In a way, Under the Banner of Heaven winds up being as much about fragile masculinity as it is about religion, though religion no doubt shaped the masculinity of the people involved. When Ron’s estranged wife Dianna returns to town in hopes of rescuing the other brothers’ wives before it’s too late, she confronts their brother Sam. “You’re not special,” she tells him, arguing that he and the other brothers turned to fundamentalism because they were unable to confront their own failures.

And that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? A failing chiropractic practice, a failing construction company, a refusal to pay fines and taxes—this is the quotidian bad luck and bad decisions that led the Lafferty brothers to collectively go mad. Every setback is refashioned into a challenge to be overcome with ever more fervent and violent faith. Anything but admitting that such mighty men as they could possibly have steered the plane into the mountain on their own.

Ditto the polygamy concept. These small little men, losing control in other aspects of their lives, no doubt treasured the power and thrill of having multiple wives (or “wives,” in the sense that simply having sex with a woman constitutes marriage to them). It’s an extension of the control they wish to have over their own original wives, and a reflection of the misogynistic rage that drove them to kill Brenda Lafferty and her daughter over her perceived meddling in their affairs. 

I reviewed the finale of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

Bernthal makes it clear that Jenkins does not see himself as a dirty cop—he reacts in horror several times when this allegation is made—but rather as a resourceful one, a guy who sees all the angles and commits a series of victimless crimes. The fact that innocent people are routinely brutalized and, in the case of one high-speed chase, accidentally killed during the course of his work doesn’t really concern him. He feels he meant well, and that’s all that matters.

That’s a tall order for any actor to convey, but Bernthal somehow makes it look easy. From underneath a series of world-historically unfortunate haircuts, his dark brown eyes radiate a sort of idiot good cheer. (When that good cheer goes away at the end of the story, those same eyes become the dim dark eyes of a hit dog, wondering what went so wrong.) Bernthal gives a physical performance that indeed makes Jenkins look like he owns this city and everyone in it. Indeed, he’s often polite to the point of comedy to the very people he arrests, robs, and/or frames. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a good guy, right? Call it noblesse oblige, call it whatever you want: Bernthal radiates a lethal “who, me?” charm even at his character’s most brutal moments.

I tried to explain what makes Jon Bernthal so good for Decider.

For his part, Obi-Wan mostly gets wrecked, which is to be expected—he’s facing the most powerful former Jedi in the galaxy, a guy who’s been using unchecked power for years instead of hiding in a cave in the desert someplace. But it lacks the drama and power called for by the moment—a poor follow-up to their final battle in Revenge of the Sith, which even most prequel haters seem to appreciate.

The new rendez-vous also calls into question the conversation he has with Vader during their fateful duel aboard the Death Star in the first Star Wars movie, about how when they last met, Vader was his student. As with Leia, who now has canonically spent time with Ben Kenobi prior to her plea for his help in A New Hope, there’s now an extra wrinkle to the Kenobi/Vader timeline, and I’m not convinced it makes sense, or that the payoff here was worth monkeying with the continuity.

And that’s the big question dogging Obi-Wan Kenobi. Is it pleasant to spend more time with Ewan McGregor in the title role? Absolutely. Is it fun to hear James Earl Jones’s voice coming out of Vader’s mask, and to catch blink-and-you’ll-miss-him glimpses of Hayden Christensen as the once and future Anakin Skywalker? You bet. But does the story that reacquaints us with these characters have both the logic and the emotional heft to make it worth telling, in the end? On this matter, the Force is hazy.

I reviewed today’s episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

And I’m left sounding like a broken record, because the show’s pros and cons have remained constant right up through the end. Jon Bernthal delivers a for-the-ages villain performance as Jenkins, the jolliest goon in the entire BPD. Jamie Hector imbues (relatively) good cop Sean Suiter with intensity and pathos. And the show’s thesis, repeated once again by Grabler, that the War on Drugs is what turned policing into the brutal business we know and loathe today still doesn’t hold water.

