Lisa Frankenstein: Wit’s Alive!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kathryn Newton in Lisa Frankenstein

Diablo Cody and the ’80s: match made in cinematic heaven, or ungainly fit? Despite a varied and underrated screenwriting career (Tully, Ricki and the Flash), Cody remains best known for her opening one-two punch of Juno and Jennifer’s Body, which instantly established her polarizing style: pithy wordplay, obvious themes, and referential characters who seem to know they’re living in a movie. The heightened quality of her writing would appear to make her a natural match for the era that brought us John Hughes and synth pop. What’s strange about Lisa Frankenstein is that it neither sends up classic ’80s teen flicks nor pays loving tribute to them. It seems to be set in 1989 for no other reason than to justify its kickass soundtrack.

Which is fine, as far as it goes. I’m skeptical that Lisa Frankenstein will earn the same cult following that Jennifer’s Body did—certainly it won’t send adolescent boys scurrying to the internet in search of “megan fox amanda seyfried kiss scene”—but it is at least a vibrant and playful production. The feature directorial debut of Zelda Williams (working from a script by Cody), it sports bright colors, cool music, and an array of outfits so dazzling, they’d make Cher from Clueless jealous. The movie is not without significant flaws—uneven dialogue, awkward staging, a general aimlessness—yet it offers the robust built-in defense of, “Sure, but did you see her hair?” Read More

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The Zone of Interest: Heart of Gas

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest

The music speaks the truth. Strip away The Zone of Interest’s first few minutes—a grim overture in which Mica Levi’s doomy, dissonant score aches and seethes against a black screen—and you might suspect that you’ve stumbled into a gentle movie of bucolic bliss. The first image we see is that of a happy-looking family lounging lazily in a meadow. As a stream gurgles nearby, the children traipse along a dirt path, the sun glinting down on their golden hair. Their parents seem entirely relaxed, suggesting a life of comfort and security. Perhaps they’re on vacation, or maybe just enjoying a weekend picnic. Even after they return to their home, a cozy cottage with a carefully tended garden and a small in-ground pool, it takes some time before you pick up on the curious nature of their surroundings: the razor wire atop the large wall in the background, the smoke billowing from distant chimneys, the muffled echoes of gunfire and screams.

Adapted by Jonathan Glazer from a novel by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest is decidedly a movie about the Holocaust. But it is also not a Holocaust picture—at least, not in the way the subgenre has traditionally been understood. There are no ghastly scenes of extermination, no heroic feats of endurance and survival, no condemnatory speeches, no comeuppance or catharsis. There is simply the pervasive aroma of death, and the people willfully oblivious to its stench. Read More

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Ranking Every TV Show of 2023: The Complete List

Jeremy BeckTV Rankings
Brittany O'Grady in The Consultant; Diane Morgan in Cunk on Earth; Rebecca Ferguson in Silo; Sarah Snook in Succession; Cara Delevingne in Carnival Row

If you haven’t noticed (and judging by our traffic numbers, you haven’t), we’ve just completed our annual exercise of ranking every TV show we watched last year—94 of them, in 2023’s case. This omnibus post is designed as a cheat code for those of you who care about the rankings and not about the writing, though please note that each header includes a link that will take you to the piece with a detailed capsule on the shows in question.

The Top 10
1. The Last of Us (HBO, Season 1)
2. The Bear (FX on Hulu; Season 2)
3. Succession (HBO, Season 4)
4. Fargo (FX, Season 5)
5. Sex Education (Netflix, Season 4)
6. Poker Face (Peacock, Season 1)
7. The Great (Hulu, Season 3)
8. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix, Season 1)
9. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon, Season 5)
10. Barry (HBO, Season 4) Read More

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The Best TV Shows of 2023

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists, TV Rankings
Juno Temple in Fargo; Jeremy Allen White in The Bear; Kate Siegel in The Fall of the House of Usher; Natasha Lyonne in Poker Face; Ncuti Gatwa in Sex Education

And at long last, here we are. 2023 may have been a down year for TV overall, but its relative blahness shouldn’t influence perceptions of the year’s best shows, which were uniformly exceptional. Our countdown of every series of the year concludes below, but if you missed the prior episodes, consult the following links:

#s 94-81
#s 80-66
#s 65-51
#s 50-41
#s 40-31
#s 30-21
#s 20-11

10. Barry (HBO, Season 4; last year: 12 of 110). Barry was always enjoyable in part for how deftly it blended its madcap comedy with the emptiness eating away at its titular assassin’s soul. So as the show continued to lean harder into its darker impulses, it was fair to question if it was losing that delicate balance. But Bill Hader’s vision for this entrancing, disturbing show has always been personal—with little interest in appealing to fans or playing it safe. The final season hardly skimps on quirky entertainment; there are shootouts and prison breaks and Sian Heder cameos and organized-crime meetings at Dave & Buster’s. But its portrait of all-consuming selfishness—personified not just by Hader but by a wonderful Sarah Goldberg—is awfully bleak, and Barry commits to it with unapologetic zeal as well as formal audacity. Remember, this started out as a one-joke show about a hit man trying to become an actor. By the time it ended, no one was laughing. Read More

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Ranking Every TV Show of 2023: #s 20-11

Jeremy BeckTV Rankings
Keri Russell in The Diplomat; Jack Lowden in Slow Horses; Betty Gilpin in Mrs. Davis; Timothy Olyphant in Justified: City Primeval; Elizabeth Olsen in Love & Death

Nearly there now. Our rankings of every TV show of 2023 have reached their penultimate episode, with what you might classify as the honorable mentions. For prior installments, featuring series that are rather less excellent than the ensuing 10, check out the following links:

#s 94-81
#s 80-66
#s 65-51
#s 50-41
#s 40-31
#s 30-21

20. Love & Death (Max, Season 1). As a piece of ghastly, ripped-from-the-headlines true-crime fiction, Love & Death is solid but unremarkable. Yet it’s the typicality of the whole thing that makes it so unsettling. The story, about a happy but restless Texas housewife (Elizabeth Olsen) who embarks on a lengthy affair with a friend’s husband (Jesse Plemons), is sad and pitiful, featuring people who scan as ordinary not because of their demographics (white, middle class) but because their lives seem so limited in scope or possibility. Ironically, that sense of bland familiarity lends Love & Death a disturbing resonance; if these folks’ lives can be turned into tabloid mayhem, why can’t yours? Beyond that, the series works because—as was true with A Murder at the End of the World (discussed yesterday)—it doesn’t pin everything on its ultimate verdict, which proves to be weirdly beside the point. Instead, Love & Death operates primarily as a gripping study of marriage and infidelity, exploring—with clarity but without judgment—the ebb and flow of burning desires and cooling passions. Olsen and Plemons are both excellent for how they burrow inside their characters rather than sensationalizing them; Plemons’ performance in the finale is astonishing for how it chokes off any sense of catharsis. This may be a show about an axe murderer, but it’s the dullness that really leaves a mark. Read More

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