In short, the show is about pregnant women, and the legal, medical, ethical, moral, and political issues that swirl around them. Needless to say, this significantly shifts the framework of the original. Jeremy Irons’s Mantle twins are misogynists who see women as both sexual playthings and medical tools against which they can sharpen their genius. The misogyny present in Rachel Weisz’s Mantle twins, as well as in characters like Rebecca and her ghoulish circle of rich women, is internalized, though it’s no less present for that.

In both versions, the female body is a commodity to be experimented with, and on, but changing the gender of who’s doing the experimenting changes almost everything else. But only the TV show expands this into a multifaceted feminist critique of the economic and political forces surrounding the issue: America’s murderous for-profit healthcare system and the women who’ve girlbossed their way to its apex; racial and class discrepancies in maternal healthcare outcomes; the fascist anti-abortion movement’s pas de deux with advances in care for premature infants; the objectification and infantilization of women during the process; and probably more I’m missing. All of this emerges naturally through story and character, which is a pretty staggering achievement in itself.

I compared the David Cronenberg/Jeremy Irons Dead Ringers film to the Alice Birch/Rachel Weisz Dead Ringers TV series for Decider.

Speed Racer is a sight for sore eyes. Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s 2008 follow-up to The Matrix trilogy feels like an anticipatory antidote to a decade-plus of same-y superhero blockbusters kicked off by two of that year’s other major releases, The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Where the former was dour and the latter was merely workmanlike, Speed Racer feels like an explosion in a Skittles factory, edited to feel like a dream. From the start, shifting timelines flow in and out of one another, juxtaposing the high-speed auto racing that is the title character’s forte with flashbacks to his troubled childhood and Greek-chorus commentary from a slew of racing announcers in a panoply of languages. At varying points, the film depicts a futuristic city in which airborne vehicles soar between Day-Glo skyscrapers; a cross-country race that rockets from an underground catacomb to a sprawling desert to a treacherous ice cavern; and a boy and his pet chimpanzee getting hopped up on candy and riding a cart through a swarm of factory employees on Segways, while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” blasts in the background.

What you don’t see: gas pumps. Or fuel tank covers. Or exhaust pipes and the plumes of smoke that go with them. Or cars that either are or resemble real-world vehicles, giving their manufacturers the advertising power of product placement. Speed Racer’s futuristic world (its exact timeframe is unclear, but the dates affixed to various events in racing’s past place it in a sort of alternate future-past reality) has been effectively denuded of the propagandistic power of your average automobile-based movie. The carefree world of Pixar’s Cars looks like a Detroit-sponsored dystopia by comparison. No gas, no masters: The world Speed Racer creates runs entirely on science-fictional fuel.

I wrote about the feel-good fossil-fuel-free future of Speed Racer for Polygon.

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!

Money moves the plot of Spielberg’s Michael Crichton adaptation at an almost molecular level. Both the arrival of outsiders to Isla Nublar and the escape of the dinosaurs are motivated by cold, hard cash. After a velociraptor kills a worker in the opening scene of the film, his family launches a $20 million lawsuit against parent company InGen. We later learn from the park’s mousy lawyer, Donald Gennaro, that the incident gave the park’s insurance company and its investors second thoughts about backing the project, prompting the hiring of outside experts Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm to inspect the park. Without the concerns about continued cash flow, our favorite paleontologist, paleobotanist, and mathematician would never have felt a single tyrannosaurus-foot impact.

“Spared no expense”: I wrote about Jurassic Park‘s carnivore capitalism for Polygon.

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.

‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

You can’t swing a dead parrot on Netflix without hitting content from comedy’s answer to the Beatles—all four seasons of their Flying Circus series are on there, along with a bunch of documentaries, greatest-hits comps, and the religious satire Life of Brian. But you can’t beat the granddaddy of them all, the midnight-movie masterpiece that put John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam et al in the world of King Arthur and his Knights Who Say “Ni!”—no, wait, his Knights of the Round Table, sorry. The movie’s laconic pace and legendary bits (“Just a flesh wound!”) make for the baked equivalent of comfort food. And don’t forget to stick around until the very end of the closing theme for the best sketch of the bunch!

Celebrate 420 Day with this list of ten perfect stoner movies and shows on Netflix that I wrote for Decider. Comedy, drama, action, horror, musicals, documentaries, you name it!

I’m back on the terrific Struggle Session podcast this week, as the gang and I take a look at a movie close to my heart, Road House. This was a fun as hell discussion and I hope you enjoy it!

