If there’s one thing Secret City has gotten right, it’s showing how hard we can cling to our preferred versions of the people we love. That’s an unusual statement to make regarding a cloak-and-dagger thriller about the menace of China Rising, but it’s true nonetheless. Episode 3 of Secret City finds its emotional center in the mourning for Kim Gordon, the slain spy who was once married to main character Harriet Dunkley, and it provides ample opportunity for writer Belinda Chayko and director Emma Freeman to demonstrate this maxim.

I reviewed the third episode of Secret City — featuring some really beautiful shot compositions, a magnetic performance by Anna Torv, and misgendering as a sign of villainy — for Decider.

I do have one concern, though, and upon thinking about it it’s a pretty major one: What is this for? Don’t get me wrong: Anna Torv and Damon Herriman (a cis male actor cast as a trans woman, he steers clear from the showy pitfalls such performers often leap into, even when the material all but frogmarches him in) are both magnificent in this segment, and if anything it’s a shame they won’t be given a chance to repeat this performance together. Yet I’m sitting here watching these characters in terror and pain because, what, there’s some opaque shenanigans and skullduggery going on in a pissing contest between Australia and China, involving a bunch of unlikable bureaucrats we’re treating like fun antiheroes and flat-affect spies who can best be described as “sinister Asians”?

The stories of spycraft that have really mattered to me — The Americans, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Joseph Conrad’s relatively obscure but beautifully bleak novel Under Western Eyes — wedded their characters’ zealous, often murderous and amoral patriotism to a sense of colossal waste. It’s impossible to walk away from those stories feeling like you’ve watched an edge-of-your-seat thriller and nothing else, not when they’re based on the idea that espionage is a soul-destroying, life-destroying business. Unless and until Secret City gets serious not just about the deaths of people like Kim, but the whole fraudulent and poisonous enterprise for which such people died, it’s not a city I really want to live in.

I reviewed the second episode of Secret City, which is maybe a bit too good for its own good in terms of wedding well-made characters to a potboiler, for Decider.

Stream This Absurdist but Empathetic Documentary About Live-Action Gamers

A scene from “Darkon.” Ovie Entertainment

‘Darkon’ Where to Watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime; rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, or YouTube. Save it to your Watchlist.

This 2006 documentary from Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel takes its title from the Darkon Wargaming Club, a society of live-action role players in suburban Baltimore. Strapping on homemade armor and whacking each other with foam-padded weapons, these weekend warriors (and wizards and elves) gather to enact elaborate story lines of conquest and intrigue. But peel away the helms and tunics, and you’ll find a diverse group of people, driven by personal or economic dislocation to find fulfillment in an imaginary world: a stay-at-home father, a single mother, a young businessman, a teenage misfit.

“Darkon” is bracingly honest — and, in the context of today’s cultural conversations, prophetically relevant — about the limits of escapism. And the determination its subjects display in using their own imaginations to find agency and joy is deeply moving. At a time when wide swathes of nerd culture have gone toxic, the downtrodden but upbeat adventurers of “Darkon” are downright inspiring. — Sean T. Collins Stream an Overlooked, Terrifying Slice of Satanic Panic From John Carpenter Alice Cooper, center, in “Prince of Darkness.” Universal Pictures   ‘Prince of Darkness’ Where to Watch: Rent it on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Vudu. Save it to your Watchlist. The writer and director John Carpenter birthed the slasher film with “Halloween,” reinvented the creature feature with “The Thing” and created the sci-fi dystopia of our age with “They Live.” The guy is good. But he has never been better than in one of his most overlooked efforts, “Prince of Darkness” (1987). This bone-deep-disturbing supernatural horror film pits an outmatched team of professors and students against Satan himself, who appears in the form of a swirling green ooze that the Catholic Church has kept sealed away for centuries. As that evil essence permeates the claustrophobic and abandoned urban church where they’re trapped, the academics’ mission switches from study to survival. Simply put, this movie just feels wrong. Both the story’s structure and the entity’s powers shift constantly, preserving the power to shock. The theology underpinning the horror, meanwhile, is perverse enough to make even my extremely lapsed Catholic jaw drop. If you liked the madness of “Hereditary,” bow to the “Prince.” — Sean T. Collins

