“This reminds me of The Sopranos”: Now that’s a thought you love to have. If a show is doing something reminiscent of the show that effectively made all of your subsequent favorite shows possible, then it’s doing something right. Watching a pair of gangster idiots escalate a meaningless offense into a brutal murder and clumsy coverup? That’s that Sopranos magic, baby!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

As Nancy Sinatra sings “Bang Bang,” my stomach ties itself in knots. Two episodes remaining in this season of Sexy Beast and I find myself torn. Part of me wants the story to go on for however long the filmmakers want. But another part hopes they wrap everything up, since high quality isn’t the kryptonite of short-sighted cancellation it was just a few short years ago. (Fatal Attraction, we hardly knew ye.) 

More importantly, though? I’m nervous as hell. My body’s reacting to the prospect of pressing play on this episode as though it thinks I’m actually in danger myself. The atmosphere of mounting dread, created by showrunner Michael Caleo and now helped along here by writer Alastair Galbraith and director Stephen “Teddy Bass” Moyer, has me that shook. 

As it needs to. In the original Sexy Beast, you know from moment you see Aitch, Jackie, Deedee, and Gal react to the news that Don Logan called that this man is terrifying; you spend the movie wondering when he’ll make good on his reputation. The TV show’s trick is to set whatever event gave Don that reputation—whatever made people stop thinking of him as weird and annoying and start thinking of him like an alien could burst out of his chest and eat them at any moment—in the indeterminate future. We know we’re getting closer to it, but we don’t know how far we’ve gone.

I reviewed the fantastic penultimate episode of Sexy Beast‘s first (?) season for Decider.

Which brings us back to Mr. Black Magic himself. The Teddy Bass of Sexy Beast the television show is played by a TV vampire of considerable experience: Stephen Moyer, True Blood’s Bill Compton. Watching Moyer slink his way through this show, leaving a trail of dropped drawers and broken bodies in his wake, you can’t help but feel that this is the kind of monster Moyer had hoped to play all those years ago. Finally, he’s got something he can really sink his teeth into.

Younger, hungrier, and more dynamic than the older version played by McShane — who by that point is firmly on top of the pyramid — the TV Teddy is vampire-coded to a major degree. He’s quiet, pale, raven-haired, black-clad with red accents, largely nocturnal, possessed either by brooding malice or sinister good cheer and nothing in between. He kills men without compunction, rapes men without shame. He tends not to step into a home unless he’s been invited. And once he is, all are powerless before him.

In the most recent episode at the time of this writing, Teddy wheedles his way into the manse of his quarry, the corrupt aristocrat politician Sir Stephen Eaton (the marvelously named Julian Rhind-Tutt), by seducing his wife’s best friend from her university days. “He walked right up to me, this close,” she recalls giddily, “and he said ‘Everyone in this room, man and woman, wants to fuck me, but I only want you.’” Teddy fingerbangs the friend under the table at dinner, using the same hands he used to nearly shatter the bones of a loudmouth at the party, to the delight of all onlookers. By the end of the evening even Sir Stephen is tenderly brushing his hand against Teddy, even though he knows, for a fact, that Teddy has been spending the past few weeks using Gal and Don to rob him blind. He is irresistible. 

But he is also angry, righteously angry. In the monologue that opens this piece, from the episode that airs this week, Teddy explains to Gal, in a voice more Cockney than Queen’s E, that he loathes the upper class for its thievery and entitlement. It’s not until the season finale that you see his real supervillain origin story in this regard, and I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s ferociously, almost frantically anti-oligarchy, making their menace to the body politic concrete in their menace to the human body itself. Sir Stephen’s enrichment of himself at the expense of the public fuels Teddy’s quest to take him down every bit as much as Teddy’s own lust for power. This man is excited to plan a heist for Guy Fawkes’ Night because he vocally admires Guy Fawkes. 

I wrote about Stephen Moyer’s portrayal of Teddy Bass in Sexy Beast for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

The “To be sure” paragraph in a review, the bit where the critic briefly tempers their overall praise or criticism with the reverse, usually comes pretty deep into things. Not this time, friends.

To be sure, the sixth and final episode of True Detective: Night Country has its high points. The highest is undoubtedly Liz Danvers’s ferocious tirade at Evangeline Navarro when the younger woman claims to have seen and heard Liz’s dead son Holden. “You don’t come here and tell me ‘he said,’ or I will shoot your sick fucking mouth right off your face,” she screams, the threat so blunt it almost sounds silly. “Leave my kid out of it, or I will rip you apart. I am not merciful. You understand? I got no mercy left.” Jodie Foster tears into the words like they’re between her and oxygen. 

It’s not just tremendous acting, it’s tremendous writing. Creator/writer/director Issa López gives Liz a wholly and appropriately furious and disgusted reaction to the fucking bunkum Evangeline is spewing. Dead kids returning to tell their mommies everything’s okay? Ghoulish. A ghoulish thing to claim! People who do so, who take advantage of the grieving whether for profit or ideology or psychological gratification, deserve to be screamed into silence.

Then the show itself goes and does exactly that. 

