A Trip "Down Cemetery Road"

Several members of the "Slow Horses" creative team have adapted another Mick Herron novel, about the detective Zoë Boehm.  Emma Thompson plays Zoë, and Ruth Wilson portrays the book's other heroine, Sarha Tifford, in the "Down Cemetery Road" miniseries.  And since these are two of my favorite currently working UK actors, there was no way that I was going to miss this.

A fiery explosion in a suburban neighborhood interrupts the dinner party that Sarah and her husband Mark (Tom Riley) are having a few streets away.  Sarah becomes suspicious when one of the victims, a little girl, appears to disappear from media coverage and is refused all visitors at the hospital.  She tries to investigate herself, eventually recruiting a private detective named Joe Silverman (Adam Godley), who is married to the much more skeptical investigator, Zoë Boehm (Thompson).  Meanwhile, we learn that the explosion was an unauthorized action by people working for the Ministry of Defense.  We follow a verbally abusive official known only as "C" (Darren Boyd), and his hapless underling Hamza (Adeel Akhtar), as they try to cover up what happened.  There are various other figures in play, including dangerous men played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Pip Torrens, and Fehinti Balogun, whose motives are unknown.

The bumbling mismanagement of the Ministry of Defense characters are what are the most reminiscent of "Slow Horses," and they provide a nice counterpoint to the fairly typical mystery and conspiracy plots being unravelled by Sarah, and later Zoë.  Ruth Wilson is in the fairly thankless role of an ordinary person whose obsession puts her into an extraordinary situation, and a lot hinges on her retaining the audience's sympathies while making foolhardy decisions left and right.  Wilson's fine, but it often feels like a questionable use of her talents.  Emma Thompson as Zoë is more fun, because she gets to rock a leather jacket and a cool haircut, and drop a few antisocial one-liners here and there.  The show is at its most successful when the characters are the most in the dark, and the situation seems to be out of everyone's control.  The best twists are the ones that are deployed the earliest, and Zoë gets a paltry amount of screen time despite easily being the most interesting character.  Okay, the second-most interesting character after one of the villains, but that's a spoiler.

Once we actually get a better picture of what's going on, the story gets bogged down in near-misses and chance encounters, with the characters travelling to a Scottish island for a big, final confrontation.  At eight episodes, the series doesn't feel too long, exactly, but the pacing could be improved.  There are a wealth of promising minor characters who all needed a little more screentime, and the ending is very abrupt.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who could have used another episode just to tie up loose ends and confirm that Zoë's hacker friend Wayne (Joshua James) is all right.  Both of the heroines are going to have a rough time picking up the pieces of their lives that have been disrupted by the investigation, and there are a lot of the more personal questions that are left unaddressed.  These are not the answers I'd be demanding of your usual mystery series, but they're ones that the show posed and that I was left waiting for.  Since there are three other Zoë Boehm novels, this could be covered in a sequel series, but that's never a guarantee these days. 

If this is your genre, "Down Cemetery Road" is worth watching, but it's not a series that I'd prioritize over the new "Department Q," or "The Lowdown," or any of the better mystery series that have come out recently.  I wouldn't mind seeing Emma Thompson in another one of these though, but I hope she's actually the main character next time.                

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My Favorite Julie Taymor Film

This is an interesting entry to write, because Julie Taymor is better known for her achievements as a theater director than as a feature film director, and she's only qualifying for this writeup because I'm counting recorded stage productions as  part of her filmography.  Still, there's nobody who makes movies like Julie Taymor, with her particular blend of mixed media, stagecraft influences, elaborate production design, and experimental elements.  Her film directing debut was a TV movie, "Fool's Fire," possibly the best puppet film ever made.  However, the first of her features that I saw was "Titus," a very bloody  adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus."  A few decades later, I'm still processing it.