I’ve begun contributing movie recommendations to Watching, the New York Times’ fun and useful email newsletter that offers tips on good movies and TV shows available to stream on pretty much any and every service and network. It’s free to subscribe, and the newsletters don’t appear anywhere else online (unless I copy and paste my segments, like so, which I shan’t be doing again), so go sign up!

“All right, so, let me get this straight. She was married to you, and then she cheated with you, and then she left you for you, and then she cheated on you with you, and then she had your baby, but then said it was your baby. Did I get that right?”

Sure, I could identify the men referred to by each use of the word “you” in the above monologue, delivered by the high-school student Anton Gatewood to his teacher Noah Solloway and Noah’s former romantic rival Cole Lockhart. But would it really even matter? Watching the actor Christopher Meyer say all this stuff from the back seat of a car to the two men in the front, his head swiveling back and forth as if he were watching some kind of bizarre, psychosexual Wimbledon, says it all. As an encapsulation of the chaos into which the titular relationship on “The Affair” plunged its various participants, Anton nails it. And judging from the cryptic flash-forwards that have opened each episode of Season 4 so far — in which Noah, Cole and Anton embark upon what appears to be a search for Alison Bailey — there’s more chaos to come.

But this particular brand of interpersonal mayhem takes a back seat to more immediate professional and physical concerns in this week’s episode, which returns us to the Los Angeles half of this season’s story. While Noah navigates the rocky waters of class, race and faculty politics at the charter school where he works, his ex-wife Helen and her boyfriend, Vic, receive a devastating medical diagnosis that throws their already strained relationship into greater turmoil. Connecting the two story lines is the sense that life is turmoil and chaos, and that the times we’re able to control it are happy accidents at best.

Savior complex: I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

“Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad” is a genre of prestige — or at least prestige-adjacent — television I’ve avoided until now. So too is its auxiliary wing, “American Version of Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad.” Secret City, the new crime drama from Netflix, is a little bit of both. Set in Canberra, Australia, the country where it originally aired in 2016, it’s one of the many many foreign shows branded with the American streaming-media behemoth’s familiar red N. Its star, Fringe‘s Anna Torv, also co-headlines the David Fincher serial-killer series Mindhunter, a hit for the network (as far as anyone knows; Netflix is infamously opaque about such things). Despite predating Mindhunter, this gives Secret City the feel of a side project, a place Torv can use her native accent and look less like Carrie Coon while still dealing with the same basic matters of investigation, intrigue, and murder most foul. If Mindhunter is her Parliament-Funkadelic, Secret City is Bootsy’s Rubber Band.

I reviewed the first episode of Secret City on Netflix for Decider. Based on one episode out of a total of six, it’s a so-so show with a strong lead and at least one interesting supporting character.

Coincidence, synchronicity, luck of the draw: If any show on television is aware that these mysterious forces are often less than benign, it’s “The Affair.” The series’s titular relationship began with what seemed like kismet between a frustrated father and a grieving mother, and it ended in a slow-motion crack-up of the families involved. In the process, Noah landed in prison for a death he didn’t cause, covering for both his current wife and his former one. And those are just the two most prominent instances among many.

Which brings us to tonight’s episode, in which the often traumatic experiences of undocumented immigrants plays a central role in the story — airing, it just so happens, on a week when it has played a central role in American life and politics.

True, the back story behind Cole’s second wife, Luisa, was planted when she first appeared on the show; Sarah Treem, the series’s co-creator and its sole showrunner, has long had an eye for the undercurrents in this country that can drag otherwise fully functional adults down. Indeed, another such riptide, the small-town drug epidemic made manifest by the Lockhart family’s coke-dealing side hustle, popped up again this week after many, many hours of screentime had elapsed since it last played a part.

