• Crimes of the Future (2022): I've watched this twice and I can't decide whether it's brilliant, or just a pastiche of Cronenberg's earlier work. But I can't stop thinking about it. It's part Videodrome, part Crash, part Naked Lunch and a little Scanner Darkly. It's dense with ideas and leaves some important things that happen completely unexplained.

• Ms. Marvel (2022): This is pretty cute. It's definitely a kids show. The first episode leaned heavily into Scott Pilgrim, with the narration taking place through imagined animated graffiti and so on, but sadly, they stopped that almost immediately. It drags a bit in the middle, and does that typical Marvel thing of "the villain is just an evil version of the hero!!" And the visual presentation of her powers sucks. She makes badly animated crystals instead of stretching and deforming. Terrible choice. And there's a jarring amount of copaganda. Still, it was fun, and it's great that something like this got made at all, for all the obvious reasons.

• Mad God (2021): A stop-motion dialog-free movie about a faceless soldier descending through the layers of some kind of steampunk Giger hell. It's part Švankmajer's Alice and part Eraserhead and all nightmare fuel. I wasn't able to actually finish it, but it is.... a hell of a thing. I don't know if that's a recommendation or not.

• Slash Back (2022): Small town Alaskan teen girls repel alien invasion. It's fun.

• Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020): Two minute time machine! It's shot to appear as a one single shot that loops back on itself, and it's an absolute masterpiece of choreography, shot for approximately zero dollars. I can't even imagine what the storyboards looked like. The only thing that strained my suspension of disbelief was the unfathomably long extension cords.

• Press Play (2022): It's a cute time travel romance. But how did they not call this Mix Tape Time Machine?

• The Princess (2022): A Disney princess is locked in a tower, about to be married off. Oh, but she knows kung fu. It's almost one long Wickian fight scene!

• The Sea Beast (2022): This was adorable. It starts off with some amazing tall-ship action, and then rolls into a somewhat predictable, "the real monsters were the friend we made along the way" thing, but the animation and characterization were just great.

• Outer Range (2022): It's a show about these mysterious creatures from American mythology, the "independent cattle farmer", where four people run a whole ranch and they're all white. Suspend your disbelief on that, though, because they also have a Stargate out in the field, so when they find it they do what everyone would do: first you drop a rock in, then you do a little light murder and toss the body in too. Surely that problem is gone forever, right? Then they fuck around for episodes 2 through 6, episode 7 is the flashback, and episode 8 sets up more cliffhangers. Gaaaahhhhhhhhh.

• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022): This was garbage. Infuriatingly so. Let's just watch the Pitch Meeting instead.

• 30 Days of Night (2007): I remembered this being not very good, and it's not, but it's ok. There's a good movie in here struggling to get out but it doesn't.

• 30 Days of Night 2: Dark Days (2010): This is utterly forgettable. It might as well be Blade 3, it's that forgettable. I can hear the pitch meeting: "Ok but hear me out, what if instead it was set in LA?" Yes, they never actually make it to any area where the days are dark.

• The Crow 2: City of Angels (1996): I remembered this being bad, but wow, it is so much worse than I even remembered. Not even the Graeme Revell score can save it. I didn't make it past the 30 minute mark. And again: I can hear the pitch meeting: "Ok but hear me out, what if instead it was set in LA?"

I'm basically out of stuff to watch, as you can tell from the barrel-scraping near the end there, so I'm taking suggestions. You know what I like.

Previously.

• The Rising (2022): Small-town ghost tries to solve her own murder. It's pretty good. Reminded me a bit of I Still See You.

• From (2022): Idiots trapped in Twilight Zone "Mayberry" pocket dimension; at night carnivorous ghosts come out. The individual moments of survival-horror are ok, but by the end of the season absolutely nothing is resolved or explained.

• Moon Knight (2022): This was just so boring. Why was Oscar Isaac in something so boring?

• Russian Doll S02 (2022): So they swapped out the time loop for time travel, and it was fun, and lower stakes and much simpler than the first season, but it was still decent... and then the last two episodes went completely gonzo and were amazing.

• Where is Anne Frank? (2022): Anne's imaginary friend comes to life in the present day as an avatar of the diary, and goes looking for her and has adventures. It's cute, and the animation is great.

