Poker Face is halfway through its season, so I feel safe in saying it’s a hit. Natasha Lyonne leads a cast of guest stars so well-known it will make your head spin, in this crime-solving mystery created by Rian Johnson.
The Sky is Everywhere is a study in grief from director Josephine Decker. When a teenage girl’s older sister dies it throws her into a crazy spiral of grieving. Also explored are other family members and the dead girl’s boyfriend’s ways of grieving. It’s a heavy topic but it’s treated with fantasy and magical realism.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye paints a portrait of the human person with strengths and weaknesses in Tammy Faye Bakker. With the help of some prosthetics and padding, star Jessica Chastain proved once again that she is capable of convincing an audience of anything.
Transparent: Musicale Finale takes a grieving Pfefferman family on a journey toward healing with music, Jewish traditions, and some truly bizarre turns of fantasy.
The Party brings a dysfunctional collection of people who know each other’s secrets into the same room. It’s a wild and wonderful thing to watch.
Wine Country is hilarious and heartfelt. Six old friends go to Napa for a 50th birthday celebration and things happen that set off memories, old resentments, new worries, and cement friendships.
I’ll say it right off the mark: I didn’t think season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale was as strong as season 1. I’m not sure I can pinpoint why, but I’ll offer several theories as to why anyway. You can join in with a comment if you think you have a better sense of why. This review is fairly spoiler …
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a 2016 Tina Fey starrer about a journalist in Afghanistan. It is based on a book by Kim Barker, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The premise should guarantee an interesting journey into an unknown land. In some ways it fulfills that promise, it some ways it does not.
Transparent season 3 dives deeper in the the hearts of the Pfefferman clan than we have gone before with this series. After much thrashing about, some of these unhappy and broken people are starting to get a grip. Just barely. There are some season 3 spoilers ahead.
Ali Pfefferman’s (Gaby Hoffmann) discovery of epigenetics in season 2 of Transparent hooked me. In fact, I thought the idea that stress and trauma from generations before yours could be passed through the generations was the most interesting thing in season 2 of Transparent. It certainly would do a lot to explain why the Pfefferman clan are such a bunch …