Still, this week’s installment, written by Treem and directed with Atlantic Ocean coolness by Rodrigo García, brings home the difficulties faced by America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants by tying it to quotidian and universal events. Let’s say you aren’t an undocumented immigrant, or don’t know any personally: You’ve almost certainly experienced the stomach-dropping dread that comes with seeing the lights of a cop car in your rearview mirror. You’ve probably also at some point felt like the odd person out, prevented by circumstances beyond your control from truly fitting into the life of a person you love. And you’ve most likely wondered why people who are supposed to care about you are too tied up in their own petty concerns to treat your plight with the seriousness it deserves.

That’s Luisa’s story, told from Cole’s perspective over the course of a bad couple of days in their life. For those of us in the real world, the timing could not be better. (Or worse.)

I reviewed last week’s typically on-the-money episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Does the series still work? Did it ever? Appropriately, that may depend on your perspective. There’s an old saw taken from therapists and their countless dramatized depictions that sums up the experience of watching “The Affair” quite neatly: “How does that make you feel?” And from its very first hour, when its multi-perspective template was established, this series has emphasized feeling, serving more as a vehicle for impressionism rather than for realism. The differences among its characters’ competing histories speak to a basic truth about the unreliability of memory, but some of them are probably too major to explain away as tricks of the mind. (I mean, two totally different people saved the same kid from choking to death all the way back in the pilot.) As such, I have long believed that the best way to process “The Affair” is as a portrait of those mindsets, not as an effort to reconstruct the truth.

Viewed from that perspective, all the sex, lies, self-destruction, screaming matches and occasional violent outbursts and murder mysteries are merely the screen on which the series projects its kaleidoscopic picture — a picture of the ways in which grief, guilt, lust, love, parenthood, couplehood, marriage, divorce, age, class and (especially) the limits of traditional gender roles replace reality, deep down inside us. And if you can accept that, then “The Affair” winds up looking like one of the smartest, most observant, most empathetic things on television — the most truly adult show since “Mad Men.” You just have to let yourself feel it.

So how does it feel? Not always great, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Helen and (especially) Noah aren’t merely unreliable narrators in this episode, they’re also unpleasant ones. The series — and the actors Maura Tierney and Dominic West — isn’t afraid to make these people ugly, and to look ugly doing it. They pay the price every time a viewer or critic says, “Get your act together, Helen,” or, “Ugh, Noah is the worst.” But expecting otherwise treats that ugliness (to echo Helen) as if it were the show’s “fault” rather than its strength. That misses the point.

Because if you’ve reached adulthood without ever failing to get your act together or being the worst … well, bless your heart, because that sure doesn’t look like life from where I’m sitting. “The Affair” — angry, guilty, horny, and as restless as the ocean Fiona Apple sings about in the opening credits — does.

I’m excited to be covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, beginning with this review of the season premiere. Co-creator and showrunner Sarah Treem saw this review and said “I’ve never seen anyone articulate what I’m trying to do on this show as clearly,” so there’s that.

The funny thing is that despite the length of the finale and the glacial pace of most of the preceding episodes, Westworld Season Two still feels like it just barely got started. Take away the shifting time frames and the occasional detour into Flashback Country, and what have you got? A road movie in which characters who either perpetrated or survived Season One’s climactic massacre all head to the Valley Beyond. A bunch of robotic redshirts and a few supporting players get killed. A few other supporting players make it through to a virtual-reality paradise while Bernard, Dolores and the Man in Black live on (in one form or another) in the real world to fight another day.

