2. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

CAST: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

RATING: R

From the perspective of the Oscars, this is the most acclaimed horror movie ever made. From the perspective of a horror fan, the statuettes are well deserved. Anthony Hopkins is a monster par excellence as Hannibal Lecter, the refined cannibal killer whom Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee Clarice Starling consults for help in catching another serial murderer, the virulently misogynist and transphobic “Buffalo Bill.” The Silence of the Lambs is sad, in the way any film that’s seriously grappling with the reality of serial killers must be; it’s white-knuckle thrilling, like any good cat-and-mouse thriller; and it’s a parable of living as a woman in a world dominated by the male gaze. In other words, it’s as good as you’ve heard.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to horror on Netflix this month for Decider.

One of the best science fiction shows ever made, and one of the finest dramas of the Peak TV era, Dark ended thoughtfully, emotionally, beautifully, brilliantly.

I reviewed the series finale of Dark for Decider.

Welcome to Dark: The Lost Years.

In a way, “In Between Time” (that’s the episode title as translated by the subtitles; Netflix bills the episode as “Between the Time,” a more literal but also more nonsensical translation) is an answer to “An Endless Cycle,” Season 2’s tour de force. While that episode broke from the usual structure in order to depict a single, pivotal day in the Winden saga, the day of Michael Kahnwald/Mikkel Nielsen’s suicide, this one bounces around time and space much like most others do—but it’s the times to which it bounces that are the key. We visit the years in between the pivotal years, the years that fall outside of the show’s 33-year time-traveling cycles. It’s a way of showing us how the characters grow and develop when the threat of apocalypse isn’t imminent, and when Adam and Eva’s plans to alter or facilitate that apocalypse aren’t operating at a fever pitch.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Dark Season Three for Decider.

It probably goes without saying after all that that we’ve reached the most science-fictional point in the narrative thus far. You have to have a pretty tight grasp on the cast and the overlapping, sometimes contradictory timelines and alternate realities to have the first clue what much of the action of the episode is even about. If people were to accuse the show of disappearing up its own ass, I couldn’t really blame them.

But in the end, what you have here is a story of people being ground down by forces they can barely comprehend and cannot control. There’s a universality to that sentiment; dig past the twelve different versions of Martha or whatever and you’ll see it plain as day.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Three for Decider.

We haven’t even heard the opening line of dialogue in Dark Season 3 Episode 5 by the time we witness the disposal of its first dead body. The body belongs to Regina Tiedemann, buried by her time-traveling mother Claudia after dying of cancer. The first line of dialogue is “Why do we die?”—and it’s a question this episode answers in detail. One of the most melancholy and death-haunted hours of Dark to date, and boy is that saying something, “Life and Death” continues to add new wrinkles to the series’ complex spacetime-travel plot, while rooting itself deep in the fears and resentments of everyday people.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dark‘s increasingly wild third season for Decider.

It really is a minor miracle that a show this dense and this loaded with science fictional plot devices works as a character-based drama. And vice versa, I suppose. I’m glad I get to bear witness.

I reviewed episode four of Dark‘s final season for Decider.

“I was always too gullible.” No kidding, Adam! Back when you were referred to as Jonas and weren’t yet horribly scarred, you followed a whole line-up of would-be time-travel gurus: Claudia Tiedemann, your own future self Adam, and now the elderly self of an alternate world’s Martha, named Eva. And guess what? Every single one of them lies to and manipulates you to their own ends. But don’t blame yourself. Skipping and jumping across time and space probably takes a toll on your internal lie detector.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Three for Decider.

But for all its plot density, for all its tangled family trees and multiple timelines and now multiple worlds, it doesn’t feel like boring sci-fi bullshit for a second. It’s too warm towards its characters for that. And no, warm in this case does not mean kind or soft—it means respecting their essential humanity and putting that at the forefront of the story, not the mind-teasers.