Look back through the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, environmental protests, gay liberation, fucking Prohibition, you name it—the police have been a brutally reactionary right-wing force for decades before the War on Drugs’ militaristic terminology took effect. Writer-creator David Simon’s belief in some platonic ideal of Good Policing, something that once existed and which could perhaps be revived if the drug war were abandoned, remains his and the show’s biggest blind spot.

I reviewed the finale of We Own This City for Decider.

And where are we left, in the end? With Dan Lafferty’s browbeaten wife Mathilda, staring at the ground as if remembering her lines as she warns Brenda about blood atonement. With Jacob Lafferty, brain damaged by his father’s beating, sticking up a convenience store. With Detective Bill Taba arriving at Onias’s dream mine, invited in by the bearded racist himself. With Pyre, sobbing in his car in his home’s garage. In all cases, faith does not heal, it destroys. With only one episode to go, the only question is how deep the damage will go.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

What we’ve got in this episode amounts to a fairly serious retcon of the relationship between Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Previously, he was simply the legendary warrior to whom a desperate Leia reached out for help as Darth Vader’s forces attacked her ship. Thanks to the event of this episode, though, he’s now a person she would remember, recognize, and most likely treasure for rescuing her as a kid. You can probably square this away with how Leia reacts to his presence in A New Hope—her excited cry of “Ben Kenobi?!?” when Luke tells her the old Jedi is on the Death Star with them now feels more justified, for example—but speaking personally, I’d have kept him an aloof and mysterious figure. This feels a little like how the prequels randomly made C-3PO a creation of Anakin Skywalker. Like, okay, but…why?

I reviewed episode two of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a school shooting. Armed gunmen burst into an academy for children and began firing at anything that moved. A teacher sacrificed her own life to protect her students, dying so that they might live.

If you came in search of escapism, look elsewhere: This is the painfully timely way in which Obi-Wan Kenobi begins. At this early stage in the series—the most ambitious live-action Star Wars project that Disney+ has yet unveiled—it’s hard to tell if this awful coincidence is for the better or for the worse. Driving home the horror wrought by the Empire and its architects gives this project an emotional heft that predecessors sometimes lacked. (In the very first Star Wars film, an entire planet—which we see in some detail here—gets blown up, and it’s barely a blip on the emotional radar.) But does the show’s story of a Jedi Master’s time in the literal wilderness merit this kind of seriousness?

I’ll be covering Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

But there’s a deeper problem with We Own This City, one that transcends its strengths and weaknesses as agitprop or institutional critique, and it’s on full display in this week’s episode. Dramatically speaking, what We Own This City lacks is characters.

Oh sure, there are plenty of people in the show, some of whose names you might even be able to remember from one week to the next. But the vast majority of those people can be split into one of two camps: exposition givers and exposition receivers.

Many of the show’s most prominent roles—investigators Sieracki, Jensen, and Wise; DOJ employees Steele and Jackson—fall into the latter category; their role is simply to interview or interrogate other people about what the hell is going on, so that we in the audience can learn.

Then there’s the other camp, the exposition givers. Crooked cops like Gondo and Rayam and Ward, people in power like the mayor and the chief of police, guest stars like Treat Williams’s cop-turned-professor Brian Grabler: They respond to the interrogators’ and interviewers’ questions to deliver information that the show then passes along to us viewers.

Both halves of the equation are dramatically inert. There’s the occasional flash of human interest I suppose, like Jensen’s flute playing (Sieracki, predictably, asks if she knows any Jethro Tull), but for the most part these people are walking, breathing Wikipedia articles or Baltimore Sun investigations. They don’t function the way characters in a drama are supposed to, living and changing and growing and surprising us.

I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

Some families are hunting grounds. In these families, the man of the house sees his wife and children not as people but as belongings. Slap a religious imprimatur on it, give it the blessing of God Himself, and there’s no telling how far things will go.