It’s not a bad narrative, necessarily. From The Warriors to the freaking Odyssey, plenty of good work concerns its characters’ quest to get from Point A to Point B without losing their lives or souls in the process. But the show’s parameters for the park are too vague to give their journey a sense of direction. All we know is that it’s really, reallybig. That, and there are strategically located bunkers and hideouts just a few minutes of screentime away from wherever the characters are at any given moment so they’re never in real danger of getting lost.

Meanwhile, the constant cross-cutting between storylines dilutes our investment in the physical journey of any one character or group, since we know we’ll be whisked away to some other place and time at any moment. There’s a reason the Akecheta episode hit as hard as it did, even aside from Zahn McClarnon’s performance: It rooted us in the experiences and perils of a single character for an entire episode, in a way that made us feel what was at stake – and that no amount of Dolores monologues could equal.

And we don’t even have a recognizable endpoint in mind to serve as an anchor, the equivalent of The Lord of the Rings‘ Mount Doom. “The Valley Beyond” is amorphous even by the show’s standards (at least Season One’s “Maze” implies a central location). It’s just a bunch of rocks in the middle of a Western landscape like countless others the characters have crossed, and even as a metaphysical concept it’s just a bog-standard promised land. To paraphrase Bernard’s imaginary Ford, you might as well have spent the season chasing the horizon.

Which is a bit like the experience of watching Westworld itself. There are enough individual elements at play – concepts, creature effects, a handful of strong performances – to make you believe it could all come together at some point. There’s a consistent leap of faith needed, a fingers-crossed hope that the show will Get Good the way many other dramas that suffered shaky starts eventually did. Yet all our pathways keep leading us to the same place: clichéd dialogue, meaningless twists, plodding pacing. And the good Westworld remains, as ever, its own Valley Beyond, maddeningly out of reach.

I reviewed the blah season finale of the blah show Westworld’s blah second season for Rolling Stone. I wanted to post this long an excerpt for a couple of reasons. First, it’s me riffing on one of my favorite topics: the way film can use the motion of bodies and objects across physical space to communicate. Second, and more on this soon, it illustrates a point I frequently try to make, which is that rather than start with thematic or sociopolitical critiques and work downward, you can often start with seemingly small formal considerations of cinematography, writing, performance, etc. and discover how they work upward toward larger flaws.

I’d also recommend reading my new Rolling Stone colleague Alan Sepinwall’s thoughts on the season; we realized early on that our takes were very complementary.

Evan Rachel Wood’s performance since her transformation into the Deathbringer has been impressive in its steeliness, but her hard-ass attitude and mechanical lack of emotion have left her little to do than act like a grumpy robot unless there’s something especially traumatic for her to process. We saw how well she could play that kind of emotion when she encountered the ruin of her father, his computerized mind torn to pieces by having too much data pumped into it.

Here, over the body of the man with whom she’s shared so much, we see it again. There’s something weird and alien in how her face registers the pain of Teddy’s death, as if her internal processors have to learn what grief feels like from scratch and figure out an appropriate physical response. Her face goes weirdly flat, then asymmetrical, then contorts in an animalistic silent howl of anguish and rage. It’s acting as creation, using the face and body to build a new way of expressing a familiar emotion. You want a metaphor for how good sci-fi operates? You got it. If only Westworld gave it to us more often.

Three weeks ago I reviewed the penultimate episode of Westworld Season 2 for Rolling Stone. It’s a return to mediocre form after the beautiful Zahn McClarnon/Akecheta episode from the previous week. One thing that emerged really strongly to me this season is how badly the material hamstrings even the best actors on the show, and there are some really good ones, and how in the hands of less-good actors (it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Tessa Thompson is at it again) it just goes nowhere at all.

What a way to cap a season in which this ruthlessly entertaining and intelligent show, so gimlet-eyed about the corrupting influence of power and so deft at depicting its argot and appeal, finally brought in the buzz it has long deserved. To paraphrase the Hulkster, “Billions”-mania is running wild, brother. Long may it flex.

I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times. What a pleasure to write about this show this season!

