Let us sing the praises of James Urbaniak, whose dark energy in “The Fool,” the riveting fifth episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s currently peerless crime drama, is powerful enough to fuel the goddamn Death Star.

I reviewed episode five of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

“The Travelers” brings us to the halfway point of Dark‘s strong second season, and the music of composer Ben Frost is our company on the journey. An experimentalist whose musical and geographical travels have taken him far and wide, and who’s spent time working with venerable avant-rock superproducers Brian Eno and Steve Albini (just don’t call them superproducers to their faces), Frost’s work in this episode is a sanity-testing tide basin of shrieks and thrums and tones of alarm. It’s reminiscent of Brian Reitzell’s confrontational work on Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, or the collaborative soundscape produced by Angelo Badalamenti, Dean Hurley, and David Lynch on Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Not just sonically, either: Dark continues to make the case that it’s the best genre drama Netflix has put out yet. If it’s not on Hannibal‘s level, much less Twin Peaks‘s, it has no reason to be shy about standing in their company.

I reviewed episode four of Dark Season Two for Decider.

The fourth installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s extended meditation on the evil that men do is one of the most unnerving episodes of television in recent memory. I’d put it up there with any highlight you’d care to name from The Terror, The Act, Channel Zero, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and even the gut-churning war-crime climax of Game of Thrones.

I reviewed episode four of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Time travel, kidnappings, cancer, nuclear apocalypse—yes, sure, all well and good. But for this review of Dark, I’d like to start out by showcasing some acting. That’s an advantage of having two or three different actors play every single character at different times in their lives, right? There’s a lot more acting to go around!

I don’t mean to make light of it, either. “Ghosts,” the third episode of the German Netflix drama’s second season, shows how important the cast is to making this crazy-on-paper project work. Following young, adult, and old versions of characters spread across a hundred-year timespan, often interacting with each other anachronistically and even starting whole new lives out of sync, is demanding work for the audience. Rooting that work in the happiness, sadness, and shame of the characters—making them people, not plot devices—is the secret of the show’s success.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Titled “The Hermit” after the corresponding card from the tarot (that’s where every episode gets its moniker), the third exquisite installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young has only one thing wrong with it that I can see: It could have been longer.

I reviewed episode three of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

As always, getting through the raw plot of the show takes up a lot of column inches. But don’t let it take up all the storage space your brain has allotted for the show. While the family tree is a maze of brambles and the timelines look like the tangle of wires connecting your TV to your Xbox, the emotions are recognizable and real. Feeling like you don’t really know the people who are supposed to love you; feeling like you’re trapped in a great cosmic fuck-up and the only way to be happy is to try to just ignore it; feeling powerless to stop oncoming tragedies both great and small—that’s the stuff this show is working with, the stuff it really cares about. It’s dark matter indeed.

I reviewed episode two of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Easily one of the most thematically ambitious dramas Netflix has produced (in any language), and certainly the most narratively complicated one, Dark has returned after a year and a half for a second season of sci-fi and sadness in the woody suburbs of Germany. It does so without making the slightest concession to the notion of jumping-on points for viewers coming to the second season fresh. This is not that kind of show. If you want to get the most out of Dark—if you want to get anything out of Dark—you’d better start from the beginning. This is a journey you have to follow every step of the way.

I reviewed the premiere of Dark Season Two on Netflix for Decider. It’s the network’s best show, give or take a Suburra: Blood on Rome. 

(NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)

Murder? Yes. Illicit sex? You bet. Gross rich criminal father figure? Mmhm. Hot monochromatic and duochromatic lighting? Oh, indeed. Tracking shots and camera pans so slow they should be measured by half-life? Absolutely. Yes, most of what characterized the first episode of Too Old to Die Young shows up in the show’s second outing as well. With one major exception: the main character.

I reviewed episode two of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Here’s a cinematic axiom you can take to the bank: It’s impossible to be pretentious when you’re patient.

At the very least it’s damn difficult. To the extent pretentiousness means anything (other than “this person thinks they’re better than me and my concern is they’re right”) it signals that an artist is rubbing an unearned sense of intellectual or aesthetic superiority in the audience’s face. The last thing a truly pretentious artist would want is to give that audience time to think. For one thing, pretentious artists don’t believe the audience is capable of thinking, at least not on their own level. More importantly, time for the audience to think is time better spent showing off.

Now consider Nicholas Winding Refn, one of Danish cinema’s many enfants terribles. With each film he’s made since his breakthrough Drive—the Ryan Gosling reunion Only God Forgives, the Elle Fanning fashion-horror freakout The Neon Demon, and now Too Old to Die Young, an elephantine miniseries co-created by crime comics writer Ed Brubaker—his willingness to not bum-rush the viewer from one signpost of his ostensible genius to the next has grown to an almost perverse degree.