Katharina is a terrific example of this. As played by Jördis Triebel, she’s embittered and worn out from suffering, and that can entail lashing out, as it does when she practically assaults the teenaged Hannah. But the tenderness with which she greets Ulrich is heartbreaking, as are the tears in her eyes when she meets her mother, a nurse at Ulrich’s psychiatric facility. Like Jonas and Martha and Elisabeth and Claudia and Regina and everyone else, she’s a person, not a plot device.

This mentality has a ripple effect on the filmmaking as well. You see it in throwaway establishing shots, even, like when a nurse lights a cigarette and you can see the orange glow of the ember outside the psych hospital. There’s no reason for that to be there; it just is, because sometimes people step outside for a smoke. Dark never loses sight of what people do by virtue of just being people. The time traveling doesn’t change that. To borrow a phrase from another spacetime-warping show, humanity is Dark‘s constant.

I reviewed episode 2 of Dark Season 3 for Decider.

There’s no easy reentry into the world of Dark. Netflix’s twisty time-traveling psychological thriller, created by Baran bo Odar (who directs this episode, entitled “Deja-vu”) and Jantje Friese (who wrote it), has no shallow end of the pool to step into. You’ve got to plunge in head first where it’s deepest and, yes, darkest. That’s where the show’s sophisticated, character-rooted approach to one of science fiction’s most shopworn devices shines the clearest.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

I’m covering the final season of Dark for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a hell of a show.

What an episode. Emotional, unsparing, thrilling, and horrifying in turns, it displays all of the strengths of the season that led up to it. And it never loses sight of the fact that this excellent series is, in the end, a character piece—a show that uses its action and suspense sequences to reveal who the characters really are, not simply provide some thrills between dully revelatory monologues. 

I reviewed the season (series?) finale of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Beautifully shot, compellingly plotted, and gorgeously acted, this is yet another excellent episode of the most surprising crime drama of the year. I’m sad there’s only one hour to go.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Two scenes, two minutes: That’s all you’re getting of the Lynwood family saga in ZeroZeroZero Episode 6. The fate of their cocaine shipment and the money owed on it? The subject of two or three lines of throwaway dialogue half a world away. The Italians who purchased it to begin with? Not present at all.

For this episode, it’s Manuel’s world, and we just live in it.

Directed by Pablo Trapero from a script by Leonardo Fasoli and Max Hurwitz, “En El Mismo Camino” is a breathless nightmare journey into the life—I hesitate to say “mind,” since he remains so sociopathically opaque—of Manuel Quinteras, the special forces soldier turned chief muscle for the Leyra Brothers cartel. Only he’s much more than that: He’s the commander of an entire army of young men he’s training to become perfect killers, just like himself and his squad mates. Though known to the outside world as the Firm, they take their internal name from Manuel’s old callsign: They’re the Vampires.

I reviewed the extraordinary sixth episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

From its title, “Sharia,” on down, the fifth episode of ZeroZeroZero is nominally concerned with the fundamentalist militia that becomes the latest obstacle in the path of the show’s ill-fated cocaine shipment. The way it handles the group is…tricky. Much is done to humanize them, particularly their leader, and to portray them as just another gun-toting subculture, like the Italian mob and the Mexican cartel. That said, there’s a degree of stereotyping that American eyes and ears will impose on such characters almost automatically; having a bunch of them cheer “Allahu Akbar!” when a bomb goes off in a hotel on a live news broadcast isn’t doing them any favors, that’s for sure.

But there’s a throughline for this episode, and it’s not jihad—it’s family.

I reviewed episode five of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

“When did it start?” Emma Lynwood asks her brother. Silence. “Chris,” she says for emphasis. “When did it start?” Again, silence. There’s no choice; she has to come right out and say it. “When did the spasms start?” she asks, her tone that of a statement: The spasms have started.

A pause. Then, Chris, quickly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That’s how this episode of ZeroZeroZero (“Transshipment”) ends, as Mogwai’s melancholy score plays us out over a shot of the Senegalese coast. And there’s an ocean of character in that brief, terse exchange. It tells us that with everything else she has to worry about—the cargo stuck in international limbo, the cocaine she’s desperate to move from Mexico to Italy, the new Senegalese partners Chris cut in on the deal in exchange for their help in offloading the coke—she’s worried about her kid brother’s disease.