If you want something done right, give it to actor Zahn McClarnon to do. That’s the logical conclusion to draw coming out of this week’s episode of Westworld, titled “Kiksuya” – and the series’ best hour by a considerable margin. For once, the show’s annoyances (easy escapes, constant pointless bickering, those damn orchestral alt-rock cover versions) aren’t enough to overwhelm the material of real value. It took one of its most underutilized cast members, placed him at the center of a storyline that directly addressed the series’ sci-fi conceit but combined it with real mythmaking power and then let him run. The warrior Akecheta may not save Ghost Nation and its many human captives, but he just might have saved this show.

Until now, McClarnon had only been required to do is act mysterious and menacing – which is easy to do when you’re covered head to toe in death-cult warpaint – and spend a little time in a real-world flashback scene looking smart and suave. (The dude is all cheekbones.) But if you watched Fargo Season Two, you know that this actor is capable of so much more. As Hanzee Dent, the Native American enforcer for a Midwestern crime family, he was a nearly mute murder machine whose every move and murmur carried the weight of the whole rotten world. His reading of a weary, whispered line like “Tired of this life” – so tired that even identifying himself as said life’s owner was too much to bear – was all he needed to make himself the season’s greatest monster and its wounded moral heart.

This is the McClarnon we get tonight.

Last night’s Westworld was, by a considerable margin, the best episode of the series. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone.

26. ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ (2001)

Meet the only film on this (or any other) list in which a deranged Vietnam veteran played by Law & Order: SVU’s Christopher Meloni learns valuable life lessons from a talking can of vegetables that can suck its own dick. (“And I do it a lot.”) With a gaggle of alums from the influential sketch comedy group the State both in front of and behind the camera – and a cast of soon-to-be superstars including Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd – this send-up of raunchy Reagan-era teen comedies has an anything-for-a-laugh approach that actually gets laughs every time. This one-time cult curiosity has since spawned two Netflix spinoff series … as well as a legendary DVD audio commentary track that just adds extra fart sounds.

I contributed a pair of write-ups to Rolling Stone’s list of the best comedies of the century so far, featuring the usual murderers’ row of writers. Enjoy!

This week, on “Billions”: Salt Bae.

The viral-video sensation and steakhouse hearthrob Nusret Gokce makes an unexpected appearance to open the episode. Of all the real-life restaurateurs, athletes and hedge-fund aristocracy who’ve appeared on this show, none made me laugh harder at their sheer delightful audacity. Come to think of it, I don’t know if anything on TV has made me laugh harder than this.

The look of lust in the eyes of Condola Rashad’s normally unflappable attorney Kate Sacker, accompanied by the sensual strains of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” on the sound system, simply add additional seasoning to the scenario. Silly as it sounds, the scene is a textbook example of the attention to detail “Billions” pays to its Manhattan machinations. The show never settles for satisfying when spectacular will do.

Billions is so good. I reviewed this week’s episode for the New York Times.

It was the best of worlds, it was the worst of worlds. Like no episode before it, this week’s voyage to Westworld (“Les Écorchés”) was the proverbial non-stop action thrill ride – a carnival midway of cool sci-fi/horror imagery and visceral combat. It had James Marden’s Teddy going full Terminator, dressed in body armor and beating short-lived security badass Coughlin to death with his bare hands. It has both Clementine and Angela going out in blazes of glory, the latter by blowing up the hosts’ backup files in the Cradle and setting them free from the park’s endless loop. It has a beautifully shot face-off between Maeve and the Man in Black, the camera resting on Thandie Newton’s foregrounded face as she uses her psychic powers to turn the MiB’s own android allies against him. It has a creepy Bluebeard closet full of Bernard replicas and the real version getting possessed by the electronic spirit of his own creator so he can murder Delos thugs guilt-free. In short, it’s full of rad-ass robot shit.