There was a resurgence of Shakespearean cinema in the late 1990s, mostly spurred by Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo+Juliet" and the Kenneth Branagh adaptations.  "Titus" is part of this trend, a star-studded, wildly over-the-top piece of phantasmagoria that added surreal "penny dreadful" fantasy sequences, a framing device from a child's POV, and glaring anachronisms to the lurid revenge story.  The setting is now a combination of Ancient Rome and the Fascist Italy of the 1930s, with gorgeous sets straight out of a Fellini film - and that's no surprise, given that "Titus" was shot at Cinecitta Studios with some of Fellini's old collaborators involved.  Despite this, "Titus" sticks very close to the original text, and retains the Shakespeare's dialogue.  Anthony Hopkins also grounds the film, giving a striking performance as Titus Andronicus with all the gravity and weight you'd expect of any tragic Shakespearean figure.  Well, until the last act, where he goes mad and gives into the camp at just the right moment.

"Titus Andronicus" has long been one of the less popular and least well-regarded Shakespeare plays because of its gruesome nature, featuring multiple deaths, maimings, sexual violence, and even cannibalism.  "Titus" leans into the morbid and prurient content, stylizing the worst acts into Grand Guignol spectacle.  The metaphorical is made literal, and the literal is often abstracted into the psychedelic.  What initially drew me to the film were the wild costuming choices, with Jessica Lange in a literal crown of kitchen knives as the spirit of Revenge, Alan Cumming in Mussolini dress uniforms and leopard prints as the smug Emperor, and Laura Fraser's brutalized Lavinia sporting tree branches in the place of severed limbs.  Anthony Hopkins appears in a chef's outfit for the cannibalism scenes, naturally.  Not all of this works, with the lengthy closing shot of a character walking off into the distance pinging as especially indulgent and pretentious, but it's a thrill to see someone engage with the play with this amount of earnest passion and rigor.  "Titus" remains the definitive screen adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," because nobody has been brave enough to try anything remotely as ambitious with it since.  I also suspect it went a long way toward popularizing and rehabilitating "Titus Andronicus" with modern audiences.

Taymor originally staged "Titus Andronicus" in 1994 as an Off-Broadway show, in the middle of an impressive run of theater projects that included the operas "Oedipus Rex" and "Salome," and the musical adaptation of "The Lion King."   The acclaim from "The Lion King" is almost certainly why Taymor got to direct "Titus," and was able to assemble such a high calibre cast and crew for it.  Nearly all of the film's defining artistic choices and imagery came from the stage production - the costuming, the video projections of nightmare imagery, and plenty of graphic violence.  Taymor has claimed that she was drawn to the play because she found it so relevant to the modern era.  Some of the characters certainly stand out as ahead of their time, especially the Moor, Aaron, played by Harry Lennix as a notably complex villain.  She also expands the role of Young Lucius, a minor character, in order to highlight the cycles of violence, generational trauma, and revenge begetting revenge.  

I've enjoyed Julie Taymor's subsequent films, especially "Frida," but none of them have resonated with me like "Titus."  I suspect it's because underneath all the extremity and the flashy visuals, there's a very solid Shakespearean tragedy here, with compelling characters and strong performances.  And deep down, I've always been a sucker for Shakespearean tragedies, and the few screen adaptations that really do them justice.   

What I've Seen - Julie Taymor

Fool's Fire (1992)

Oedipus Rex (1993)

Salome (1995)

The Lion King (1997)

Titus (1999)

Frida (2002)

Across the Universe (2007)

The Tempest (2010)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (2014)

The Glorias (2020)

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"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is Relevant