That seems to be the story of Under the Banner of Heaven as of the show’s fifth episode, titled “One Mighty and Strong.” That title refers to a prophesied leader who will return the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to its true roots. Predatory losers Dan and Ron Lafferty seize on the concept and act accordingly. The bloodshed that followed was almost a foregone conclusion.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

When I think of how Jenkins is portrayed in this episode, I think of Henry Hill’s description of Jimmy Conway in GoodFellas: “What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” In scene after scene, Jenkins makes out like a bandit. He robs drug dealers. He robs drug dealers twice, first by looting their car, then by going to their house and looting it, too. He robs a stripper, taking back the money he gave her and then some. He robs a couple of guys raiding a Rite Aid for oxycontin, then takes the drugs to his crooked bail bondsman friend to make money off the stuff he looted from the looters. He robs a dealer’s safe, then stages a video re-creation of the looting of the safe so that the missing money never goes in the public record. And in a sense, he robs all the other crooked cops in his circle by constantly keeping the lion’s share of each haul for himself. The dude just can’t help himself.

But it’s the larger community of Baltimore he’s really robbing blind. As he explains to his fellow cops, he can take an 8-to-4 shift, show up to work at 2pm, and still make enough overtime to nearly double his salary. Why? Because during the hours where he actually quote-unquote does his job, he’s constantly “hunting,” busting heads and making arrests and seizing drugs and guns and money. “As long as we produce, as long as we put those numbers up, they don’t give a shit about what we do,” he explains. “We literally can do whatever the fuck we want.” And then the kicker: “We own this city.”

I reviewed last night’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

Overall, I remain very impressed with Under the Banner of Heaven—with its fine cast, its depiction of the Lafferty family’s sort of group psychosis, and its sensitive but unsparing exploration of perhaps the most American of all religions. It almost plays like a lost season of American Crime Story, which is about the highest praise I can give a true-crime TV show. And despite knowing that the facts of the case are online for anyone to see, I find myself holding off, waiting to see what comes next.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

But ultimately there’s no solid ground to stand on. We’ll never know for sure what made Candy Montgomery chop Betty Gore to ribbons, and this is as true of the filmmakers behind Candy as it is for us viewers. If that troubles you, well, I get it.

But I don’t think that art exists to present us with answers. Good art asks questions and trusts us to answer them ourselves. That’s Candy, very good art indeed, in a nutshell. To echo Betty, that’s it.

I reviewed the finale of Candy for Decider.

Written by Elise Brown and directed by Tara Nicole Weyr, this episode (“Cover Girl”) straddles the line between black comedy and outright tragedy more than any other episode so far. There are funny bits to be found throughout the hour, from Allan admitting he doesn’t know how to change a diaper but, “Well, I am an engineer…” to him pouring the wrong kind of dish soap into the dishwasher and generating a comical overflow of bubbles. Candy’s behavior, too, is played for dark laughs, as she has to feign surprise at every new revelation. And in a flash-forward/flashback on the witness stand at the trial, Pat admits to buying his wife flowers and a card when he found out she had the affair. “I blamed myself,” he says, but they worked through it. Maybe they should have worked through it a bit harder.

But it’s when the dark humor has you off-guard that the episode really twists the knife. Child actor Antonella Rose is heartbreaking as young Christina Gore, who hums a little tune to herself in blissful ignorance as the Montgomerys drive her back to her house, where they know she’ll hear the worst news of her life. Her tears are devastating, particularly when she takes it upon herself to reassure others through those tears; when she says to her weeping grandmother “It’s okay, Grandma,” I just about lost it myself. (Aven Lotz and Dash McCloud are adorable as the Montgomery kids, too—two children who are also about to have their lives turned upside down due to their mother’s actions.) And for the first time in the series, Betty herself is nowhere to be found—no flashbacks, nothing.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Candy for Decider.