For all their lurid colors, lurid subject matter, and ultraviolence, Refn’s movies are ssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Closeups, zooms, pans, tracking shots, exchanges of dialogue, tones from Cliff Martinez’s vibratory scores: They all proceed at the pace of the profoundly stoned, which indeed is the best state in which to watch them. While dazzling, I don’t think their intent is to dazzle, since that implies a reflective surface. If you like a Refn movie it’s because you sink right into it, and can float around inside it with the company of your own thoughts to fill the space, kill the time, and assign meaning to these multicolored worlds full of moral morons.

This is my long-winded way of saying “The Devil,” the feature-length pilot episode of Refn & Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, whips ass. Am I being pretentious? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.

I reviewed the series premiere of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young for Decider. This show is exquisite and disturbing. (NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)

From the start, Black Spot has been a case study in how the whole can be equal or less than the sum of its parts. Lush location filming and thoughtful character work that tells much of the emotional story simply via well lit closeups on their faces, juxtaposed with perfunctory mysteries and recycled horror imagery: The combination frustrates because anyone capable of pulling off the former ought to know better than serving up the latter.

Titled “The End Is Only the Beginning” with almost maddening bluntness, the show’s cliffhanger season finale offers yet more evidence of this irritating tendency. Yet for once, the surprise reveals are—almost—as good as anything else on the show. Making it work in the final hour is a mystery alright, but it’s a happy one despite it all.

I reviewed the surprisingly engaging season finale of Black Spot, which still isn’t the show it could be, for Decider.

Black Spot has a strong, quiet cast that does great work with what they’re given. It’s as good at landscapes and intimate closeups as any show you’d care to name right now. I mean, look at this:

But as long as it keeps both telegraphing and pulling its punches, depending on the episode, it’s never going to feel worthy of the raw material with which it’s working. It will never see the forest for the trees.

I reviewed the season finale of Black Spot for Decider.

If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.

While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Black Spot Season One for Decider.

If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.

While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Black Spot Season One for Decider.

How many times can you say the same things about the same show, I wonder. Well, let me see. How many episodes does Black Spot run again? The awkwardly titled “Dark Heroes” is the sixth installment of the most aggressively mixed bag of a Netflix show I’ve seen so far. By now, if you don’t have its like-clockwork rhythms committed to memory, you should probably set your content filter to “Kids” to avoid complex narratives entirely.

I reviewed episode six of Black Spot for Decider.

How many times can you say the same things about the same show, I wonder. Well, let me see. How many episodes does Black Spot run again? The awkwardly titled “Dark Heroes” is the sixth installment of the most aggressively mixed bag of a Netflix show I’ve seen so far. By now, if you don’t have its like-clockwork rhythms committed to memory, you should probably set your content filter to “Kids” to avoid complex narratives entirely.

I reviewed episode six of Black Spot for Decider.

Two very, very different images of post-mortem movement bookend “The End of the Road,” yet another drearily predictable mystery wrapped in sumptuous cinematography and magnetic acting in Black Spot‘s ever-growing tally. It’s like taking Woodward & Bernstein and using it to wrap the catch of the day.

The real asskicker is that if creator Mathieu Missoffe had gotten half as creative with the script as the filmmakers and cast have gotten with what they’re doing, so many of the show’s problems would be nothing but dodged bullets.

I reviewed episode five of Black Spot for Decider.

I dunno, folks, I really just don’t know. The more I watch the more I feel that Black Spot is just an extremely well-made primetime broadcast-network supernatural cop show that could be so much more. I suppose we’ll get to the bottom of it in the end.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Black Spot for Decider.

I’m starting to think that I’d make an excellent addition to the Villefranche police department. Could I help them account for their town’s unusually high rate of violent crime? Free the people and the surrounding forest from the grip of the Steiner family? Figure out what the hell is up with the weird antler-man making all that infernal racket out there in the woods? No, no, and no. But I sure could solve murder cases a lot quicker than Major Weiss’s cuddly cops, I can tell you that much.

I reviewed episode four of Black Spot for Decider.

It’s no fun at all to watch a mystery you’re halfway to solving by the time you actually see the crime. It’s especially no fun when the mystery in question is this well shot, well cast, and well acted. The cast, led by Suliane Brahim as Major Weiss and Laurent Capelluto as District Attorney Sirani, are warm and endearing—even Weiss and Siriani, the prickliest of the bunch. Meanwhile, director Thierry Poiraud is as proficient with landscapes as he is with closeups. Both are used to convey isolation and fear in a way that’s far more moving than the mystery material.

I reviewed the fourth episode of this frustrating series for Decider.

Episode 3, “The Void,” illustrates a major potential problem with the show’s approach: If you’re going to have eight mysteries a season, you have to be good at writing mysteries.

I reviewed the third episode of Black Spot for Decider.