It's not often that you see a film as timely as "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die," which pits a motley collection of LA residents against an evil AI in a battle for the future.  It's not just that the film takes aim at social media, screen addiction, and ad-filled subscriptions replacing human interactions, but it captures the uneasy feeling of always having to question whether what you're seeing is real or not, in the age of large language models generating AI slop and online grifters constantly trying to hijack your attention.  "Eddington" tackled similar subject matter last year, but was focused on the proliferation of relatively grounded misinformation and conspiracy theories.  "Good Luck" is much zanier and more unhinged, where reality itself seems to be in danger of total collapse.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie starts with an unnamed man, played by Sam Rockwell, barging into a busy Norm's restaurant one night, claiming that he's from a dystopian future.  He threatens to blow them all up unless six people come with him to save the world.  However, as the night goes on and we get to know all the characters better through a series of flashbacks, it looks like everyone is living in a dystopia already.  School teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) have to deal with phone-addicted students who seem to be turning into zombies.  Susan (Juno Temple) is grieving her teenage son Darren (Riccardo Drayton), who she's been able to get a clone replacement for.  Ingrid (Hayley Lu Richardson) is allergic to electronics, and was recently ditched by her partner Tim (Tom Taylor), when he became obsessed with a VR game.

Stylistically, "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is taking a lot of influence from "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," particularly the low budget effects work and the chaotic storytelling.  There are lots of absurd, whimsical elements, like Ingrid spending the whole mission in a princess dress, that help to lighten the tone and increase the silliness of some pretty dark material.  The time traveler claims that he's come back to the same night in the diner over and over again, looking for the right combination of participants and tactics to complete his mission, so he's constantly talking about his failed attempts where people died horribly.  The whole Susan subplot comes about because school shootings are common in this universe, and there is some very black humor dealing with parents cloning their dead kids.  

"Good Luck" is very reminiscent of the "Black Mirror" anthology episodes in many respects, so I'm predisposed to like it.  However, what gives the movie a real kick is that it's also the return of Gore Verbinski to the director's chair after a decade-long absence.  This is a man who understands how to put together an action sequence that feels epic, and how to evoke horror vibes from the most innocuous situations.  I also appreciate how he leans into the oddity and the unreality of many sequences.  "It feels like AI" has been a popular criticism of a lot of media over the past year, since ChatGPT and its ilk have invaded the internet, and "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is one of the first movies I've seen that turns this into a plot point.  I have no idea how long the movie has been in production, but it feels eerily prescient, and I'm very curious how well it's going to age.   

If you're primarily interested in the entertainment value, I had fun.  The cast is mostly made up of rock-solid character actors who have no trouble handling the humor or the wild hairpin turns of the plotting, and the production looks pretty polished in spite of the limited budget.  I'd have liked the movie to be a little longer or more tightly written, so we could have gotten more time with some of the characters - Asim Chaudhry's Uber driver, Scott, for instance, didn't feel like he got a fair shake - but that's likely a matter of taste.  There's just enough existential trippiness that the people who like treating movies like puzzles will have a grand time trying to figure out how much was real, and how all the little loose ends connect.  If you just want to see fights and explosions and flashing lights, there are quite a few of those here too.  

And it ends on a hopeful note, which I appreciate.

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"Pluribus" For One and All

There are a lot of spoilers in "Pluribus" that make it difficult to talk about.  It's a science fiction show from Vince Gilligan starring Rhea Seehorn, it's very conceptual and deliberately paced, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  It's not going to appeal to everyone, because it's not in a hurry at all, but I loved the way that the first season unfolded, slowly giving us more and more information over nine episodes, and letting the characters work through various dilemmas at their own pace.  About 90% of the show is solely focused on Seehorn, playing our protagonist Carol Sturka, a difficult woman who is still a good person.  How much you like "Pluribus" may come down to how much you like spending time with her.  From this point on, I'll be spoiling the events of the first two episodes.

"Pluribus" is my kind of science-fiction, all about exploring a fantastical concept that isn't just an excuse for cool action sequences or power fantasies.  Rather, the focus is on how the world changes because of this new event, and exploring all the unintended consequences and unexpected issues that come about in its wake.  In this case, you have everyone on Earth, minus eleven people, becoming part of a single hive mind through an extra-terrestrial agent.  Gilligan and his collaborators have clearly spent a lot of time thinking this through, and a lot of the fun of "Pluribus" is watching them spend an impressive amount of Apple TV+'s money to realize the sweeping, grand scale spectacle of humanity's transformation.  You don't need a lot of society and infrastructure when everyone is in perfect agreement with each other, and you can get so much more done, more efficiently.  Some of the most unnerving images in the show involve groups of people simply moving or talking in unison, which must have taken a monumental amount of work to achieve.

