For the unaware, Da Vinci’s Demons is a new television series on Starz (“Where history comes to die”), in which a saucy young Da Vinci, trying to prove himself as an artist and inventor, lives his life as a human pinball amid the dangerous politics of contemporary Italy (accurate!) and solve a mystical mystery about a secret society and thre magical book that’s the key to their power (suggested by someone who didn’t understand the stakes of actual Italian politics at the time, I am guessing, because Da Vinci WISHES… Read more »

Defiance, the SyFy TV sensation that exists mostly as a weekly ad for a video game apparently, premiered on Monday! There are some things you should know.
(This won’t be overly detailed; partway through I checked the timestamp and realized this pilot was an hour and 26 minutes, at which point I called Hulu a son of a bitch out loud in a room by myself, so that’s pretty much how this is going.)
1. If you don’t have time for ten things, Graham Greene’s face sort of gets it… Read more »

A woman sits at a table, making paper chains. She has a worm inside her; the man who put it there is asleep in her bed. He’s halfway through taking everything she has. When she wakes up again after the worm (in a process so surreal it’s better experienced than described), her life is broken.. A man who carries the same wounds, in every sense, sees her on a train. He says hello.
That each of these moments is almost unbearably tense is part of the art of Upstream Color;… Read more »

The pilot of Hannibal, like any pilot worth its salt, tries to answer a lot of questions that are meant to draw the viewer into the series as a whole, while leaving some lingering questions. (The pilots not worth their salt mainly ask, “Will you watch this? How about this? WHAT WILL YOU WATCH?!”)
Hannibal’s pilot must, first and foremost, address the task of separating yet another dark serial-killer procedural from the pack. In a TV landscape glutted with them, some of it is perhaps doomed to be standard, though… Read more »

(Ye Olde Awkwarde Family Photo.)
This month, the History Channel finally admitted that everything it does is fiction by adding an explicitly-fictional show to its line of programs about men crossing their arms in front of things. VIKINGS purports to document the first Viking raids on the lands “to the west” and the political turmoil at home.
I watched two episodes with the intent to review, because it looked like it had potential to be pulpy fun, at least. By twenty minutes into the pilot, I realized time was actually… Read more »

“Did you ever stop to think that a family should be the most wonderful thing in the world?”
Stoker, Park Chan-wook’s superlatively beautiful film, is billed as a thriller, but isn’t quite. It’s more a style-heavy meditation on things not actually present in the narrative (it’s a vampire movie with no vampires), and a ruthless dissection of the thing that is (family, family, family).
Case in point: in the movie’s first moments, we meet India. She tells us she’s wearing her mother’s blouse, and her father’s belt, and a pair… Read more »