Review: Dead to Me (Season 1)

By Spencer Coile 

In recent years, Netflix has held the honor and burden of bringing to life countless TV series – giving a voice to talent previously under or unseen. While it has become impossible to keep up with everything the platform currently has to offer, it also allows its creators, writers, and directors to tell their stories on their terms. Gone are the days where television was situated comfortably in the binary of comedy and drama. Now we have space carved out for shows that subvert our expectations, make us uncomfortable, and if we’re lucky, invite us into the artist’s vision. 

Liz Feldman takes complete advantage of this genre fluidity. Her Netflix creation, Dead to Me (streaming now), is a darkly comic meditation on grief and the ways it manifests within our interpersonal relationships. Featuring especially remarkable turns from two typically underutilized actresses, Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, Dead to Me is a prickly, but surprisingly personal examination into how we process trauma... 

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Tribeca 2019: "Lucky Grandma"

And here is Jason Adams reporting from Tribeca again...

It's easy to recognize Grandma -- she's the one called Grandma. But if you're sitting about ten feet away from Chinatown NYC as I am as I type this review, it's even easier -- I could step out onto the street and see a dozen women who look just like Grandma. If I happened to walk just a little further away to the local movie theater, I wouldn't see a single Grandma, not one. And that is what makes Sasie Sealy's film Lucky Grandma feel so easily revolutionary. Grandmas are everywhere, but this is the one...

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Not exactly maternal

Let's drink to Senator Keeley's daughter and our Val. I'm afraid I haven't done much for him in these last 20 years...

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Happy 50th to Renée Zellweger

by Eric Blume

It seems crazy, but today marks the 50th birthday of Oscar-winning actress Renée Zellweger.  Zellweger is a bit of a divisive actor (even within this site!), but I loved her the second I first saw her onscreen, loved her through her big decade of success, and will proudly love her forever.

I fell for Zellweger for the first time the way most of America did:  as assistant Dorothy Boyd opposite Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire in 1996.  Even though that film features Cruise’s best performance (he should have beat Geoffrey Rush for the Oscar), I walked away from Jerry Maguire thinking, who the hell is Renée Zellweger?  It takes major presence and considerable skill to not be blown off the screen by a star like Cruise at his most commanding.  Not only did Zellweger hold her own, she brought out new things in him: a comic warmth, a quality of genuineness, something softer and more open.  He listened to her and didn’t anticipate everything, because she was off-center...

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Pussywillows! Serial Mom at 25

by Salim Garami

What's good?

The existence of Serial Mom 25 years ago establishes that America’s current obsession with true crime stories – with the likes of Serial and American Crime Story and the never-ending avalanche of Netflix documentaries – is not something remotely new to our day and age. Hell, it wasn’t even new to 1994; many of the social observations Serial Mom makes arguably were already well before up to the previous year’s The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. There is little prophetic in the satire but there is A LOT of scary forecasting regarding the OJ Simpson murder case that was just around the corner at the time of its release...

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