Joe Wright’s Hanna was released in 2011, just preceding the boomlet in all tales Strong Female Protagonist ushered in by The Hunger Games one year later. In some ways, this damned the movie to a pseudo-obscurity: Though it follows a teenage girl infused with super-soldier DNA in utero, raised in isolation by the…

Until this penultimate episode, Escape At Dannemora has distinguished itself as a character-driven drama, more remarkable for its subtleties and for the ways it used its bigger, flashier moments—like, for instance, the titular escape—to illuminate certain truths about its characters (especially the truths they…

Here, finally, for better and (inevitably) for worse, is the titular escape at Dannemora. Or, more aptly, escapes: Sweat and Matt finally emerge on the other side of the prison walls. Tilly finally makes her choice—or, rather, her body makes the choice for her—to abandon her fantasies about living out a dime store…

“Chapter Four” is roughly the midpoint of Escape At Dannemora, so it makes sense that this episode would focus on the unique, and very specific fear, that can come with feeling your fingers close around (but not quite grab onto) the moment, the object, or the person, of your heart’s desire. Matt and Sweat inch…

One of the pleasures of watching Escape at Dannemora is the way the show connects action (and “Chapter Three” has plenty of action) with the internal movements of its characters. The fact that anyone who wants to know exactly how the titular caper panned out can spoil themselves with a basic Googling has freed the…

If “Chapter One” of Escape At Dannemora was about the power and sway of raw desire—how it invigorates and complicates a humdrum life—then “Chapter Two” is all about the ways that desire can be weaponized, can lead us to action, and, of course, to our ruin. Last episode focused on the affair between Joyce “Tilly”…

Even though The Walking Dead has shuffled and slurred and growled a long way from its heyday as must-see Sunday TV, the news that series star Andrew Lincoln would be hanging up his cowboy hat and holstering his Colt Python near the mid-point of season nine still came as a shock. Rick Grimes is the axis upon which…

“Warning Signs” accomplished what precious few episodes of The Walking Dead have done since about roughly mid-way through season four: It got me excited about what’s going to happen next. For the past several years, The Walking Dead has been, at least for me, a put it on while cleaning the house kind of show. The…

In the first scene of “The Bridge,” Rick Grimes rhapsodizes about the brightness of the future with his quintessential corniness. “We’re not fighting to survive,” Rick tells some unseen figure (though, of course, we know exactly who he’s talking to). His face is half-shadowed, a clear allusion to the dark past he’s…

It’s fitting that Persephone, the goddess most known for her suffering, is finally evoked in the last episode of Sharp Objects. Her story is inextricably bound to daughter-hood, motherhood, and obliteration. The innocent, care-free child of a woman powerful enough to freeze the world, to starve and parch every living…

Sharp Objects is a dark meditation of a show, long on mood and short on forward action. These six hours have been an imagistic evocation of history and emotion animated by a murder mystery that often seems quite cursory—at least, compared to the terrifying richness of the series’ real story, about how Camille Preaker…

In her seminal essay, “A Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison assesses the ways that women are violated and wounded, humiliated and abused, throughout our art and our culture. She describes Mina Harker from Dracula, crying out as she’s bitten and drained of her blood; Anna Karenina leaping to her doom…

The episode titles for Sharp Objects offer a kind of wry commentary about the surface and subterranean events of the show: “Vanish” is, on its surface, about the two disappeared girls, but it’s also very much about how Camille, despite her best efforts at self-obliteration, will never be able to truly leave her past…

Sharp Objects is saturated in menace: The ugly, acid-washed lighting that haunts seedy motel rooms, hospital corridors, and fancy manor homes alike; the quick yet hazy cuts between present day troubles and the terrors of the past; and the low and constant thrum of heavy rock music coming out of a cracked iPod conspire…

“Dirt,” the second episode of Sharp Objects, is a study in contradictions. Those contradictions revolve around beauty and brutality, grief and cruelty, familial love and twisted obsession. These contradictions exist in a tight, sharp symbiosis; they’re like the thin sides of the needle that Camille drives…

Toward the end of the first episode of Sharp Objects, a teenage girl tells her half-sister that, “Mama says I’m incorrigible.” Her tone winks with mischief, her words bright with a quicksilver menace. She’s wearing a prim, floral-patterned dress, her mother’s living doll (as she has called herself only moments before)…