• Gaslit (2022): I would not have expected another re-telling of Watergate to keep my attention, but Julia Roberts is fantastic in it, and this version really plays up what a bunch of bumbling morons they all were.

• Star Trek Strange New Worlds (2022): This is the greatest Star Trek series so far. A+, no notes.

• The Lost City (2022): I gather that Sandra Bullock is one of those super-connected Hollywood people who can get any movie made that she wants, and what she wanted was to make a goofy Romancing The Stone variant. Well, good for her, it's really funny.

• Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022): The first five minutes were a re-cap of Ep 1-3, which was a pretty deep hole they chose to dig themselves into right out of the gate. I mean we're talking Sarlacc-deep here.

  Remember that space ship model that Luke had in the garage? Were you hoping to get an origin story for that? You weren't? Too bad.

  It's just making me re-angry about so many things I haven't thought about in years, like, "WTF does 'princess' mean to these people, your government and monarchy is completely incoherent!"

  Obi-Wan's day job is slicing little slabs of meat off of the giant, bloated, rotting corpse of some kind of dinosaur. I feel like this is a bit too heavy-handed a metaphor for the entire franchise.

  The Big Bad ("Third Sister") is fine, and Baby Leia is surprisingly tolerable, but did I really want to see a show about a snarky pre-teen whose only skill or function is getting kidnapped? I really didn't.

• Night Sky (2022): A retired couple have enjoyed having a Stargate under their shed for years; finally, some cultists come a-knockin'. I enjoyed it (JK Simmons is always fantastic) but it definitely follows some recent cynical and manipulative TV screenwriting trends: first, the plot advances very slowly for the first 7 episodes, and then in the 8th, they throw everything at the wall, tossing out like 5 unrelated pieces of exposition as cliffhangers for season 2; and second, that none of these problems would even exist if these characters weren't keeping secrets from each other for no reason other than to advance the plot.

• Shining Girls (2022): This show is terrible. I had read the book, which I enjoyed, but it was a while ago, so I can't tell you precisely how they diverged, but the show is just bad. There's a serial killer who lives in the time-traveling House of Mystery, so he gets to leave his clues/trophies out of order, and try again until he gets it right. One victim inexplicably (as in they never explain it) gets away and retains her memory of Timeline Zero when the world resets around her at his every change. She convinces a few other people that she's not just delusional, that the world is really changing, and they are all almost immediately onboard with that -- and yet it takes them 7 episodes before anyone thinks, "hey, maybe it's time travel". Multiverse of Madness? Sure. Time travel? Now that's just crazy talk.

  I'm not sure if you, the viewer, were supposed to go into this show already aware that it was time travel, but since it's set in the gray-and-rainy 90s and jumps around to the equally-gray-and-rainy 40s and 80s, you would probably have been completely lost until like episode 5.

• Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): This was absolutely bonkers. Rarely have I seen a movie so committed to how bonkers it is. This is the movie that Matrix 4 should have been. In fact, here's what should have happened: you saw all the trailers and promo and interviews with Keanu and Carrie-Anne and then you got to the theatre and this played instead, with no explanation of why they weren't in it. Asked about it later, Keanu says, "I think the work speaks for itself." Michelle Yeoh will only take questions about Point Break. That's what should have happened.

• Pom Poko (1994): Somehow I had missed that there was a Studio Ghibli cartoon about those raccoons with the enormous shape-shifting testicles. And also they're eco-terrorists.

• V for Vengeance (2022): A couple of sisters who are also vampires go on a revenge road trip, for fambly. It's fun.

• Angelyne (2022): This story is nuts, I loved it. Also, wow, the prosthetics! Not just the obvious, but also the aging makeup on the various characters was really well done.

• The Man Who Fell To Earth (2022): I don't remember the original movie at all, except that it was really long and really boring and went nowhere and Bowie being in it did not redeem it at all. This show is the same, except that Bowie has been replaced by wink-wink references to Bowie lyrics.

• Tom Swift (2022): This might be the worst thing I've ever seen on television, and I watched like a season and a half of Arrow.

Previously.

• Severance (2022): What if your memories of "at work" and "not" were completely partitioned? This is Office Space crossed with Get Out, or maybe, if Philip K. Dick had written Bullshit Jobs. It's very creepy and absolutely fantastic. (Peter Watts wrote a great review of it.)

