That is a silly complaint, and sure to be one of the least challenging contrivances of the show, but at the same time I fully support the entire cast of Kurt Sutter's The Bastard Executioner being forced to perform their roles in medieval-court French exclusively

To be honest I wouldn't rate the Times, the Telegraph or the Independent that highly nowadays, as they've all been on an inexorable slide towards being glorified mouthpieces for their owner's business interests: the Times is owned by the Australian, Fox News operating billionaire Rupert Murdoch, the Telegraph the…

He says there were four of them to three Americans, that they killed them one at a time, that one tried to run and that the whole thing took a couple of hours. That jibes more with methodically killing them as soon as they'd each dug their graves, rather than attempt to guard and feed them. Again, it's freezing cold…

They executed the surrendering Germans rather than have to manage feeding and guarding them. That's why the vet mentions the Germans were starving and his friend defensively interjects that "you were starving", and why the story ends with him remembering their blue eyes. The cannibalism reading doesn't make much…

Do you really have to grant that much for "redemptive hero rapes his sister against their son's corpse" to be an inappropriately hard narrative button to push if you then have absolutely nothing to do or say about it, or that the director should probably be aware in the basic name of common sense that he directed,…

Concentration camps were always awful, but the Germans' camp on Shark Island where they sent thousands Herero and Nama is an absurdly close forerunner to the death camps of WWII, complete with cattle-car transportation, forced labour, skyrocketing mortality rates from disease, malnutrition and overwork, grotesquely…

I saw a screening of Clockers with a Richard Price Q&A afterwards, and generally speaking I don't think anyone is more frustrated as to how Richard Price screenplays turn out than Richard Price, so I imagine he'll have something to say about this one eventually.

Well, the communal apartments, tea drinking, and patronymics are all present and correct in The Americans, and I'm pretty confident it has to have the highest volume of spoken Russian of any US dramatic production, the vast majority from actual Russian speakers. So it seems to gain points by implication.

David Michod has his own thing going on that is pretty good. So does John Hillcoat, albeit to vastly diminishing returns.

Yes because that production choice occurred entirely within your own mind

You should give Rectify a go, but otherwise, yes.

You're not a big whiskey drinker but you're pretty sure your country's output is unimpeachably great and that you can dismiss Scotch in its entirety. Thanks.

Pretty sure Twin Peaks was always supposed to look quaint!

I saw Citizen X, the film based on the actual story that inspired this one more loosely, and I'm pretty sure the propaganda line was that the Soviet Union couldn't produce pathologically driven serial killings, given how much more common and well reported those were in the US; not that they didn't have murders in…

That was seemingly the case when I was a kid, and as far as I know it's still standard for American airlines, but Qantas gave me Ides of March, Margin Call, A Dangerous Method, Animal Kingdom, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Snowtown over the course of one flight, so as much as I appreciated having a whole set of films…

I've finished it since just to put a close on it in my mind, but I first saw this film on a Qantas flight as part of their little Contemporary Australian selection, and as grim as I was expecting it to be, I had probably the hardest time of my entire history of film-watching getting through the first actual murder…

[FRAILTY SPOILERS] For the better, though? I might have been sold on a disturbingly ambiguous ending rather than a total reversal. As it stands it just seems like part of the mid-90s-to-early-00s insistence on offering "wow them at the end" brand twists even at the risk of obliterating any sense of coherent plotting…

Judge Judy often makes the statement that women lie, you guys, and I think in spite of the fact that she is presumably prone to womanish deceit herself, we should take that as a solid investigative starting point.

Well, Charles, at this point that's about the level of quality and coherence I would expect from someone rationalising Bill Cosby's 14 separate rape allegations with consistent M.O. into something other than "he is almost certainly a serial rapist".

Frankly I'd be more interested in a drama that didn't really work to make its slaveowner characters sympathetic so much as just explore the dynamic of how the fuck that actually worked for them in its dying stretches (sort of like what the Italian series Gomorrah does for the mob), but for all the brilliant drama that…