And it’s a decent episode, all told, and for all its faults. I’m not sure if the conspiracy story line has legs, or if it’s the kind of story fans of The Silence of the Lambs Cinematic Universe are interested in seeing; if this show doesn’t serve up a new serial killer with a cool nickname and a horrifying M.O. by the end of the season, I’ll eat a census taker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. I’m also not wild about recasting Martin and Krendler as Clarice’s surrogate work-mother and work-father.

But that close-up device from Clarice’s therapy sessions, and her surreal visions of those moths, point to a potentially more visually imaginative show than what we’ve seen so far. Clarice’s ability to bulldoze institutional obstacles with her powers of observation is another positive trait for the show. I think that’s the real tension underlying Clarice: Can a show on CBS, a network replete with Good Police catching the bad guys, ever be as interesting as the hugely and deservedly acclaimed film on which it’s based? That a “yes” is even possible at this point has to be counted as a victory. And like Clarice and the VICAP team, you take your W’s when you can.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Last week, Clarice Starling uncovered a series of murders targeting whistleblowers. For now, at least, that case is off the docket. Instead, she and the rest of the FBI’s VICAP team are off to Tennessee, where local and federal law enforcement are in a tense standoff at a heavily armed militia compound. The confrontation, which began when an unknown member of the group opened fire on an ATF agent, threatens to become “another Waco”—something Attorney General Martin, a Tennessee native, wants to avoid at all costs. There’s dingy local color, there’s flashbacks to Clarice’s Appalachian childhood, and there’s a bunch of generic cop-show stuff that raises some uncomfortable questions about what, exactly, we’re doing here.

For starters, why is Clarice tagging along on this mission, considering the insubordinate way she went off-script and described the whistleblower killings as coordinated and targeted rather than the work of a serial killer last week? Her boss, Agent Krendler, has in fact already requested her transfer off the VICAP team as a result. “The only reason you’re here,” he says to her, “is I don’t trust you out of my sight.” That creaking sound you hear? That’s the writers strrrrrrrrrrretching to keep Clarice at the center of the action despite behavior that ought to sideline her. Not a good sign, this early in the series!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!

I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.

I joined Ricky Camilleri and Chris Chafin on the Thirty Years Later podcast to talk about all things The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about the cornerstone of the Hannibal Lecter Cinematic Universe that I think you’ll really enjoy!

Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.

If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.

(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Stand, in which many of its overall weaknesses are made manifest, for Decider.

The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.

I hate to do this, but I hope you’ll permit a book-to-TV comparison just this once. In Stephen King’s novel, this traumatized pyromaniac, née Donald Merwin Elbert, is a central figure, one of the core characters we follow across the country in the aftermath of the plague. If Lloyd Henried is the Stu Redman of Las Vegas, the main man in the new society Randall Flagg has founded just as Stu is the head honcho of Mother Abigail’s, Trashcan Man is roughly equivalent to Nick Andros, an outcast from society allegedly destined for a key role in the new world, or Tom Cullen, a man whose mental disabilities allow him more unfettered contact with forces beyond our understanding. (That element of Tom’s personality appears to have been dropped by the show.)

Yet for some reason, instead of following Trash from the outset, The Stand‘s 2020-2021 iteration just sort of plops him down at the start of the sixth episode out of nine episodes total. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of him blowing up oil tanks somewhere and receiving a psychic communiqué from Flagg when bam, the next thing you know he’s already in Vegas, getting the lay of the land from Lloyd and receiving the blessing of the Dark Man himself. Why didn’t the show sprinkle Trashcan Man scenes throughout the season, starting no later than episode two or three? I legitimately have no idea. Was it simply to shield us from Ezra Miller’s performance in the role—a high-pitched, gibbering caricature of a neurodivergent person? Again, I got nothing, man. I enjoyed the creepy Willy-Wonka-tunnel evil psychedelic montage he envisions when Flagg psychically contacts him, and I appreciate that he alone out of everyone in Vegas seems to recognize that Flagg is effectively a demigod worthy of worship, but otherwise nearly every decision involving this character is baffling to me right now.

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

It’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.

In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?

The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.

I reviewed this week’s less-than-promising episode of The Stand for Decider.

I get the feeling that this iteration of The Stand is meant to focus on the whole life-in-the-aftermath aspect of the story, to the near-exclusion of the pandemic, and relegating the dark vs. light conflict—the titular stand!—to second place, at least for now. But it’s running out of road for this approach. Sooner or later, and probably sooner than later, it’s going to come down to Mother Abigail and her crew against Randall Flagg and his own. (A crew we simply have not seen at all yet, aside from that one episode when he rescued Lloyd Henried from prison.) I think the tone it’s struck for the material on which it’s concentrating its efforts is appropriately elegiac and surprisingly gentle. But if you’re gonna knock the house down again, it pays to have sturdily built it, and that I’m not sure the show has done at all.