I reviewed episode four of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

A pig gets slaughtered and men drink its blood. A man is set on fire as his friend is forced to watch. The heir to a business is betrayed by his father’s close friend. A rogue soldier barges into the halls of power even though he’s the most wanted man in the country. This is an action-packed episode of ZeroZeroZero, filled with gruesome deaths and daring escapes—and yet we learn so much about the main characters in the process that it’s like we sat down with each one and interviewed them about themselves. That’s quite a trick.

I reviewed episode three of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

As a critic, I consider myself to be in the liking-things business. I go into every show I watch with as few expectations as possible, save one: I expect that what I’m watching will be good, until proven otherwise. That’s it! I’m never like “Oh brother, this looks awful, but here we go”; even in cases where I suspect a show might not be for me, I hold out the hope of being pleasantly surprised. Some of the shows I’ve had the most fun writing about—The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Billions—took the better part of a whole season to get to that point, but when they got there, whoa baby, I sure became a fan. I’m always open to starting to like something, from the moment the premiere begins until the credits roll on the last episode I’ve been assigned to review.

I say all that to say this: The second episode of ZeroZeroZero kicks twelve kinds of ass. Hallelujah!

I had my problems with the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, but the second episode of ZeroZeroZero basically blew me away. Wild. I reviewed it for Decider.

I’m a broken record on this anytime it comes up on a television show, but here goes: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once told an interviewer he’d never consider killing one of Don Draper’s children, because any show in which a child dies would need to become about the death of that child, the way people’s real lives reshapes themselves around that tragedy.

Is ZeroZeroZero going to wrestle with this? Is it going to dig down deep into how it feels to know you caused the death of a kid? Or is this just a kind of detail intended to add instant gravitas and then given no more thought? I have my suspicions, yes I do.

At the very least I don’t need television’s umpteenth narco series to show me a little girl whimpering in pain and fear as blood pulses out of a hole in her neck, until eventually she dies, all on camera, which is exactly what ZeroZeroZero does. The main goal of a show like this is, let’s face it, to entertain people who want to watch people get whacked in expensive location shoots, and tossing the brutal on-screen murder of a child into the mix just so the cop character can have a sad about it is an ugly, ugly impulse. “Rules are for men”? Alright, then—that’s my rule. Break it again at your peril.

I had very strong reservations about the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, the Amazon crime show I’m covering for Decider. But stay tuned…

White Lines‘ first season tried to do a lot of things, and that kind of ambition is worth praising. Zoe’s midlife crisis, her romance with Boxer, the Calafat family drama, Marcus’s third-time loser routine, David and his spirituality and drugs, Anna and her sexuality and drugs, raising teenage children, the sideplot about Zoe and Axel’s dad, Ibiza, house music—it’s all in there, and all of it is handled more or less well. But the whole isn’t so much less than the sum of its parts as it is a jumble of them thrown together, all of them prominent but none of them truly emerging as what this show is about. Its hedonistic pleasures are undeniable. But like many of its questing characters, I want more.

I reviewed the season finale of White Lines for Decider.

With one episode in the season remaining, it’s worth taking stock of how far we’ve come. The jumpy timeframe and the rapidity with which these characters form and break bonds makes it easy to forget that Boxer brutally murdered two guys a few days ago, and that Zoe and Marcus are both involved in the cover up. Instead, the show focuses on their personal growth journeys, their sex lives, the question of whether they’re in love and if so who with. I can’t quite square that with the same people who hauled dead bodies out of the water and buried them in a shallow grave, you know? It seems like that would take precedence in their psychological landscape.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of White Lines Season One for Decider.

To paraphrase Lenin, there are episodes of White Lines where whole seasons happen. This is one of those. Boy, is it ever!

I reviewed the eighth episode of White Lines for Decider.