[…]

The same cannot be said of the new narrative’s antagonist. Frankly, it’s time to come to terms with Charlotte Hale. Obviously, Tessa Thompson’s on a career hot streak – but the character of Hale is ice cold, and not in the unflappable-villain way she’s supposed to be either. There’s just nothing interesting about this one-note one-percenter, or the smirking way in which Thompson delivers every line. She has the mocking affect of a condescending reply from a Trump supporter on Twitter. She’s obnoxious when she has the upper hand over Peter Abernathy and Bernard in their respective torture chambers, and she’s just as irritating when her picked-on minion Stubbs, or rogue hosts Dolores and Teddy, have the upper hand on her in turn.

I reviewed tonight’s Westworld, which was both good pulpy fun and incredibly stupid, for Rolling Stone.

The Terror didn’t end tonight. It died.

That’s the best way to make sense of “We Are Gone,” the tenth and final episode of this brutally humane series, that I can come up with. More so than anything else on television in recent memory—ever, perhaps?—The Terror is about the experience of death, because the story requires virtually every character we meet to die before the end. Much of that die-off happens here, tonight. It happens onscreen and off, spectacularly and quietly, peacefully and gruesomely, by suicide and murder and disease and starvation—and, of course, a gigantic demonic bear. Death is like a prism turned around in The Terror’s hand, showing every facet, never settling on any one of them as the force’s true face.

I reviewed the finale of The Terror, a truly great television show, for the A.V. Club. I’m proud of the writing I did on this show, and there will be more of it coming your way soon.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi mind-tricked its audience. As if in homage to the galaxy in which the film is set—divided as it is between the Dark Side and the Light—Rian Johnson’s 2017 installment in the saga sparked the most preposterously binary set of responses to a franchise film in recent memory. Read about this continuation of the Disney-owned sequel trilogy (begun and soon to be ended by J.J. Abrams) and you’ll quickly feel the pull of two opposing Forces, demanding allegiance. Broadly speaking: Is it a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that redeems the Star Wars concept by having the courage to toss it aside, or is it a million childhoods suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced…by incipient white genocide?

I say it’s neither, and man am I tired of having to say it, but before I see Solo I’ll give it one last shot. The Last Jedi is my least favorite Star Wars movie by far, but not for any of the reasons most of its detractors cite, nor for those against which its champions array their defenses. The misogynistic bigots whose response to the film is essentially “Why isn’t there a White History Month” will have to settle for running all three branches of government; they won’t get me to agree that a story driven by vivid and charismatic characters played by natural-born movie stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and Domnhall Gleeson—the best things either TLJ or its immediate predecessor The Force Awakens have going for them—represent the collapse of the West. Nor am I going to agree to their terms of debate the way so many proponents of the film have, acting as though hidebound nostalgia at best and bald-faced reactionary fury at worst are the only reasons to take issue with this movie. The Last Jedi has its moments, but its faults are many—and too often obscured by the Sith vs. Jedi nature of the debate surrounding it.

Right up front, let’s forget the idea that TLJ represents some bold act of iconoclasm—a creatively courageous attempt to unmoor the franchise from nostalgia. There’s a substratum of angry nerds who think believe this and hate it, and a separate group of critics and critic-adjacent people online who believe this and love it. I really don’t know how either group comes to this conclusion about what is, after all, the ninth Star Wars movie. It’s got dark lords and chosen ones, lightsabers and Star Destroyers, cute aliens and cute droids, you name it. Rey’s parentage may have been rendered a non-issue (in a desultory rip-off of the mirror sequence from The Never-ending Story, but whatever), but Kylo Ren is still the biological descendent of the main characters from both of the previous trilogies. And this is the guy—the bad guy, might I add—who utters the “let the past die” mantra so many critics and detractors alike seem to have taken to heart as the film’s mission statement. Again, this is the ninth Star Wars movie. If you want to let the past die, go watch or make a film that doesn’t co-star characters who debuted 40 years earlier.