I always liked Seehorn as Kim Wexler in "Better Call Saul," and she's similarly fantastic as the very different Carol Sturka.  The show is just as much an examination of Carol as it is about the hive mind.  She's a successful romantic fantasy writer who wants to write more serious books, but isn't good enough to do that.  She doesn't like people much, except her partner Helen (Miriam Shor), and takes the loss of her very hard.  And despite being a curmudgeon and world class grump, who ticks off nearly every other person on the planet over the course of the first season, Carol discovers that she needs other people.  Seehorn is often the only character onscreen for large amounts of time, and the role is often very physical and demanding.  She does such a great job of keeping us in her headspace as she goes through doubts, frustrations, discoveries, and the grieving process.  Her relationship with the hive mind is fascinating to watch develop, since Carol is often stubborn, prickly, and downright mean, while the hive mind, usually embodied in the form of Carol's assigned "chaperone" Zosia (Karolina Wydra), is nothing but kind, generous, and accommodating.  I love that there's a real ambiguity as to whether Carol's resistance to "The Joining" is actually a good thing for her and the rest of humanity.    

  

"Pluribus" is the rare kind of show where I have no idea what's going to happen in most of the episodes, and I love it.  Most of it takes place in Albuquerque, but "Pluribus" also regularly goes globetrotting to Morocco, Peru, Colombia, and other far-flung locations.  Multiple episodes open with characters I don't know, speaking languages I don't speak, and I'm instantly caught up in figuring out what's happening every single time.  Vince Gilligan and his collaborators have earned the benefit of the doubt from me after all those years of "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul."  But even if they hadn't, "Pluribus" is executed so well, and the material is so consistently interesting that I'd be hooked regardless.  Of all the shows that came out in 2025, this is easily the most distinct, unique, and ambitious.  And it has my full attention.    

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Catching Up With "Slow Horses"

This write-up covers the second and third series of "Slow Horses."  I watched the first one back in 2022, but never wrote a review for it.  I haven't revisited it since then, so I'm playing fair and leaving it out of this post.  However, so far each series has functioned pretty well as an individual piece of media, and you could easily watch them in isolation from each other.  And if you like British crime series or spy series, "Slow Horses" is definitely one to seek out.

Gary Oldman played spymaster George Smiley to perfection in the most recent film version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," but the spy he'll likely be best remembered for is Jackson Lamb.  He's the head of Slough House, whose members have been nicknamed "slow horses."  This is the unit where the problem children of MI5 are banished, home to those who haven't erred seriously enough to be outright fired.  Its members include the screw-ups, the insubordinates, the addicts, and a few who have fallen through the cracks.  Lamb is a cynical, slovenly man of awful habits and worse hygiene, who has a long history in intelligence, and knows all the major players.  He is also secretly very good at his job, which is why Slough House keeps getting involved in stopping major threats to national security despite its reputation.

  

Oldman's performance is the main event, of course, with Lamb befouling the atmosphere and throwing zingers at everyone unlucky  enough to cross paths with him.  However, I like the whole ensemble.  The second lead is Jack Lowden, who plays River Cartwright, a former star agent and grandson of a famous spy (Jonathan Pryce), whose flair for heroics tends to go wrong.  He badly wants out of Slough House, but keeps getting into one catastrophe after another.  Other members of the team include ex-alcoholic administrator Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), formidable field agent Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), family man Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan), spitfire drug addict Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and sleazy techie Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung).  Their bosses include the totally amoral MI5 leaders Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo), and MP Peter Judd (Samuel West).