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

It is kind of a feat, when you think about it: an audience in 2020 not knowing what’s going to happen in The Stand. This unusual, mix-and-match adaptation of one of the best-known horror novels in the English language continues to unfold in non-linear fashion, making familiar characters and plot points seem strange and unexpected. Sometimes this is very effective, like how it allows Nick-the-outsider and Nick-the-high-priest-of-Mother-Abigail to be directly contrasted with one another in the episode where we get to know him in the first place. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, like how it races through the creation of the “committee” established by the survivors to govern Boulder; here it’s all the work of Mother Abigail, who picks them to be her emissaries first and a governing body second (if at all).

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

Overall, this episode functions less as a successor to the premiere and more as a part two. Showrunners Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell are still introducing characters, weaving their pasts and presents together in that same dreamy way—a million miles from Stephen King’s relentless forward pace at this same stage in the story in the book version. In effect, we’re just seeing pieces of the puzzle at this point, and waiting for the final picture to take shape. Until then, it’s hard to judge the show as a success or failure, though the game cast, impactful score, and occasional flash of post-apocalyptic imagery (like the George Washington Bridge covered from one end to the other by stalled cars filled with dead passengers) are keeping my interest. It’s kind of like we’re in the early stages of the superflu, before it’s had a chance to really take off. We’ll see what kind of world we’re inhabiting when we reach the other side.

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

We’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of the thing. The Third Day is a show about the mysteries of faith that lets them remain mysterious. The point — aside from being scary, which the show frequently was — is to probe at our own feelings of exclusion and belonging, whether in a community or a family or both. What are we willing to sacrifice for that sense of belonging, and is it worth the sacrifice? The Third Day doesn’t answer that for us because it can’t. Only we know, and it’s up to us to tell our secrets; or to keep them until the day the world forces our hand.

I reviewed the finale of The Third Day for Vulture. This was really well-done folk horror, and Jude Law is tremendous.

That “Sh-Boom” singalong is a solid stand-in for Lovecraft Country and its season finale, “Full Circle.” I see what they’re going for—in this case a moment of levity before the horror and desperation of the final battle sinks in. I get it, in theory. But the delivery is just a bit off: The smiles feel forced, the shared connection too neat, the scene too much of a scene instead of something that feels like it emerged organically from the characters involved. Similarly, I get what Lovecraft Country wants to do; I just don’t think it did it.

I reviewed the season finale of Lovecraft Country, a nobly intentioned, well-acted, poorly executed show, for Decider.

I’ve written before that Jude Law’s face is the real star of The Third Day. After tonight’s episode, it’s safe to say that Naomie Harris’s face shares top billing. Watch how director Philippa Lowthorpe’s camera holds a closeup as Harris’s character Helen learns that the baby she just delivered, for a woman she spent all night trying to locate and help, was fathered by her missing husband Sam—who’s still alive and well and living on the island of Osea, despite everything she’s heard to the contrary.

It’s subtle, but you can almost see the exact moment at which the tears of joy pooling in her eyes for the beauty of this mother-and-child tableau turn to tears of shock and sadness. You can just barely see her smile tighten, the love and happiness it connoted twisting around in her mind to betrayal and confusion and anger. But Helen has to keep it together, she has to maintain the serene and peaceful front. Even when Jess, the woman whose baby Helen helped bring into the world, tasks Helen with walking to the island’s “big house” and summoning Sam to see his new daughter, Helen doesn’t break. But you can see everything she’s holding back, written all over her face.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.

Moreover, what I said in my review of the series premiere remains true: Jude Law’s face alone tells the story. His pores are choked by dirt and grime. His temple is caked with blood, both dry and wet. His cheeks are streaked with tears for himself and, eventually, for his son. There’s something … I dunno, almost thrilling about seeing a handsome male actor subjected to the final-girl indignities of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens or Marilyn Burns’s Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Florence Pugh’s Dani in Midsommar. To watch someone so beautiful be physically and emotionally broken down is like witnessing a human sacrifice of a sort.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?

But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.

I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

I promise you there’s a good reason so much of this review is just the breathless recitation of the plot. It’s like that because the plot has reached that magical point that horror movies, the good ones anyway, arrive at midway through. So much is happening, so many threats are emerging, so many false leads are being tried and rejected, that the resulting feeling borders on intoxication. Your heart and mind race even as you remain glued to the spot, trying to keep up, trying to identify the danger — and worrying, on some lizard-brain level, that the danger has the ability to reach out and identify you. This is thrilling filmmaking, raw and weird and alive, like the rituals it chronicles.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. If “The Wicker Man, starring The Young Pope” appeals to you in any way, you need to watch The Third Day.