Decider.

As previously mentioned, I grow less and less convinced that 1899 has big things to say about anything in particular as the show progresses. To the extent that it’s any fun at all, it’s purely down to the sci-fi hijinks and the overall murky tone that accompanies them. It’s binge-y stuff, and who knows? Maybe that’s enough.

I reviewed episode five of 1899 for Decider.

Okay, I get it now: 1899 is Lost. It’s just Lost! I mean, it’s Lost with no jokes and no heart-tugging Michael Giacchino score, which is to say that tonally it’s way, way different — different enough, I think, to insulate it from rip-off charges. But: trapped in the middle of the ocean because something went wrong with the vehicle you were using to cross it. A motley crew of passengers fleeing their troubled pasts. Secret connections between them. Mechanically induced teleportation. Mysterious strangers. Mysterious symbols. Maybe an eccentric gazillionaire behind it all. A boy with special powers. (Remember, that was an important part of Lost, once upon a time, before the showrunners realized children age in real time even if the characters on your show do not!) And flashbacks, hoo boy, flashbacks. Literally and figuratively, it’s Lost at Sea.

I reviewed the fourth episode of 1899 for Decider.

One thing 1899 has going for it, despite my present reservations, is its apparent determination to barrel full speed ahead into the weird. I mean, this is only the third episode, and already entire steam ships are disappearing into ruptures in the spacetime continuum opened by strange machinery. It took Lost years to get there; it took 1899 three hours. That’s storytelling confidence, is what that is. Let’s just hope it’s warranted.

I reviewed the third episode of 1899 for Decider.