Yeah, I hadn't heard of him until now either — Janus Metz Pederson. But I think it paid off well. The lighting in particular was even more evocative and stylized than before.

This was definitely better than the first two episodes, and I'd put a lot of that down to the first two being helmed by Justin Lin, whose direction was a bit bland. This one was not only more visually striking but had less clunky dialogue; everything just flowed more smoothly. It's still got a lot of problems, but…

I just finished watching for a second time, and I'm not sure why everybody seems so down on Season 3. While it has a few more glaring flaws than the basically perfect S2 — the non-Brian Cox theater troupe, the Earps, a few too many Steve The Drunk scenes — everything else is just so damn good. It's the most dramatic…

No problem, hope you like it. If nothing else, it's probably the most polished use of digital in a Mann film yet — still grainy at times, still far from the locked-down Kubrickian compositions of Manhunter, but much more crisp and clear.

Yeah, I want to check out at least some of the Milch-heavier episodes of NYPD Blue but I'm afraid they'll seem antiquated or less interesting in light of the last 15 years of prestige/premium cable TV. Too many episodes is right, I can't imagine writing or producing a show with 25+ episodes a season or whatever.…

Miami Vice has actually gained a pretty big cult following with critics and viewers alike, and is consistently on lots of "best films of the 2000's" lists, but yeah, the general consensus for most people is still negative, which makes sense because it makes no attempt to ingratiate itself with the audience and…

I think it's second only to the perfect S4. It really is a unique setting for a crime drama, and the story had me incredibly gripped the first time around, so I never understood the complaints (although I guess it was a bit jarring for the first episode or two when the main POV switched so drastically from the…

Absolutely. This was confirmed to me by the compelling chemistry between Farrell and McAdams in the car-ride scene. Although Vaughn's performance has been steadily getting better, it's still an awkward piece of acting — and such a cliche'd gangster character would've been better served by being sketched in by a…

Thanks. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I didn't mix up Milch and Simon; I was just trying to say that Pizzolatto is trying to ape both, so we get faux-Swearengen childhood-inspired monologues as well as convoluted political machinations in some attempt to spice up the narrative stew. Ultimately though I think he…

Good call on Velcro, hah. It's been discussed a lot but it really is a silly name. Pizzolatto's character names are all very mannered in a kind of cutesy, pun-obsessed, literary way that doesn't quite translate well to TV, I think. And Farrell's scene with Abigail Spencer as his ex simply made me wish I was watching…

I loved Luck, and I 'm a huge Mann fan (I think Miami Vice ties with Heat as his best work, and I thought Blackhat was astonishing), so we'll probably have to agree to disagree. I do agree that some artists work best when reined in (I'm trying to think of an example; I know there's several), but I personally love…

Probably both, to be honest…

I said this last week, but it's like Pizzolatto wants to be David Milch. He probably thinks Vaughn's endless opening monologue about the water stain and his father was akin to one of Al Swearengen's disturbing childhood-revealing blowjob soliloquies. No, Nic, it was just tedious, self-important nonsense that didn't…

Well, to be fair, it's also been a decade or more since Deadwood. I love seeing W. Earl Brown in anything, even when he's more or less just hanging out, as here.

Westchester and "rundown" in the same sentence? Does. Not. Compute. Nah, I guess that's not true, as somewhere like New Rochelle (where I'm from) can range pretty harshly between crazy wealth and, well, poverty. And Yonkers too, I guess, though David Simon is doing something on that. But overall Westchester county is…

As per the NYT review (which was more positive than this one), it's some song by Leonard Cohen. (The reviewer said Cohen "recited" the words, which confuses me as to whether it's actually a spoken-word piece or if she was just trying to come up with an interesting synonym for "sang").

I don't think it's not having the same cast that's the problem, but the same crew. If Harrelson and McConaughey were suddenly playing different characters in Season 2, it'd just feel distracting and odd to me. But Fukunaga, as many have pointed out, may have been a large part of what made Season 1 so good.

Sounds like he wants to be David Milch but has little of the compassion, writing talent, or genuine oddball-brilliance to back it up. When I read that the first thing he did before Season 1 was give the two leading men each a box-set of Deadwood, it all clicked for me.

The way that Mannish Boy suddenly, jarringly, cuts into the previous song just as Henry takes a big snort of coke, is such a perfect cinematic rendering of the drug "rush."

BLACKHAT is a masterpiece — the greatest film of the decade thus far — and to liken it to schlock like THE NET and HACKERS, as so many have, just shows how lazy and insipid so much film "criticism" is today.