I like that "Slow Horses" offers a little of everything.  Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, the tone is darkly comedic, but the spy adventure elements are solid.  We get plenty of twisty John LeCarre power plays and conspiracies to untangle, and major characters are killed off with surprising regularity.  At the same time, the show has been steadily increasing the number of raucous James Bond-style action sequences, with the third series climaxing in a protracted gun battle.  Physical humor and pratfalls are not uncommon, though deployed with care, so as not to undercut the thrills.  Though our heroes can be counted on to do the right thing, and can be surprisingly competent in a pinch, they're also prone to making bad calls and being easy marks.  Cartwright has all the making of being a great spy, except that he takes things at face value too quickly, and is thus easy to manipulate.  Up against half the cast of "The Darkest Hour," he's totally outclassed, and it's such fun to watch him flounder. 

It was also a pleasant surprise to discover that the show is managing to deliver a full series yearly, with the sixth one due this year.  Also, six hour-long episodes is a perfectly good length to cover a novel's worth of material.  So far, each series has ended with a preview for the next one, and there are enough "Slough House" books still coming out that "Slow Horses" could easily run to the end of the decade adapting them all.  This depends on Gary Oldman sticking around, of course, and thankfully he seems to be having a very good time being very awful as Jackson Lamb.  

Keep an eye out for write-ups of the remaining series soon, because they're not going to last me very long at the rate I've been watching them.  

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The 2025 Films I Didn't Watch

I write this post every year to acknowledge some of the movies that I've made a conscious decision to skip watching.  In some cases there's a reason, and in some cases there's just a lack of enthusiasm.  I've got very strong completionist tendencies, so I hope writing about some of these films this way will help me put any lingering doubts to rest.  So, here are eight films that didn't make the cut this year.   I reserve the right to revisit and reverse my viewing choices in the future. However, I still haven't watched anything from last year's list.

It's Never Over Jeff Buckley - I generally like music documentaries, but I've found that I have little interest in the ones about musical artists where I'm not familiar with their music.  Jeff Buckley is an obscure singer-songwriter who put out one album and gained a cult following.  I'm sure the documentary about him is very good, but I'm also sure that I'm not likely to get much out of it.  

Ballad of a Small Player - Edward Berger directs a gambling film starring Colin Farrell, in scruffy loser mode, set in Macau.  A few critics I like are adamant that this is a hidden gem, but I remain wary.  "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Conclave" were respectable, but I didn't particularly enjoy either.  What really sank this one for me, though, were the totally unimpressed reactions this got at Toronto and Telluride early in the season.  

The Assessment - I generally watch every weird, high-concept science-fiction and speculative fiction film I hear about.  "The Assessment" is supposed to be about a future world where couples have to pass an interview to have a child.  However, this is just an excuse for a movie where Alicia Vikander gets to screw with Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel for two hours.  Once I saw the trailer, which looked insufferable, I dropped it in spite of positive reviews.

Magazine Dreams - This one had Oscar buzz when it originally premiered at Sundance back in 2023, but the allegations against Jonathan Majors quashed them.  After changing distributors, the film finally got a very limited release this year, and reviews were very positive, but this was never the kind of film that I was going to enjoy, due to the punishing subject matter.  Once it was out of contention for the major awards, I took the excuse to ignore it.  

Good Boy - I like the concept.  I get the concept.  However, watching an entire movie of a poor dog in danger from supernatural forces struck me as an experience I had absolutely no interest in having.  This was also a tiny production made for $70,000, helmed by a relative newcomer, so I wasn't keen on having to deal with shoestring aesthetics on top of everything else.  I'm glad people enjoyed this, but I'm also very sure about my decision to keep my distance.

Eleanor the Great - This is Scarlett Johansson's directing debut, starring June Squibb as a newcomer to New York who is accidentally mistaken for a Holocaust survivor.  The situation snowballs into a learning experience for everyone involved, and the trailer didn't do anything to convince me that the movie was any better than its tiresome plot.  The critical response was fine, but everything about "Eleanor" comes across as too contrived for me to take.     

