I think there's a difference between letting a talented actor ham it up in a one-note role - where, as you say, they can often elevate the performance or at least make it memorable - and burying a talented actor under so much makeup that they can barely act at all. Another good example of this is Christopher…

Like I said, Mystique and Jean Grey do a lot, and some of the other new mutants (Cyclops, Nightcrawler) are along for the ride. If there's a star it's probably Mystique.

This is a pretty flawed movie, but I still ended up enjoying it a lot more than the better-made Civil War. I have to wonder if a lot of the criticism it's getting is rooted in the fact that, as the review notes, both Xavier and Magneto are sidelined by the story. That's obviously a flaw in the storytelling, but it…

I'd be OK with this, since most of the damage is done by the bad guys and the good guys have their hands full just trying to prevent everything from getting a lot worse. But at the end of the movie Magneto, who is responsible for almost all of that carnage, is forgiven by everyone and even hailed as a hero by the…

I've seen it, and Isaac is completely wasted. Not only does the makeup completely prevent anything resembling acting, but Apocalypse is such a one-note character that there is simply no justification for wasting an actor of Isaac's caliber on him.

It's very clear that it's an attempt to recapture the one thing that everyone walked out of DOFP talking about. But it also stands up on its own, and does a good job of raising the stakes and complicating the situation. I wouldn't like every X-Men film from now to feel obliged to have a sequence like this, but this…

That is an issue, though I think maybe less so than the fact that the season spends too much time resolving the Dong and Jacqueline plotlines, and takes far too long to get to the more interesting story of Kimmy and her unresolved traumas.

We can debate whether 22 good episodes is inherently unworkable, and I'm not even sure I disagree (it is just a number selected to satisfy the needs of advertisers, after all). But that doesn't change the fact that even your weaker seasons of Buffy or Angel were stronger, and handled their episode order better, than…

My problem with Magneto in Apocalypse is that the film clearly conceives of itself as (yet another) redemption story for him, whereas for me it's the movie where he goes beyond the pale. There's only so many times you can decide that your own personal suffering is more important than the survival of the entire human…

This weekend I watched most of the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I'm sorry to say was a little underwhelming. There are some good things - Titus and Mikey, Tina Fey's psychiatrist character, Anna Camp's magnificent guest turn - but on the whole the show feels less sharp and less funny, as if the…

This is the same festival that keeps insisting that criticism of Roman Polanski or Woody Allen is merely "puritanism," but drove Lars von Trier out of town on a rail for making a dumb Nazi joke. They seem determined to live down to every nasty stereotype about Europeans in existence.

Well, unless Sean is in on the joke, it's still pretty mean to him.

So the resolution of the Sophie/Danny story is that both Sophie and Danny have been toying with Sean's affections, and we're meant to find this cute and romantic? And apparently Danny is going on a date with Sean even though he's not attracted to him and is about to start something with Sophie? Who the hell behaves…

Scandal has many flaws and its later seasons have been a mess. But even at its worst is has never been boring, nondescript, or unambitious. These are all qualities that characterize the writing on AoS.

If AoS were produced by Shondaland, it would be a lot more fun to watch, and would feature significantly fewer bland white guys.

Just to be clear: a black book organization that jails people without recourse to the courts or any reference to their civil rights is not legal just because the president says it is. You might as well say that Guantanmo is legal. It's tolerated because executive orders work as they do, but there's a reason it has…

If the Russos can take time to bring Abed and the Dean into their Captain America movies, they could probably do the same for the AoS characters. They don't want to because Bennet is right that no one in Marvel cares about AoS. But given the show's dismal ratings, there's really no reason for them to care.

From everything I've read, new SHIELD is basically the same as the old SHIELD, but without Hydra to blame for all the awful things it does. It's still an organization that kills and imprisons people with no legal authority or recourse to the law or the courts. It's still suspicious or even hostile to people who…

Based on Winter Soldier, she was still loyal to Fury. And in her post-WS appearance on AoS she acts pretty superior to anyone who thinks they can criticize SHIELD for, um, completely and totally failing at their stated mission at a level so catastrophic that no one involved should be allowed to manage so much as a…

There's definitely a bigger problem with his characterization when Whedon was writing him, but I also thought some of his behavior in Civil War wasn't quite in character. At some point, he crossed a line that I just didn't believe he would cross.