Titled “Jefe de Jefes,” after the Lucky Luciano–style “Boss of All Bosses” sobriquet bestowed upon Félix by his high-flying lieutenant Amado, the show’s seventh episode makes ample use of the parallels between its protagonist and antagonist. That, at least, is par for the course. The series began by setting up Gallardo and Camarena as opposite numbers with the same basic makeup: both of them cops, both of them relocating to Guadalajara, both of them hoping to advance in their respective careers after being stymied back home, both of them often thwarted by the established power structure, both of them exceptionally driven to work around obstacles to achieve their goals.

Now, though, it feels both excessive and unnecessary to maintain that parallel structure. Both men are planning to leave town to go back home. Both run into opposition from their Concerned Wives when they decide not to do so. Both make major power plays to defeat the last governmental obstacles to their end goals. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, to be sure, but when you’re creating historical fiction based on the strange truth, there’s definitely a point at which “stranger than fiction” becomes “too cute by half.”

I reviewed episode seven of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. Stuff like this is why as good as this franchise can be from time to time, it never quite achieves liftoff.

The Romanoffs currently has a 43% rating among “top critics” on Rotten Tomatoes. The Walking Dead, the zombie juggernaut no one seems to like anymore, more than doubles that score with 88%. Arrow, one of several interconnected shows about DC superheroes, is sitting even prettier at 91%. Even the largely maligned but seemingly immortal CBS nerd-culture comedy The Big Bang Theory rates a 75% among people whose job it is to tell you whether a TV show is any good. Outside of network publicists and Rotten Tomatoes itself, I don’t think anyone would argue that review aggregators actually tell you much about the quality of a given show. But looking at those numbers, I think they say an awful lot about the qualities of shows that critics find valuable, and it’s not anything good.

[…]

By my tally, The Romanoffs was half good-to-great, and half okay-to-meh. In that light, perhaps a score hovering in the 40-50% range makes sense. But in a world where Arrow is nine percentage points shy of perfection? It’s pure-dee nonsense for a show this ambitious, involving this much acting talent, to get a failing grade. Even among critics, series that take no risks because they have no ambition are rewarded above those that do. You don’t even have to like The Romanoffs, let alone Matthew Weiner, to recognize that. And a TV landscape without room for wild, swing-for-the-fences use of unprecedented financial backing and creative clout, even if they strike out half the time—a world where reassurance, fanservice, and algorithmic crowd-pleasing hold sway—is a bleak one indeed.

I reviewed the season finale of The Romanoffs, and got some stuff off my chest about the state of TV criticism, for Vulture.

Displaying considerable moxie, the show chooses G.W. Handel’s stately, morose “Sarabande” to accompany much of the action, particularly the climax in which Gallardo narrowly escapes arrest and then returns home to discover his infidelity has been discovered in turn. Real Kubrick headz know that this is the theme music to the great director’s period-piece masterpiece Barry Lyndon — itself the story of a country boy who becomes rich and powerful through a combination of luck and deceit. I kinda wonder if the filmmakers were gonna go with a more appropriately adulterous Kubrick music cue, Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2” from Eyes Wide Shut, before thinking better of it and going for a less obvious choice. (Also, its Netflix sister show Altered Carbon got there first.) At least they didn’t use Strauss.

I reviewed episode six of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Actor Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar was one of my favorite television characters of the decade — a singular performance that’s all the more appealing and imposing because of how much he underplayed it. It’s funny hearing all of Gallardo’s friends with a foot in the coke world warn him about Pablo being “temperamental,” an assessment with which Escobar himself agrees, because looking at and listening to him you’d swear the guy was coming down off painkillers after a root canal. (Maybe it’s all that weed he’s smoking.)

Cocaine, schmocaine: Pablo’s chief export was the ambition and anger he grew inside himself. But the genius of version of the character we saw on Narcos was that his reserved temperament when encountered in person forced everyone to lean in closer and hang on his every word. It’s more effective, and frightening, than exploding all the time would have been. To reflect this, Amat Escalante keeps Pablo shrouded in darkness and half-light during an outdoor nighttime soirée. It may simply be a workaround for Moura’s post-Pablo weight loss, but it presents a stark contrast with the brightly lit office of the Calí boys, and it gives the character the vibe of a supervillain without requiring him to do anything outwardly supervillainous at all.

I reviewed episode five of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. God bless Wagner Moura.