Christy - Sydney Sweeney plays a female boxer who deals with domestic abuse.  I promise that I steered clear of all the culture war uproar around the film, and I'm avoiding it simply because this is a female-led awards hopeful that doesn't have much going for it except a lead performance that hasn't really made any waves.  I skip a lot of similar films like the Daniel Day Lewis starrer "Anemone," and I don't feel too bad about skipping this one too.  

Keeper - I'm a fan of Tatiana Maslany, but I've given Osgood Perkins enough chances.  After "The Monkey," I need a break from his brand of horror for a while.  And there were more than enough excellent horror films this year to keep me occupied. 

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"The Plague" Gets Under Your Skin

First time filmmaker Charlie Polinger has made a nerve-wracking film about a group of twelve and thirteen year-old boys at a water polo camp.  Everett Blunck stars as Ben, who runs afoul of the established group dynamics of the other boys, where a kid named Jake (Kayo Martin) has started a cruel game to treat the oddball Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) like he has contracted a mysterious "plague."  Desperate to fit in, Ben initially goes along with the ostracism, but also finds he enjoys being around Eli, who doesn't seem bothered by the negative reaction.

There have been many films about bullying and the way that adolescent growing pains can turn kids into monsters.  However, I've rarely seen a film like "The Plague" that lays out the forces at play so clearly.  The kids' cruelty looks harmless, but is extremely hurtful, even in the earliest stages.  It's immediately obvious that all of the boys involved in the game are vulnerable in some way or another, and most are like Ben - going along because nobody wants to be in the target role.  The ringleader, Jake, is the kind of smirking little instigator that seems Machiavellian to Ben, but later scenes make it clear that this is a child who is processing a lot of negative emotions very badly, and his cruelty is learned.  He has no real idea of the consequences of his behavior, or that the game will end up spinning out of everyone's control.  

The performances from the young leads are very good, and the writing is perceptive enough to nail the behaviors and dynamics of kids this age, even if the specific vernacular might not be right.  Ben is guileless enough to say exactly what he's thinking most of the time, and when he tries to feign amenability or aloofness, he's bad at it.  Eli seems to have no self-awareness, which seems odd for a kid his age, but not unlikely.  I found myself getting frustrated with Ben and Jake, and had to keep reminding myself that these were seventh graders who may have never been away from home for an extended period before, and whose social skills were rudimentary at best.  The kids being so young certainly increased the emotional intensity of the film throughout, and I found myself hyperaware in even the most innocuous dialogue scenes.    

You have to suspend disbelief about some aspects of "The Plague."  For instance, the only adult presence at the camp seems to be the coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton), who is aware of the bullying and does his best to intervene when things get out of hand.  However, the lack of supervision was something that I couldn't help fixating on.  This is a horror/thriller, largely told from the subjective point of viewpoint of a prepubescent kid, so was this an artistic choice?  Was Daddy Wags the only adult around because that's what it felt like to Ben, and the other adults simply didn't register for him?  Was this to suggest that the camp, despite catering to the kind of rich kids who would have the money to play water polo, was financially cutting corners?  Or was this simply because the "Plague" is a low budget film and couldn't swing the cost of more adult actors?

My instinct is to go with the first option.  "The Plague" does a lot with a little, whipping up some potent horror imagery out of swimming pools, darkened bathrooms, and institutional corridors.  I especially like the opening underwater shot, where the boys appear to be headless as they tread water.  The sound design is a marvel, using human voices as part of the soundscape in places where you might not expect them.  Water is a recurring motif, naturally, standing in for the subconscious.  

Horror fans may come away disappointed because there's only one real moment of gore, most of the chills are strictly psychological, and the story stays mostly grounded in reality throughout.  However, I came away extremely impressed with everyone involved.

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