I reviewed the season finale of True Detective: Night Country for Decider.

Sexy Beast bristles with ideas, images, emotions, and sensations. This episode in particular is like the Hellraiser puzzle box, opening up and shooting chains in every direction, tipped with hooks that sink in and pull. 

[…]

Every single layer that Sexy Beast adds has enhanced rather than obscured the source text. It’s like if Coppola had made a TV series of the Vito Corleone section of The Godfather Part II. It is absolutely the goddamnedest thing. 

I reviewed this week’s amazing Sexy Beast for Decider.

Boy, this was a nice-looking episode of Tokyo Vice. Granted, this is Tokyo Vice, and looking nice is kind of its thing. But even by the show’s own neo-noirish standards, this week’s episode (“Old Law, New Twist”) had me wolf-whistling at the screen again and again. Director Josef Kubota Wladyka and cinematographer Daniel Satinoff understand that making Tokyo look like a nocturnal dreamworld is job one if this story is to succeed; whether indoors or outside, up close or from a bird’s eye view, they make the city and its people feel luminous.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

The writing is funny and clever throughout. Did you notice how the fearsome biker gang really didn’t want to leave the restaurant without paying in full? Or how Tats’s credo — “I’d rather get high, fuck girls, and steal bikes than live like [normal people]” makes him sound like the hero of a Hal Ashby movie? Or sweet and silly back-and-forth between Emi and her Korean-Japanese husband Shingo (Shoji Arai) when he calls her “a tigress” after sex and she busts his chops for sounding like “a bad romance novel”? Or the way they still have Jake carrying a backpack, used in tandem with Ansel Elgort’s floppy hair, lanky build, and goofball smile to make him look like an overgrown kid? Or even the smart and sexy way Sam wins over self-professed “confidence man” Inaba by saying her club is “a place where confidence men can come and be honest”? That stuff is good, quite good.

I reviewed the second episode of Tokyo Vice‘s two-part premiere for Decider.

As anyone who’s watched a few episodes of the original Japanese Iron Chef can tell you, 1990s Tokyo was a deliciously glamorous place — a political, financial, and cultural world capital with a sumptuous nightlife and a seedy underbelly. (Granted, you didn’t see much of the seedy underbelly on Iron Chef unless you count particularly harsh judges.) The streets, the lights, the food, the storefronts and restaurants and bars and clubs and bikes and beautiful men and women and architecture…Tokyo Vice’s great strength is showing you why this place is worth killing and dying for in the first place. 

I’m back on the Tokyo Vice beat for Decider starting with my review of this week’s premiere.

Keep in mind that this comes hot on the heels of Deedee’s gutting storyline, involving a disastrous attempt to reconnect with her family over Sunday dinner. Her shitty father stonewalls her and eventually kicks her out. Her mother smiles and cries but does nothing. And her sister, who’s ostensibly her remaining friend in the family, is revealed to be the person who told Deedee’s father she’d started filming porn. (And kissing girls.) In a harrowing flashback, he bodily drags young Deedee from the house and throws her out. A more effective evocation of social conservatism — a political movement dedicated to giving men a pretext to abuse their spouses and children — I haven’t seen in a long time.

I reviewed this week’s Sexy Beast for Decider.

The idea that we hoi polloi see the ruling class who lord over us as louche, overindulgent, perverse, and dangerous is nothing new. It is, after all, as clear how Edgar Allan Poe felt about Prince Prospero and his revelers as it is how Mike Flanagan feels about Prospero Usher and his. But in the main, television’s swipes at the ultrarich have been satirical and visually straightforward, and have preferred to keep violence to a sanitized minimum. Succession is a very nice-looking show, as is The White Lotus (2021– ), but they don’t feel as though the depravity of the characters has seeped through into the stuff of the filmmaking itself.

The New Lurid, by contrast, gives television auteurs and viewers alike a new narrative and visual vocabulary, one commensurate with the degeneracy of our overlords as represented by the characters to which they often directly correspond. Like a televisual vanitas, it is sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Dead Ringers, and a genre I like to call “The New Lurid” — overheated, oversaturated, oversexed tales of depravity and violence among the entropic elite and its interlopers; think “Saltburncore” — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

We’re talking all five seasons of Noah Hawley’s Fargo on our latest subscriber-only episode. This is a good one!

Don Logan is the Gollum of the Sexy Beast cinematic universe. Sometimes he’s harmless, fawning Sméagol — desperate for his friend buddy Gal’s affection, willing to catch a bullet if it means sparing his only friend in the world. Sometimes he’s Gollum, paranoid and dangerous, prone to flying off the handle at the most minor perceived slight and spurring the sort of altercations that end with cops dead at the hands of their own crooked partners in full view of multiple witnesses. The problem for Gal is you never know which Don you’re gonna get; this is also the problem for Don.

I reviewed this week’s Sexy Beast for Decider.

Sexy Beast the TV show is basically like someone Andor’d Sexy Beast the movie. How’s that for high praise? But that’s what creator Michael Caleo and his co-writers have done on this thing: They took an iconic work of cinema (referring to the whole Star Wars gestalt rather than Rogue One specifically here) and made something rich, challenging, ugly, and darkly humane out of a prequel that fleshes out the original work’s world at length. It’s the damnedest thing.