And for crying out loud, how great is the sequence where Rafa and his partner-turned-babysitter Don Neto have to figure out a way to kill time in their big empty safehouse? The two get massively coked up, and then have a little two-man dance party to freaking Culture Club. As Boy George croons “Karma Chameleon,” Neto (who winds up nearly getting arrested during his drunken drive home, then makes the cop who stops him his indentured-servant driver) hoots and hollers about his new CD player, simply unable to contain his joy that the music won’t skip no matter how much you jump around. In a music-nerd move so amazing I can hardly contain myself about it, Rafa’s reaction is momentarily muted when he produces a stack of vinyl records in their cardboard sleeves and starts ranting about how the album cover will become a lost art when the canvas shrinks to CD size. It’s like he stepped out of every conversation about music I had with my dad in 1990. Writer Scott Teems deserves some kind of award for this scene alone.

I reviewed episode four of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

The most remarkable thing about the episode, in which DEA Agent Kiki Camarena uncovers irrefutable proof of Félix Gallardo’s massive marijuana operation while Gallardo cements his role at the top of the organized-crime pyramid (sort of), is its patience.

Take Kiki’s journey into the belly of the beast, when makes an unauthorized undercover trip to work in Gallardo’s marijuana fields. First, he drives out to the point in the desert where he’d previously seen the unidentified convoy of blindfolded workers drive past. He sits there in his car for hours, until nightfall. When the convoy approaches, he waits until just after it passes and then pulls into line behind them. He arrives at the staging ground for the operation’s workers — a popular enough spot despite being in the middle of nowhere that it has food carts and bars operating 24/7 — and blends in, during a lengthy steadicam shot that does nothing in particular, really, just follows him into this world. He has a three- or four-beer, five- or six-cigarette conversation with the guy next to him at the bar, but then comes up short on getting any useful intel out of him.

He waits around again, napping, until the start of the workday just before dawn. He manages to get himself on one of the transports to the field with the help of his barfly buddy (who demands half his daily wages in exchange for this favor) and gets trundled out to the fields. He spends the whole day there, picking buds and fucking up his hands and eating bad food and, eventually, hiding from the DFS agents who show up on business and might recognize him from their shared time in the Guadalajara cop bar. He gets back on to the bus after what can best be described as a low-speed chase in which he struggles to stay out of sight and ahead of step from DFS underboss El Azul, who spotted and vaguely recognized him. By the time he’s shipped back to the staging ground and can use the payphone to report his findings to his boss, he discovers his wife has gone into labor.

All of this is done with minimal cinematographic razzle-dazzle, and more importantly, with barely a note from the show’s score and nary a peep from its omniscient narrator. Director Andrés Baiz, a series mainstay, clearly trusts his audience enough to grant them this silence, to let them take in the events of Kiki’s day and draw their own emotional conclusions about what he’s thinking, feeling, experiencing. The few times something unusual does happen from a filmmaking perspective — that long but unshowy take, the reveal of the gigantic forest of weed, the split-diopter shot that juxtaposes kiki’s terrified face against the DFS agents in the background — it hits harder because of its restrained context.

I reviewed the very good third episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

I’ve long thought that the key to Narcos‘ success, such as it is, is just the flow of the thing. I’ve said in the past that whatever the strengths of its stars, from Wagner Moura’s taciturn menace as Pablo Escobar to the mustachioed cool of Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal as his enemies, that slow, sly, sexy, slightly sinister theme song is the production’s true lead.

The show follows suit. With its Scorsese-esque narration, provided once again by an unseen Scoot McNairy, and its use of how-the-sausages-get-made montages, it has the same sit back and sink right into this strange new world appeal as the opening reels of GoodFellas and Casino — only over and over again, hour after hour, one season per year. If you think that dilutes the appeal of those kinds of sequences, that’s fair, and it’s probably even correct.

But there’s something soporifically enjoyable about its rhythms nonetheless. You can always count on some tense conversations, some glamorous coke-fueled excess (Neto and Amado in particular find their first big-city coke soirée to be a real hoot), some cops conducting high-risk raids, a lot of murders and executions, a few that are stopped at the last minute, some sweeping shots of the wildnerness and the city streets, and all the other crime-genre thrills and chills you could ever want.

I reviewed episode two of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

As an artistic enterprise, Narcos is a bit like the business it chronicles — a simple matter of supply and demand. The show was originally created to tell the incredible true story of Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was so rich and ruthless that he essentially conquered the country before losing a bloody civil war and getting hunted and killed like an animal, complete with an American DEA agent posing for a photo with his corpse. With a magnetic lead performance from Wagner Moura as Escobar and rising star Boyd Holbrook as the American who took him down, it became one of Netflix’s bigger and more respected dramas.