To the extent that writer-director Rian Johnson did wipe the slate clean, the effect was not a healthy one. Dispensing with the pattern established by all the other movies, Johnson resumes the action right where The Force Awakens leaves off. Leia, Poe, Finn, C-3PO, BB-8, and the rest of the Resistance core are still on their home base from the previous film; so little time has elapsed that they’re still waiting for the First Order to show up and chase them out of there when the movie begins. Elsewhere, Rey and Luke’s storyline resumes mid-conversation. Because of this, our first images of our heroes take place in places we’ve already seen, rather than dropping us head-first into new ones—not even the familiar desert/forest/ice archetypes of The Force Awakens, which were at least different planets than the ones from the original trilogy, if not different types of planets.

The bulk of the story takes place on Luke’s island, a couple of spaceships, and finally a single patch of a desert planet that simply substitutes salt for sand and adds a little red dust for flair. The plot concerns Rey trying and failing to convince Luke to get up off his ass and Kylo Ren and General Hux picking off Resistance ships one by one, Battlestar Galactica–style (to put the resemblance kindly, though if you called it a knockoff I wouldn’t object). Mysteries aren’t so much solved as canceled: Rey’s parents are nobodies (a theoretically interesting idea delivered in perfunctory fashion) and the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke gets jobbed out before displaying a single interesting characteristic except being unusually tall and having cool red wallpaper. The film ends with the characters hiding in an abandoned garage some guy’s trying to break into, pretty much.

In short, this is the first Star Wars movie in which the world feels smaller at the end of the movie than it did at the beginning. It’s an attritional film, one that whittles away until only a tiny fragment remains. The manic thrill of discovery and creation that made the original trilogy so culture-changingly compelling—and which makes the much-maligned prequel trilogy, which you can read persuasive defenses of here and here, a gloriously weird work of art on the Speed Racer level if nothing else—is almost entirely absent. (Almost: the trip made by Finn and his new ally Rose to that casino planet has that wild and woolly feeling to it, which paradoxically may be why people dislike it; Leia’s Force-enabled spacewalk is a poor substitute for getting to see her with a lightsaber in her hand but it’s still good audience-rousing fun; the Porgs, of course, are perfection. But that’s thin gruel to spread across two and a half hours of running time.)

This is the first half of my lengthy essay for Decider on why I don’t like The Last Jedi. I just got so sick of seeing the debate, both pro and con sides, framed entirely in terms set by bigots or “my childhood!!!” types, and wanted to open up other lines of criticism and inquiry. Click here to read the rest.

It would do the show’s writers — in this case, the series co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, joined by Matthew Fennell — a disservice to describe these financial machinations as merely a MacGuffin; too much effort is put into nailing the almost esoteric intricacy and jargon of these multi-hundred-million dollar transactions. But in the same way that the Maltese Falcon or the “Pulp Fiction” briefcase are meaningful mostly through what people do in their name, Bobby’s predicament — moronically described as “Defcon 6” by his unctuous, hilarious compliance officer Ari Spyros (Stephen Kunken) — enables an entire cast of characters and guest stars to shine.

It’s Paul Giamatti vs. Clancy Brown and Damian Lewis vs. John Malkovich with a heaping helping of David Krumholtz, Maggie Siff, Asia Kate Dillon, and Maria Sharapova (!) on the side: I reviewed last week’s Billions for the New York Times. Absolutely unimpeachable writing, casting, acting.

You can take the boys out of the blood feud, but you can’t take the blood feud out of the boys. Just two episodes after the successful conclusion of the truce that saw the main men of “Billions” call an end to hostilities and help each other out of potentially career-ending legal trouble, both Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades have launched dangerous new contests of the will. And this time around, it’s not the courtroom versus the boardroom: Each man has entered into a rivalry with a bigger fish in their own professional pond.