I reviewed episode three of Sexy Beast for Decider.

Oh. So it’s a real show then. Upping the ante of violence considerably — from shocking and stylish to prolonged, sexual, and horrific — this episode of Sexy Beast is at times a very tough watch. It probably had to be. There’s nothing wrong with a slick ‘90s British crime caper series featuring well-executed younger versions of characters we know and love from a bona fide movie masterpiece. But that movie is absolutely grueling to watch at times, however much its London gangster cool and brilliant soundtrack convince you otherwise. For this show to be more than a good time on the telly…well, it has to be a bad time, too.

I reviewed the second episode of Sexy Beast for Decider.

I don’t know how they do it. I really don’t. How do you take a stylistically unique, psychologically intense, stone-classic thriller from the past 40-odd years of English-language cinema and make a really good show out of it — not just once, but enough times that trend pieces can be written? What alchemy is this?

I reviewed the series premiere of the Sexy Beast prequel series for Decider. It’s really good!

This is what I was worried about. Three episodes in and it’s clear that barring a major, likely audience-infuriating twist at the end — gas leak, chemicals in the water, Navarro is schizophrenic like her mom and sister (I actually think this one’s semi-likely) — that True Detective: Night Country is also Ghost Country. It’s a land of magic and mystery, where the dead speak, the maimed know your name, someone in the darkness plays catch with an orange with you, and an ominous She has been awakened. It’s also a place where basically none of this is actually scary.

I reviewed this week’s True Detective for Decider.

The pleasure of the finale is in watching Vergara say goodbye to this character, whom I expect will be a career-changer for her, or at least ought to be. The fire largely extinguished, the crack pipe put down, she’s first stonily defiant, and then simply emptied out. She’s still Griselda, but you can feel that something vital isn’t there anymore. There’s no big breakdown either — it’s like someone let the air out of her, and she’s flopping along the highway at 15 miles an hour to her inevitable destination. And with that, we’ve reached ours as well, our eyes opened to Vergara’s potential and our drug-drama jones fully satiated. Not a bad outcome at all, for us anyway.

I reviewed the series finale of Griselda for Decider.

All this craziness gives Sofía Vergara her best chance yet to just go absolutely nuts on screen. The comparison that springs to mind for me is watching Jon Hamm in Fargo Season 5 after watching him in comedies for a decade. Who the hell is this terrifying maniac, this delusional tyrant plagued with paranoia and arrogance and the inability to let go of a grudge? For god’s sake, she takes a golden uzi and forces a man to strip nude and bark like a dog while forcing two other guests to fuck in front of everyone, and you believe it. It’s not funny, either, not campy, and don’t let anyone try and tell you otherwise. The show may not be going for realism, but that rage, that compulsion to humiliate and terrorize in order to feel in control? That’s real. Vergara makes it real. 

It’s kind of like once it starts coming out, she can’t make it stop — certainly not until she stops chain-smoking crack. Vergara portrays Griselda as a woman hurling herself from one experience to the next: having an off-camera threesome with Rafa Salazar’s manipulative party-girl wife Marta (a captivating Julieth Restrepo), gazing dumbstruck at the fireworks display she arranged for her suddenly estranged husband, nearly choking her best friend to death, hitting the pipe over and over, shooting up Dario’s beloved Cadillac, sexually assaulting her guests, berating her son Uber for trying to be a voice of reason like Dario, perseverating on the idea that she still has an informant in her organization despite a ruthless mass murder campaign against any potential rats, accusing virtually everyone who cares about her of being said rat…she’s mainlining first dopamine and then adrenaline to a dangerous degree. 

I reviewed episode 5 of Griselda for Decider.

Director Andrés Baiz at no point loses sight of the fact that he’s pointing his camera at Sofía Vergara. Slight prosthetics notwithstanding, she’s a stunning actor, and we’re reminded of this constantly when she’s here at her moment of triumph (at least until the last minute or so). Reclining on a sofa, luxuriating in a bath with an enormous classical nude behind her, out in the twilight tracing the orange cherry of her cigarette through the blue of the night air…It’s kind of like how you could tell how much everyone who directed Mad Men loved shooting Jon Hamm. In this role, Vergara is a person you just don’t get tired of looking at.

I reviewed episode four of Griselda for Decider.

And Sofía Vergara is terrific. I haven’t even mentioned how she’s been rendered off-model by makeup effects, particular around her jawline. She uses this at times to hide her beauty, leaning into the bulldog underbite and its accompanying air of tenacity. (The scene with the dealers, where she rallies them with a fiery speech, is a case in point.) She’s excellent at playing a woman for whom beauty has undeniably been a great advantage, but also a source of constant aggravation, harassment, underestimation, and ultimately danger. She makes Griselda seem like she needs to rotate her new nickname, “The Godmother,” in her mind a few times before she can fully believe it. And that glare at the end, ooh-wee.

I reviewed episode 3 of Griselda for Decider.