Dredging up Nightbreed from the depths of my personal canon at the present moment — imagining us in the place not of the pitchforks-and-torches humans but the gloriously bizarre creatures they choose to persecute — has given me unexpected solace. The post-coronavirus society in which I wish to live is one of herd immunity and mutual aid, one where workers whose vital services we take for granted are justly compensated for their indispensable labor, one where the art that sustains our spirit is created by artists we strive to support, one where health care and housing are recognized as universal rights.

I wrote about the Clive Barker film Nightbreed and our need to reimagine the post-apocalypse for the Outline.

If you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, every week you’ll get a new piece on one of my favorite movies. Here’s what I’ve tackled so far:

• All That Jazz
• L’Avventura
• Barry Lyndon
• Casino
• Darkon
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Heavenly Creatures
• Hellraiser
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II
• The Lord of the Rings
• Lost Highway
• Manhunter
• The Master
• Natural Born Killers
• Nightbreed
• Star Wars
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• To Live and Die in L.A.
• Velvet Goldmine

Subscribe, read, enjoy!

There’s a wrestler in AEW by the name of Adam “Hangman” Page, who works a cowboy gimmick by way of Red Dead Redemption iconography. (One of his finishing moves is called the Dead Eye, presumably after RDR‘s targeting system.) During one of his promos a few months back now, he promised one of his enemies that in their upcoming match he’d see Page do some real “cowboy shit.” Ever since, fans have chanted “COWBOY SHIT! COWBOY SHIT!” when Page takes the ring or uncorks a successful offensive maneuver. It’s charming.

It’s less charming when I think about “cowboy shit” as the animating force and raison d’être of Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

It occurred to me that despite writing about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for years, I never wrote anything about the BB sequel movie El Camino. Well, over at my Patreon, now I have.

I’ve started a new column about film called My Favorite Movies, which will cover exactly that. The inaugural installment: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s available for my Patreon subscribers at the $5/month tier. I hope you dig it!

With that in mind I’ve experimented with making my pro wrestling column, Sweeping Up the Eyeballs, free this week. I hope you dig that too!

“They will not fail!”

The deluded denialism of Lord Summerisle and his people is made terrifyingly clear. In the nobleman’s piercing, clarion voice you can all but hear him clinging, white-knuckled, to the edifice of ideology he himself helped construct and enforce. He cannot admit that he’s wrong, can’t even brook the possibility. He’s telling himself the sacrifice will be accepted and the crops will return as much as he’s telling Howie or the assembled islanders. He’ll commit murder, doom his community to collapse and his people to starvation, before admitting the truth.

I think about those four words, and Christopher Lee’s perfect delivery of them, a lot. I hear an entire mindset, the complete conservative worldview, in those four syllables.

I wrote about my favorite line from The Wicker Man and why it’s the key to so much that’s wrong with our world for Polygon.

“…Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin…the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Summers.”

– Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” The New York Times, May 8, 2018

“I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher … but above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

– Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in The Master

These quotes introduce a new essay I wrote about The Master in the Intellectual Dark Age of Trump for Polygon. Special thanks to my editor Matt Patches for the inspiration.

Since I first saw the movie with a bunch of drunk, high, hooting and hollering friends over a decade ago, I’ve watched it dozens of times with dozens of people. I never get tired of the bone-crunching action, the sweaty neo-western sex appeal, the cockamamie dialogue (“Are you gonna fight, dickless?” “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick!”), the peculiar performances, and the overall vibe that anything can happen at any moment. I always find new things I never noticed, or old things I never fully appreciated.

In other words, this great bad movie functions, in a lot of ways, like a great great movie. I’ll never stop watching it. Now, thanks to its presence on that big red streaming service, you never have to stop watching it either.

Road House is on Netflix now, so I wrote a guide to its wonders for Decider.

When I love a horror film, I want to live in it. I mean this as a physical proposition. If a horror movie I adore has a great scene set in a memorable enclosed space, my instinct, no matter how awful the things that happen in that space are, is to walk right into it. I’d like to be in Leatherface’s bone room, in the Overlook Hotel’s elevator lobby, in the bare wooden attic where the Cenobites kill Frank Cotton, in Scarlett Johansson’s black liquid void. I want to feel the walls, tap the floor with my foot, smell the viscera. You know, make myself at home.

