Review: Christopher Guest’s Family Tree
Christopher Guest is finally (and delightfully) back behind the camera with Family Tree, a new half-hour single-camera comedy on HBO co-created with Jim Piddock. The production is a bit of a...
Category: Europe
“Shadow Dancer”: An Interview with Director James Marsh
“Fiercely intelligent” is the phrase used by a recent acquaintance, whose husband worked on “Shadow Dancer,” to describe the film’s director James Marsh. It’s a spot-on assessment that I...
Cruel Britannia: A closer look at Gangster No.1.
London 1999. In the shadow of the Millennium Dome, men with faces as rough as Bethnal Green tube station laugh and leer at the camera. These monsters in bow ties are grotesque; their mirth rains like...
“A series of endless stupid romances”: Doctor Who returns
Doctor Who came back from a brief hiatus this weekend with a rather unremarkable episode revolving around a plot to steal human minds over wifi networks in order to feed a mysterious client. Its main...
Cappucinos with Kaidy: Mother-In-Law-To-Be
All those hyphens! You can actually feel the jumps and the starts, no smooth flow here... and I don’t just mean the heading at the top of the page. I’m actually referring to you and me and every...
Academy Award Nominee “Kon-Tiki”: An Interview with Co-Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg
Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film nominee “Kon-Tiki” is a fictionalized account of the Norwegian experimental ethnographer (and subsequent Oscar Award winner) Thor Heyerdahl’s...
Call the Midwife: Taking Mothers Seriously
While the United States is fawning over Downton Abbey (how about that shocker in Sunday’s episode, eh?), UK viewers are enjoying the return of Call the Midwife, which just started its second series...
Review: Ripper Street
BBC America’s ‘Dramaville’ brings warmed-over helpings of British television to US shores for those who haven’t caught it on the Internet already, and Ripper Street is reheated Ripper, so it...
Are You Being Served? Class and Service on Downton Abbey
With the release of Downton Abbey in the US comes a new tide of commentary about the British drama, which seems to be captivating audiences on both sides of the pond in addition to ushering a new era...
Less Than Nothing: Žižek’s Theory of Everything
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012). by Adam Kotsko First, the good the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has finally written...