For Chuck, this means setting his sights on a new white whale: Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat, the Alamo authoritarian running the Justice Department. For Bobby, it entails entering an alliance of creepy convenience with Grigor Andolov, a cheerfully violent Russian oil baron, whose bottomless reserves of liquid cash are exceeded only by his well-earned reputation for criminality and cruelty. Together, writers Adam R. Perlman and Willie Reale and director Stacie Passon operate this week’s episode, titled “Icebreaker,” like a factory assembly line, cranking out perfect new foils for two characters who are never complete without conflict.

If you needed another reason to start watching Billions, please note that John Malkovich and Clancy Brown now play major antagonists. I reviewed the episode that introduced Malkovich’s character for the New York Times.

Dismemberment, disembowelment and decapitation: Traditionally, these aren’t what you’d call teachable moments. But thanks to some swordpoint shenanigans in Shogunworld, all three figure prominently into a key scene in this week’s episode of Westworld (“Phase Space”). Even better, they go a long way toward demonstrating why this installment is such a dramatic uptick in quality from its predecessors. Whether it’s the script by Mad Men veteran Carly Wray or the direction by Swedish filmmaker Tarik Saleh is unclear, but there’s attention paid here to subtle human reactions to events as they unfold that’s unequaled by previous episodes. It’s all about the execution – even when you’re talking about an actual execution.

Let’s take that gory swordfight as a starting point. The duel in question involves Musashi, the ronin befriended by Maeve and her posse last week, and his former lieutenant turned rival Tanaka. Eschewing the techno-telepathy of “the witch” in favor of an old-fashioned mano a mano – staged in broad daylight, as opposed to the previous episode’s inexplicably murky swordplay – the two men go blade for blade in front of our heroes and a whole crowd of townspeople. (Contender for most memorable shot: An old man covering a little boy’s eyes to shield him from the bloodshed.) The fight ends with Tanaka’s protracted, screaming demise: Musashi cuts his hand off at the wrist, then provides him with the short sword he must use for harakiri, before beheading him. It’s the first time in a long time that the show’s brutality has been this inventively and empathetically staged. When the samurai and his geisha comrade Akane (who memorably carves out the heart of her own daughter for cremation) choose to stay behind and fight for their homeland instead of fleeing, the decision feels truly earned.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Westworld, which I thought was better than most, for Rolling Stone.

But – listen, this is Westworld, there’s always a but – enough baffling decisions remain to knock you out of the action faster than a katana to the face. For starters, despite what looks like very strong fight choreography and a behind-the-scenes budget bigger than a small country’s GDP, all the combat is shot in the dark. This is usually either a cost-cutting measure (you don’t need to pay for details you can’t see) or a way to hide sloppy swordplay. Since neither of those factors appear to apply, it comes across like sheer addiction to the murky, somber lighting and color palette of Prestige TV. What’s the point of all that precise blade-wielding if you don’t actually get to see the damn blades?

Also, true to the show’s programming, cringeworthy music cues are abound here. If you thought the cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” (coincidentally the week he went full MAGA) or the “White Stripes: Indian Edition” version of “Seven Nation Army” were hard to take, wait until you hear faux-Japanese versions of the Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” The former, at least, is a callback to the show’s first use of the song, during the Sweetwater bandit raid that ShogunWorld has recycled for its own setting. But “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” during a scene that has nothing to do with cash? Is the idea “Well, Wu-Tang love samurai flicks, so it works”? If so, why not remake a song that actually samples music or dialogue from those films? As it stands, this just sounds like taking the Wu’s most recognizable hit and dumping it in the middle of a scene just because they can. Not even dropping a big sack with a dollar sign right in Thandie Newton’s lap would seem more jarring.

I reviewed the Westworld where they went to Fake Japan for Rolling Stone. I was pleased to see the show embracing its innate pulpiness, which has always been far more interesting than the deep thoughts it seems to think it has, and I write about that a bunch. But it still makes everything such a challenge to actually enjoy because of choices like the ones described above.