Which meant that even after Escobar’s death, the show must go on.

I reviewed the debut of Narcos: Mexico, and presented a people’s history of the Narcos franchise, for Decider.

“End of the Line” is the best episode of The Romanoffs since its third, the psychological horror movie in anthology-TV-show form “House of Special Purpose.” It’s arguably the best, period. Either way, it has more in common with that Christina Hendricks–starring installment than quality: They share an atmosphere of dislocation and paranoia that goes beyond the mere fact that they’re both about Americans abroad. (So were two or three of this season’s other episodes, after all.) There’s something about them that feels … I dunno, sick. Sick, and being lied to by the doctors telling you you’re going to be fine, and by the loved ones promising to stay by your side to the end.

Written by director Matthew Weiner’s longtime collaborators Maria and Andre Jacquemetton, “End of the Line” succeeds in its grim task in part by casting two of the most likable actors on the series so far. Kathryn Hahn and Jay R. Ferguson, ebullient comedic talents who count Bad Moms and Mad Men among their diverse credits, play Anka and Joe Garner, an American couple who travel to the Russian port city of Vladivostok to adopt a baby after years of failed attempts to have one themselves. They find Russia to be a cold, bleak place: Government officials are openly corrupt and actively homophobic, the water is dirty, the health-care system is shoddy, and heavily armed military police are omnipresent. Thank goodness they’re there to whisk some poor child away to America where she’ll never have to worry about any of that stuff again, right?

I reviewed the fine seventh episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

“Panorama,” the peculiar new episode of The Romanoffs, seems straightforward enough. A muckraking Mexican reporter named Abel (Juan Pablo Castañeda) is investigating a ritzy medical clinic in which grievously ill, extravagantly wealthy, generally contemptible patients are being sold snake oil by a shifty doctor. During the course of his investigation, he unexpectedly falls in love with Victoria (Radha Mitchell), the concerned mother of a 12-year-old kid who inherited hemophilia along with her Romanoff genes. Both the exposé and the love affair end up unconsummated.

But then, as Adam Curtis might say, a strange thing happened. As a street performer sings a cloying tune to the general effect of “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life,” Abel ends the episode by walking through a magical-realist live-action recreation of artist Diego Rivera’s massive mural The History of Mexico, flanked by Rivera, Frida Kahlo, her sister (and Rivera’s lover) Cristina, Marx, and Lenin as they stroll off into the proverbial sunset.

It’s audacious, I’ll give ’em that!

I’m not gonna sneer at the audacity, either. Directed, like every episode, by Weiner from a script he co-wrote with Dan LeFranc, “Panorama” aims for the effect referred to in the title: a sweeping portrait of haves and have-nots, rich and poor, white and brown, predator and prey, with Abel and Victoria’s short, sweet, sad relationship at the center — the same position Rivera occupies in his massive mural, as Abel points out to Nicky earlier in the episode. Driving this point home with a rupture in the fabric of reality that feels nothing like what’s come before isn’t the kind of move you see from highly lauded, allegedly surreal shows like Legion or Maniac, shows so larded with explanations for their inexplicable events that the dreamlike life is often crushed right out of them. Whatever else it is, the ending of “Panorama” is weird in a way that even shows that aim for surreal weirdness rarely manage.

But lots of things can be weird without being, y’know, good. And things can be weird without being earned, too.

I reviewed the weird Mexico episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

…And Justice for All is the biggest metal band’s best album. I see you, Master of Puppets people, but I’ve strapped on the blindfold of Lady Justice and let the scales tip where they may: Justice wins. The songwriting of singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich is their most complex and vicious, retaining the power of their early thrash while jettisoning its simplistic schoolyard chants and avoiding the less-compelling hard rock tendencies to come. Use, abuse, experience, and enough beer and Jägermeister to make Keith Moon drive a luxury car into a swimming pool had tempered Hetfield’s reedy yell into something fuller and more forceful, with none of his later cigar-chomping bluster. The lyrics are a ground-level portrait of bureaucratic order pushing down on people too powerless to fight back. And the sound is nearly industrial in its ear-killing intensity, a piece of serrated steel designed to carve you and leave its nihilism in the wounds. Oh, and maybe you’ve heard this: You can’t hear the bass.

I reviewed the excellent reissue of Metallica’s masterpiece …And Justice for All for Pitchfork.