• Hellbender (2022): This is in the "Magical Girl homeschooled in the woods" genre, but this time they're cannibal witches? It was interesting, but I really need a little more detail on why someone who is like 160 years old is so into 90s indie rock.

• Station Eleven (2022): Stop me if you've heard this one before, but there's a global pandemic... It flips back and forth between the breakdown and 20 years after, and that's handled pretty well. It feels a lot like the early seasons of Walking Dead if the characters were all a lot less stupid and shitty. Also a bit of Lost in that every single person has some wildly-coincidental connection to every other from the Before Times. Mostly it's about how traumatized all of these people are, even the weird, halfassed serial killer, who ends up being neither that big of a threat, nor someone I cared about at all. A strange show.

• DMZ (2022): This is based on a very bad comic book series that I read for like 2 or 3 years. There's been another revolution, and the United States is now Queens, and the Confederate States are everything else? I was never clear on the geography. Anyway, Manhattan is the DMZ, so it's Escape From New York meets The Warriors, except that in the comic, instead of Snake Plissken, the main character is a whiny man-child journalist. See, I was a big fan of Brian Wood's first series, Channel Zero, but all of his subsequent work seemed to be of the "whiny man-child protagonist" variety. Anyway, later in the comic they switch protagonists to a medic, and that's where this TV series begins, which was a better choice. But, the plot is entirely constructed of ludicrous coincidences. Our Hero has 48 hours to find her son, who has been missing for years. Coincidentally, there's a mayoral election happening right now, and coincidentally, she used to date both of the gang leader candidates, and coincidentally, one of those candidates is the baby-daddy, and coincidentally, her son is now the World's Greatest Assassin.

• Shining Vale (2022): Writer's block in a haunted house, sounds like a yawn, but the ghost has a personality instead of just being a poltergeist, the supporting cast are good, and the dialog is snappy and foul-mouthed. I'm enjoying it a lot.

• The Bubble (2022): This combines what, if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know are two of my least favorite things: A) every character is a complete piece of shit with nobody to root for, and B) it's a movie about making a movie, meaning it's Hollywood's favorite pastime, "licking its own asshole". That said -- this is pretty funny. I laughed. Disclaimer: I was also pretty drunk.

• Halo (2022): Strong opening in the first episode, but so far it's kinda... The Mandalorian with not-as-good sets? It feels very Syfy Channel, like, is this just Dark Matter but less Canadian? I have never played the game, but I do vaguely recall watching a few other Halo-based productions, and they were all terrible. They were basically Warhammer fan-films and super boring. Here's the extent of my background knowledge about Halo: it's Starship Troopers but "Halo" means "Ringworld". Ok, so if there are ringworlds, what I want is lots of deep technical nerding about orbital mechanics, and terraforming, and some kick-ass CGI simulations of stellar-mass megastructures with deep zooms. I have received none of these things thus far, meaning that this series has failed me.

• Star Trek Picard (2022): You may recall that I despised the first season. Amongst its many sins was that it was a show about Data, and fuck Data and all his god damned re-treads of the Pinocchio story. This season started off with Q, and my eyes rolled so hard that I think I sprained my face, because, come on, though there's nothing worse than a Data episode, the next worst thing is a Holodeck episode, and right after that is a Q episode. And then... TIME TRAVEL! Not only time travel, but a Borg Queen, another hack-ass betrayal-of-the-entire-concept that should never have been allowed into the franchise in the first place, but that now they have to live with forever! Ok, but that said... this season is kinda great. I am enjoying it a lot and I don't know how they managed to make something good out of these incredibly shitty ingredients.

  Update: The preceding review was written about the first half of the season. The second half managed to squander all of my goodwill. It was absolute garbage.

• Spider-Man No Way Home (2022): Wowwww, was this a pile of hot garbage. It is like a remake of Into The Spiderverse by someone who hasn't actually seen it, and lacking all of the charm. There's so much about it to hate, but I'll just leave it with "Why was Dr. Strange wearing a wig from the Spirit Halloween Super Store with aerosol-spray temples?"

• Dead Sushi (2012): What if Tampopo but Reanimator?