Candy is a drama about a woman who chopped her friend up with an axe over an affair that began with a literal list of pros and cons. Seriously: When we join Candy and her would-be inamorata Allan as they plot their affair, there’s a big sheet of bround paper taped to a nearby window wall with all the “Whys” and “Why Nots” written down in black marker. “Adventure :)” reads one item on the Why side, complete with a smiley face; “Could be good for spouses!?” is up there too. The Why Not that concerns Candy the most is “Danger of emotions”—though given that Allan kicks off the part of the discussion we see with that famously romantic phrase “Let’s talk logistics,” it’s not at all clear that emotions enter into the picture at all. At least it wouldn’t be clear, if it weren’t for the whole eventual axe-murder thing.

I reviewed episode three of Candy for Decider.

It was the best of cops, it was the worst of cops. That’s the contrast established by We Own This City in its third episode, in which the paths of bad cop Wayne Jenkins and good cop Sean Suiter unexpectedly cross. But the unexpected team-up between Jenkins and Suiter—once old friends going back to their rookie days, apparently—reveals another layer to the show’s intricate interweaving of different plotlines and time frames. By now the show has firmly established Jenkins as a cowboy and Suiter as a straight arrow, in very separate storylines. Seeing them together as they raid a car wash that’s a front for a drug dealer has the effect of watching the stars of two different shows suddenly cross over and team up.

I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

To paraphrase Pink Floyd paraphrasing Thoreau, hanging on in quiet desperation is the Texas way. At least that’s the impression we get from Candy‘s second episode, pointedly titled “Happy Wife, Happy Life.” Directed by Jennifer Getzinger (who, like showrunner Robin Veith and premiere director Michael Uppendahl, is a Mad Men alum) from a script by David Matthews (late of the harrowing suburban-horror series Them), it takes us deeper into the lives of Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore, before the former took the life of the latter. Neither woman is happy, but they have very different ways of coping.

I reviewed today’s episode of Candy for Decider.

You ever have one of those days? You’ve got to get the kids to their swimming lessons, but only after their Bible pageant at Sunday school. They’ve been bugging you to go see the new Star Wars movie too, so that has to go on the schedule. You murder your best friend with an axe. Father’s Day is coming up, so it’s off to Target to pick up a card. Busy, busy, busy!

I’ll be covering Candy for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. Check back in all week for each episode’s review!

There’s a secretive group of Americans out there who believe their word is law. Mostly men, though at least one woman sides with them, they are religious fanatics who believe the Constitution as originally written is a perfect document, ordained by God. To them, subsequent revisions to the laws of the land are unconstitutional, illegitimate, and most importantly immoral. They want to return to the old days, to the old ways. Keeping women in their place through having children, whether they want to or not, is key to their plan—to God’s plan, as they see it. They’ve studied and prayed all their lives, and now their time has come.

Also there was a new episode of Under the Banner of Heaven.

Sigh. “See what I did there?”, the critic asked depressively.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

And it’s an emotionally intriguing note to end on, that’s for sure—a new Marvel Cinematic Universe hero, doing something pointedly anti-heroic, or even just straight-up bad. If we do wind up getting more Moon Knight adventures, Oscar Isaac’s lightly comic performance as all of the Moon Knight collective’s individual components will be the main selling point, no question; they’re what made this show so easy and fun to watch. But after that ending, I’ll be curious to see just how grim’n’gritty the character is allowed to get. I’d imagine that white costume dirties up pretty good.

I reviewed the season finale of Moon Knight for Decider.

We Own This City knows its chief weapon is Jon Bernthal, that’s for sure. The show’s second episode is full of lingering close-ups on his character Wayne Jenkins as he does, well, nothing really—sitting and waiting in an interrogation room, in a jail cell, wherever, just impatiently thinking about his next move. Bernthal’s black-eyed charisma here is just off the charts; even in doing nothing, Jenkins feels so dangerous you don’t want to come near him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.