“What, you think she’d ruin his life because of a joke?”

“A good person doesn’t ruin somebody’s life over some random accusation.”

“Bearing false witness is the worst crime that you can commit. Otherwise, anyone can say anything about anybody, and just saying it ruins their life no matter what they did. Does that seem fair?”

Provided you didn’t toss your laptop across the room or yank your Amazon Fire stick out of the TV in disgust the moment you heard lines like those, episode five of The Romanoffs (“Bright and High Circle”) is worth talking about.

I reviewed the false-accusation episode of Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs, which was bad in more story-specific and complicated ways than you might have heard, for Vulture.

Rushed, slapdash, illogical, and — horror of horrors — even poorly fight-choreographed, “A New Napkin,” the final episode of Daredevil‘s enthusiastically received third season, feels less like a considered episode of television than a mistake someone made along the way to making one. The funny thing is that it has the opposite problem of most shaky-to-downright-bad Marvel/Netflix episodes, which bloat and drag tediously along to the closing credits. This one feels like the writers went to work one day and realized they’d lost track of how many episodes they’d already done, forcing them to wrap things up as quickly, and therefore as clumsily, as possible. It’s a suitcase packed by someone who overslept their alarm and has a flight to catch in 45 minutes, in television form.

[…]

Daredevil is a fun, and usually fine, show, don’t get me wrong. It and The Punisher are the only live-action franchise superhero things I’d recommend to anyone with any enthusiasm at all since the first Tim Burton Batman movie, and this doesn’t change that. Some of those fight-centric episodes and the Karen Page spotlight were killer, and Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Deborah Ann Woll have all been fantastic from the start. But man, what a letdown — and what a bucket of cold water on the very popular idea that this season represents some sort of major breakthrough for the ailing Marvel/Netflix cinematic universe. Daredevil was better than people gave it credit for being before, and it’s not as good as people are giving it credit for being now. No bullseye, in more ways than one.

So there you have it. I reviewed the finale of Daredevil (for now or forever, who knows) for Decider. A good series goes out on a bad note.

“We’ve been manipulated by a sociopath who doesn’t care about the truth, or about who he hurts, or about anyone other than himself,” said the publicly shamed woman about the crooked New York billionaire hotel owner who seems able to flout the law and inflict suffering at will, in an episode where the judicial system is undermined and a sadistic white man murders a brown man and a Holocaust victim in cold blood. Sometimes, a show writes your review for you.

Directed by prestige-TV favorite and Daredevil veteran Phil Abraham, the penultimate episode of Daredevil Season 3 (“One Last Shot”) feels painfully familiar. It’s not so much the specific details that hurt, though despite the disparity between when the show was made and when I watched it, it’s hard for certain similarities between recent events in its world and ours not to hurt. And I tend to be skeptical about any writing premised on the idea of franchised corporate art speaking truth to power; if you thought, say, Black Panther had a message worth hearing, you and the CIA have something in common.

It’s the mood of the episode that makes the metaphorical resonance between Wilson Fisk and Donald Trump so strong. The odyssey of fear, shame, confusion, rage, horror, and despair through which Agent Ray Nadeem travels on his way to court, and then to his death — the sense that anything could happen at any moment, that it will almost certainly be bad, and that nothing that’s supposed to stop it actually can or will — this is the emotional tenor of our age.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider.

“Some people are so rich and powerful the system simply can’t handle them,” Matt says by way of explaining why he feels he has to kill Fisk rather than risk him beating additional charges if he’s simply re-arrested. “They actually are above the law.” Foggy, ever the idealist, doesn’t buy it, arguing that this is what the rich and powerful want you to believe in order to drive you to despair and preventing you from using the system to take them down.

I think it’s pretty clear that the opposite is true, and that the rich and powerful promulgate the fiction that the law applies equally to everyone; if this is the case, well, if they break the law and nothing happens, they must not have done anything wrong to begin with, right? The system works!

Daredevil operates with a compelling tension on this point. I have a hard time believing a corporate-owned superhero property will ever really challenge the validity of the entire system; like all the Marvel/Netflix shows, Daredevil has enough heroic cops and feds to demonstrate that several times over. In the case of this conversation, too, it seems we’re meant to see system supporter Foggy as the voice of reason.