• Fresh (2022): Bad date is a cannibal. It's a bit torturey and kind of your classic Final Girl, but well done.

• Madelines (2022): A slight coding error with the time machine results in another Madeline materializing in the back yard every day. Murder and body disposal at that kind of scale is time consuming and difficult. This is super low budget, but clever and funny.

• Kicking Blood (2022): An alcoholic and a vampire go cold turkey together. It's straightforward, but ok.

• The Ipcress File (2022): British spies in 60s East Berlin. It's no Atomic Blonde, or even Pennyworth, but it's fun. I guess it's a remake. I never saw the original.

Previously.

• Yellowjackets (2021): A girls' soccer team crashes in the mountains and they go full Lord of the Flies. It's interleaved between a story about the kids and them as adults. I am extremely conflicted about this. On the one hand, all of the actors are fantastic and I was invested in their stories. On the other hand, this is THE most plotblocking show I've seen since Lost. To be fair, unlike Lost, they don't keep just moving the goalposts: in Lost the answer to every question was a new, stupider question, and they aren't doing that. But the Yellowjackets writers clearly have no intention of telling us WTF happened in the mountains until like season 5, if then. Do they even know? Maybe not. I absolutely hate this miserly style. It is the "dark pattern" of screenwriting.

  Also it's very weird that two of the girls in the crash are credited as "Yellowjacket #1" and "Yellowjacket #2". There are only like ten of them, you couldn't be bothered to give them all names? According to IMDB, Yellowjackets #1 and #2 appear in 7 episodes.

• The Book of Boba Fett (2022): Obviously I will watch any show set on Tatooine. I will enthusiastically watch it on that basis alone, just for the environments and background characters. But I guess I just don't really give a shit about Boba Fett as a person. He was a bad guy with really cool armor, but the more I learn about him, and his dad, and his millions of clone uncles (clunkles?) the less I care. The stuff with the Tuskens was fun, but way too Dances With Wolves. I loved the scooter gang! But give us the Ming-Na Wen show instead. Also if Baby Yoda could fuck all the way off, that would be great.

• The Expanse (2015): They stuck the landing on the abbreviated series finale, despite some weird choices. (Like why spend any time at all on the psychic necromancer lizards if you're just going to leave that thread dangling? Every second you spent on perky children is a second you could have spent on Drummer being a badass instead.) Though the series had a droopy middle (I didn't care about anything happening on Ilus in S04) this show set the bar for any future science fiction series or movie. It's the characters and stories that made it great, but it's the physics and the sets that made it real. Every subsequent show is going to have to live up to that.

  In hindsight, of the strangest things about the show is that, through all these interplanetary cold and hot wars over scarce resources, at no point is any corporation mentioned. Not only does Earth have some form of UBI, but in all three polities, corporations are apparently just not a thing any more? That's almost harder to believe than the Manhattan sea wall, or the space demons.

• Archive 81 (2022): A guy whose job is restoring damaged Hi-8 cartridges (and who is not named Jason Scott) is drawn in to a culty mystery. It's pretty great, and I'm am here for this new genre of "people sitting in a room with q-tips and alcohol swabs trying to pull demons out of old analog tapes". But, stock plot detected, I can certainly do without the new trend of "the third-to-last episode interrupts the plot with a period-piece multi-decade flashback exposition episode that walks you through the whole mythology." Still. I enjoyed it.

• In From The Cold (2022): Now I love me some "deep-cover Russian agent went native and became a suburban mom then gets blackmailed back into doing one more job" stories. And this one has some good moments, and some good fights. But it has a bunch of tech that is just straight-up magic, a villain whose motivations make no damned sense, and an ending that is... just... bullshit.

• Nightmare Alley (2021): A noir about some carnys who upgrade their mentalist act to a real con. It's gorgeous, with great acting, a great cast and incredible sets. The story is a bit of a narrative mess, which was also true of the original -- it's kind of 2 1/2 different movies tacked together. But still a good time.

• Peacemaker (2022): Because it is James Gunn, you're only 30 seconds into it before it is deep in the "daddy issues" woods, and I'm so bored with that. But, this show is still pretty hilarious, and a fine entry in the burgeoning "superheroes who swear" genre. It's no Harley Quinn, but it is a fine followup to the surprisingly-adequate Suicide Squad 2. And, it has far and away the most hilarious title sequence I've seen in years. I watch the entire title sequence every time.