I’d eventually like to leave again, of course, which is usually what separates me from the people who do visit those places within the movies themselves. But there’s weird, cold comfort in those spaces. They’re inviting, to me anyway, and it is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.

From the Red Room in Twin Peaks to its blue counterpart Club Silencio in Mullholland Drive, David Lynch has created many of these spaces. As a director, Lynch is to ambient room tone what Martin Scorsese is to gangsters listening to “Gimme Shelter.” Evoking a sense of space, and what it’s like to be within four particular walls (curtains optional), is a major part of his project.

In one such space, he even threw a party.

I wrote about the Mystery Man scene from David Lynch’s Lost Highway for The Outline.

I wrote about 28 Weeks Later… in the context of Bird Box and A Quiet Place and survival-horror films with children at the center for the New York Times’ free Watching newsletter, which you can subscribe to here!

I don’t think I’ve seen “Naked” more than three times. And yet, “Naked” is one of my favorite films. How can both statements be true? Because like Johnny, the human vortex of misanthropy at the heart of this scathing, haunting film from Mike Leigh, “Naked” arrives unexpectedly and does enough psychic damage to mark you for life.

Played by David Thewlis in his breakout role, Johnny is a shuffling, shaggy-haired native of Manchester, now down-and-out in London after fleeing the consequences of the sexual assault that opens the film. (The merciless tone is established from the start.) With his cruel intelligence, dizzying monologues and trademark black trench coat, he upends the lives of old friends, acquaintances and total strangers alike.

The film’s devastating final shot casts Johnny as a sad-sack Satan wandering the world, unwilling to accept either punishment or forgiveness for his sins. When FilmStruck vanishes from the internet, it will take this unforgettable portrait of humanity as a failed state with it for now — but the film will remain lodged in my mind forever.

I wrote about Mike Leigh’s brilliant film Naked for the New York Times’ tribute to the late great streaming service FilmStruck, alongside a murderers’ row of other critics.

And since it’s been a while, I’ll note that I still contribute movie recommendations to the Times’ free streaming-advice newsletter Watching. I think I’ve covered The Love Witch and Eyes Wide Shut since last time. Click and subscribe for free!

Better to be a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime!
—Rupert Pupkin, The King of Comedy

Laugh and the world laughs with you!
—The Joker, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Robert de Niro will soon co-star in a film about a deranged man who fancies himself a comedian and is driven to crime by a late-night talk show host.

This time around, however, de Niro isn’t playing the insane up-and-comer, as he did in Martin Scorsese’s 1982 black comedy classic, The King of Comedy. Rather, rumor has it, Bobby D will be the superstar who spurs Joaquin Phoenix’s descent into madness in director Todd Phillips’ stand-alone movie about the Joker, nemesis of Batman and anyone taking Jared Leto seriously alike.

That distinctive chemical odor you’re smelling isn’t Smilex gas, but an air of superfluousness surrounding the whole project. The movie exists in parallel to the DC film universe, where Leto remains attached to both a Suicide Squad sequel (where his take on the character debuted) and in his own stand-alone Joker movie. Nor is it simply that the work of Martin Scorsese is cited as an inspiration anytime Phillips’ movie pops up in the trades. To an extent, that stands to reason: Scorsese is the film’s executive producer, and his signature star is in the cast. “Grim and gritty,” Taxi Driver, ’70s/’80s noir — word on the street, including what Polygon has heard from crew members, is that the Joker movie is an extended Marty homage.

Here’s the thing: The King of Comedy already is a near-perfect Joker movie. (It’s a near-perfect movie in general, but it’s a Joker-specific one, too.) It’s a glimpse into the mind of a man who’s convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he’s one of the funniest people in the world, and who’s determined that the world must be made in on the joke. Beneath the purple suit, green hair and greasepaint-white skin, that’s what makes the Joker tick.

I’d like to thank Joaquin Phoenix’s upcoming Joker movie for giving me the excuse to write at length about Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy for Polygon. Guest stars include Robert De Niro, Sandra Bernhard, Jerry Lewis, the Clash, Grant Morrison & Dave McKean, Alan Moore & Brian Bolland, Frank Miller, and a lengthy encomium to Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie. Rupert Pupkin, ladies and gentlemen!

I wrote about Jonathan Glazer’s incredible British gangster movie Sexy Beast for today’s edition of the New York Times’ “Watching” newsletter, which features recommendations for streaming shows and films three times a week. If you sign up for it today (it’s free) you can read what I wrote. Enjoy!