But Daredevil relies on the military and law enforcement for its villains, which is also like all the other Marvel/Netflix shows. Dex the crazed soldier turned FBI agent; Frank Castle the berserk black-ops veteran, his commanding officer who became a druglord, and his best friend turned nemesis who started a mercenary company when his tour ended; that guy from Jessica Jones who was a soldier turned cop who got super-strength and roid rage from experimental pills; the prison that used its inmates as guinea pigs in Luke Cage; and on and on and on. In many cases they’re augmented by entire FBI offices, police precincts, or military units that are thoroughly corrupted or downright sadistic. The whole system’s out of order, as the saying goes. Daredevil is like an extended experiment in how far the fantasy of The Last Honest Warrior setting it all to rights can be taken.

I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider. I like the word “antepenultimate.”

Written by Tamara Becher-Wilkinson and directed with both restraint and explosiveness by Alex Garcia Lopez, “Karen” is one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Actually, divided into segments designated “Before” and “Now,” it’s almost two of the best episodes in the series’ history.

[…]

All in all, this is as good an hour of superhero entertainment as you’re likely to see. The raw and nuanced performances of Tergersen and Woll, Garcia Lopez’s proficiency with both New England light and hand-to-hand combat, and a structure in which the realistic and fantastic work together to make each other better than they would be alone — it’s a model the unending onslaught of Marvel and DC movies and shows, up to and including the forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen from the Leftovers team, should seek to emulate. Amen.

I reviewed the Karen Page flashback/church fight episode of Daredevil for Decider. If the series really is over (i.e. Marvel doesn’t restart it when it launches its own streaming service), hopefully some smart casting director gives the brilliant Deborah Ann Woll the showcase she deserves.

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!

NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*

Okay, I lied: There isn’t any actual sex in the flashback sequence that dominates the first reel of “Revelations,” the ninth episode of Daredevil Season 3. And I’m sorry, but this isn’t just a dropped ball, this is a Bill Buckner–level debacle. It’s not just that Isabella Pisacane, the actor cast to play the young Sister Maggie as she falls in love with local boxer Battlin’ Jack Murdock, looks like a cross between actual young Joanne Whalley (the modern-day Sister Maggie) and Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams, which is to say she’s stunning. (Ol’ Battlin’ Jack is definitely punching above his weight class, if you’ll pardon the pun.) It’s that the tension between Catholic iconography and guilt on the one hand and raw physicality on the other is Daredevil‘s stock in trade. I believe it was Chekov (or perhaps Sasha Grey?) who said that if you have a sexy nun on the mantle in the first act, she’d better get off by the third.

I’m joking, but only a little. Co-written by Sam Ernst and showrunner Erik Oleson and directed by Jennifer Lynch, a name I remain amazed to see in television credits whenever it pops up, “Revelations” is another one of those oddly structured episode that feels more like a botched solution to the problem of Marvel/Netflix’s overlong seasons than a cohesive unit that needs to exist on its own. There’s some good stuff in here, and some stuff that could have been better, and some downright baffling stuff too.

I reviewed the Sister Maggie flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

Remember all the complaints I had about the Bullseye origin story? The gaps in plausibility, the slapdash psychology, the less-than-successful cinematography and staging? Well, you can say goodbye to that mess. You can, if you will, vacuum it right up.

“Upstairs/Downstairs,” the eighth episode of Daredevil‘s third season, did more to convince me — in the guts, more than in the mind — of Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter’s madness in this one shot of the man cleaning up his messy apartment in the Daredevil costume he wore to commit mass murder than it did in every other scene involving the character combined. I really can’t say enough good things about writer Dara Resnik and director Alex Zakrzewski, who spent the entire episode showing how Dex’s eggshell mind could be cracked, punctured, sucked dry, and refilled with nothing but trauma and violence, but who neatly (pardon the pun) summed up the whole thing in a single image. Here’s a very sick person clinging desperately to the simple instructions about routine and order that kept him semi-sane for years, while wearing the emblem of that routine and order’s complete and lethal disintegration. It’s a beautiful, horrible thing to behold.

I reviewed episode eight of Daredevil Season Three for Decider.

They call this episode of Daredevil “Aftermath” for a reason. As seemingly mandated by the by-now anachronistic 13-episode model all the main Marvel/Netflix series —the few that remain standing, anyway— follow, the seventh installment of the show’s third season is at least fifty percent conversations between characters about things that happened in the sixth installment of the show’s third season. At least Wilson Fisk gets to watch it on the news all at once instead of spreading it out over the course of 45 minutes of streaming television.

I reviewed the mixed-bag over-the-hump episode of Daredevil S3 for Decider. This series too is no longer standing.