• Pivoting (2022): Eliza Coupe and Maggie Q are rich suburban dirtbags having a mid-life crisis. It's pretty funny.

• Pump Up the Volume (1990): I hadn't watched this in many years, and I'm happy to report that it mostly holds up. This movie is the spiritual prequel to Hackers and (at least in my headcanon) the literal prequel to Mr. Robot. The one aspect that doesn't hold up so well is that it's hard not to read Happy Harry Hardon as just another edgelord podcaster, and it's hard to remember a world where that just didn't exist yet. Let alone had become a nightmarish cliché.

• Seize the Night (2022): A melancholy dealer and a suicidal pop star meet and have a romantic first date while trying to buy drugs. It is both surprisingly sweet and pretty depressing.

• The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (2022): Everybody wants to make their own Rear Window now, I wonder why that is. The acting on this is great, and I enjoyed the first few episodes, even though it was kind of hard to watch, because Kristen Bell's character is just crazy as shit and intent on burning her life down... But as the actual plot begins to unfold, it gets just deeply, deeply stupid, and the ending in particular is just an insulting slap in the face of the audience.

• Kimi (2022): Another Rear Window, I can't imagine why this is such a trend now! But this one is by Soderberg, and Zoë Kravitz is fantastic. It takes a bit of a Die Hard turn, and is extremely satisfying. One of those rare movies that acknowledges that a pandemic happened.

• Inventing Anna (2022): Remember that "fake heiress" woman from a few years back? Yeah neither do I; I've mixed her up in my head with the "Russian NRA spy" woman. Anyway, I have no idea how much of this is true, but this series is pretty great. Anna Chlumsky is awesome, and the title character reminds me of several people I've known, which probably means I should spend less time around bullshit artists.

• House of Gucci (2021): Wow was this boring. I did not give half a shit about any of these people. I started fast-forwarding about halfway through. I gather there was a murder at the very end? Nothing of value was lost.

• The Leftovers (2014): 2% of the population got raptured (so, twelve COVIDs, or 1/25th of Marvel's "Blip") and the world loses its damn mind. This is by the Lost guy, so I avoided it on that basis alone, but someone recommended it so I gave the first season a shot. It is true that it is not very plotblocking, but also not a lot happens. It's very depressing, full of sad, damaged people doing sad, damaged things and accomplishing basically fuck-all. It wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't very compelling. It is, however, weird watching this through a COVID lens, because the ways in which the show's world went nuts are both more and less insane than what we've been dealing with.

Previously.

• Night Teeth (2021): This was a great vampire movie, like if Blade had double the politics and none of the fights. There's a huge amount of backstory that is only mentioned in passing. I suspect they have the scripts for two prequels and a sequel already written, and I'm ok with that.

• Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021): Inspired by the Max Headroom incident and probably also the "I Feel Fantastic" videos, this is just great. It's a bit VHS-forensic, so it's very reminiscent of the first act of Videodrome, though it doesn't go body horror. So good. And the period tech! Hats off to the propmasters and set dressers on this movie, because wow.

• The Estate (2020): Gay failson and stepmom end up banging the same guy, decide to murder dad. Despite the porny setup, it's pretty funny. Stepmom is played by Eliza Coupe from Futureman, and she's hilarious. The ending is kind of weak, though.

• The Spore (2020): The first post-COVID zombie movie, maybe! It kinda freaked me out, might be just too soon. It's more of a series of vignettes about people dealing with the apocalypse. Some very creepy low budget body horror.

• Only Murders in the Building (2021): Somehow I had managed to miss that Steve Martin and Martin Short are in this. Why was I not informed? This was really funny.

• Violet (2021): Wow, this was brutal but really good. Our lead's internal monologue keeps cutting her down in brutal voiceover while her cry-for-help narration plays out in handwritten subtitles, so there are three simultaneous lines of dialog. It's very creative and I haven't seen anything quite like that before.

  My one complaint is that it's a "Hollywood" story, which... I know they say write what you know, but there has to be a limit. Every time I see a movie that centers a screenwriter or a director my reaction is "Please stop, I know you are in the most egotistical of all possible industries, but nobody wants to watch you licking your own asshole". This same story could have been told with characters who had real jobs, not breathing the same extremely rarified air as studio execs.

• Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021): This is a Nicholas Cage movie that has almost the same plot as the Rowdy Roddy Piper classic, Hell Comes to Frogtown but with extra samurai. Some of those words will either convince you to watch this, or to never watch this. And either way, I cannot help you, Sir. I cannot help you. This movie is bonkers even by late-stage-Cage standards.

• Multiverse (2021): Some undergrads build a magic mirror that draws some of their variants in from another dimension, which again, is why I keep saying that Mad Science needs to be a graduate level course. Anyway, it's very low budget and has some nice twists.

• The World According to Jeff Goldblum (2019): It's just Jeff Goldblum being fascinated about things that I don't care about at all, like sneakers and denim and RVs, but he's such an adorable goofball that he made me care! I'm not sure this show would be any different if the host was David Byrne. Or Mr. Rogers.

• Cowboy Bebop (2021): It's been ages since I watched the anime, but this felt exactly how I remembered it, like, almost to a Watchmen level of slavish detail. I really enjoyed the first half of it; the relationships between the three main characters and their small cons were really fun. But a show is only as good as its villain, and "Vicious" was boring as shit and I didn't care about anything to do with that subplot (including the ex-girlfriend who had no discernible character traits of any kind), which was basically the entire second half of the show.

  It's also striking, again, how much Firefly was 100% a remake of Cowboy Bebop with the serial numbers filed off. Whedon really brought nothing new to that party.

• Dexter, New Blood (2021): I was pretty over Dexter by the time the first show ended -- I thought the final season, and the series finale, were pretty poor -- but I am enjoying this revival a lot so far. First episode was iffy, but it's shaping up nicely.

• Hawkeye (2021): I think Renner's Hawkeye character in the Marvel movies is... just... the... worst. However, there have been some very good Hawkeye comics that I have enjoyed very much, particularly Hawkeye Vol. 4, 2012 by Fraction & Aja, and Hawkeye Vol 5, 2016 by Thompson & Romero (the Kate Bishop version), and this show borrows heavily from both of those. The Kate character in the show is exactly like the comics. So I'm sold so far.

• Hanna, S03: Again, I enjoyed this, but it has been so long since the previous season that I have completely forgotten which bits I am remembering from Hanna and which are from Treadstone because they had exactly the same plot.

• The Wheel of Time (2021): Stop me if you've heard this one before: it's the future of our Earth, but there was an apocalypse, and after the complete collapse of our society, the world recovered technologically to around 1500s England and then stayed exactly there for 10,000 years, and also oh yeah there's magic now or something. And some monarchist propaganda about pretty teens with a genetic predestination to rule. FFS, why do they keep making this same show?

• Venom, Let There Be Carnage (2021): With the caveat that I was pretty drunk at the time, I found this funny. It's definitely way better than the first one. And all of that gay subtext from the first one is just text now.

• Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021): This was pretty great. The MUNI fight is as good as you've heard. The first half of the movie is a straight-up kung fu movie, and it's fantastic. The second half turns into a Marvel movie, and that gets to be a bit of a slog, but overall it's worthwhile.

  Can someone explain to me, though, how this has basically the same plot as Batman: Soul of the Dragon? Like, the whole second half boss battle was, "Wait, didn't I just watch this?" Is it because DC and Marvel were just madly plagiarizing each other in the 70s?

• Last Night In Soho (2021): This is absolutely fantastic, and gorgeous. Without giving too much away, it's a mystery taking place partly in the 60s and partly today, and in the telling of the story, the two actresses switch places often, which is done with incredible choreography. There are some tricks with mirrors that rival Candyman, but I'm pretty sure this was all practical.

• Arcane (2021): Some poor kids do parkour and Fight The Man in Steampunk Land. It was pretty great. The character had personalities and the animation was awesome. It had a very painterly feel to it. Spiderverse pretty much showed that there is no longer any difference between "animation" and "3D animation" and this is a worthy continuation of that. Apparently it's based on a video game that I know literally nothing about, so it's fair to say that you don't need the backstory. Maybe I would have liked it less if I had ever seen the game.

• The Great S02: Just as hilarious as the first season.

Previously.