Reviews
Rammstein Storm Montreal to Kick Off North American Tour: Recap + Photos
In the hours leading up to the kickoff of Rammstein’s North American stadium tour in Montreal, Canada on Sunday (August 21st), a severe thunderstorm warning was issued for the city and surrounding area. The threat of heavy rains, potentially dangerous gusts of wind, oversized hail, intense lightning and pounding thunder were forecast throughout the day. And while there were flashes and bursts of all these elements throughout the afternoon, the weather report had it wrong. It was not the Earth’s atmosphere that was about to deliver on this powerful barometric disturbance. It was the German industrial-metal icons. It’s not hard to imagine that their impending 2-million-watt assault on Montreal’s Parc Jean Drapeau and its home on St. Helen’s Island was about to cause such a seismic ripple acr...
Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson Square Off In FX’s Riveting Psychothriller The Patient: Review
The Pitch: Psychotherapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell) is a man in the grips of mourning — not just for the recent loss of his wife (Laura Niemi) to cancer, but also for his strained relationship with his son Ezra (Andrew Leeds), whose choice to become an Orthodox Jew has drawn a deep rift against his more liberal Jewish father. But Alan receives the challenge of a lifetime in the form of Sam Fortner (Domhnall Gleeson), a new patient who seems cagey, mysterious, and unable to truly open up. Turns out, that’s because Sam is a serial killer, one desperately searching for a way to stamp out his compulsions, and he hopes that Alan’s expertise can help. In classic serial-killer fashion, that means kidnapping Alan, chaining him to the basement of his mother’s remote house out in the woods, ...
Welcome to Wrexham Review: Watching Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds Buy a Sports Team Is Damn Compelling
The Pitch: English: PitchAmerican: FieldWelsh: Traw In 2020, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a Welsh football team. Neither of them had ever been to Wales before taking such an enormous leap, let alone Wrexham. Nor had either of them ever followed the English football league, let alone the fifth-tier Wrexham Red Dragons. And yet, they saw some real potential both in the club (which is the third oldest football team in the world and the oldest professional club in Wales — they even play at the Racecourse, the oldest international football pitch in the world, est. 1807) as well as in the residents of Wrexham. Potential for historic sporting success, sure, but also the potential for an incredible story. And so they started making this docuseries. And then they bought the club. (Y...
My Chemical Romance Launch North American Tour with Howlingly Chaotic Oklahoma City Show: Recap, Photos + Setlist
Donning a green camo jacket and a face full of Heath Ledger-style Joker makeup, Gerard Way leads My Chemical Romance into their first North American tour in more than 900 days, often channeling the same chaotic energy of whom he decorated his visage. The fizzing static distortions in the intro to “The Foundations of Decay,” the surprise single released this May in support of the reunion tour, practically serve as white noise behind the jubilant roars of the crowd as the band takes the stage inside Oklahoma City’s Paycom Arena. (Grab tickets to the rest of MCR’s tour dates here.) Clocking in at an epic six minutes, “The Foundations of Decay” features a bite-sized version of the same world-building story-craft often associated with the My Chemical Romance albums. Way’s soft-spoken early vers...
Echoes Review: A Fascinating Story Gets Undermined by a Thirst for Twists
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of Echoes, “Falls.”] The Pitch: What if two adult identical twins swapped places every year, unbeknownst to everyone in their lives? Such is the premise of Netflix’s Echoes, a show that opens on a shrewd and successful author named Gina (Michelle Monaghan), who lives an exceedingly normal life in an austere Los Angeles mansion with her doting therapist husband, Charlie (Daniel Sunjata). Living in Mount Echo, a modest farm town halfway across the country, is Gina’s identical twin sister, Leni, a ranch owner with a hearty southern drawl and permanently braided hair. Every year on their birthday, Gina and Leni switch places for a year, unbeknownst to anyone else: From their accents to their devoted husbands to Leni’s ...
House of the Dragon Review: A Beautifully-Made History Lesson From an Ugly Fictional World
The Pitch: Perhaps you are a carbon-based life form with an Internet connection and/or cable TV subscription, and thus are aware of the existence of a little show called Game of Thrones, which for a few years there was pretty dang popular. Well, here’s some more of it! Specifically, here is House of the Dragon, HBO’s prequel/spinoff that does not involve Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, but does hope to capture the imagination of an ever-fickle viewing public. To that end, we return to King’s Landing 172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen (House of the Dragon is very specific on this point), where Daenerys’ ancestors still hold the very familiar-looking Iron Throne. Though we begin with the line of succession in flux, as a ruler without heirs has to make a choice...
Spin Me Round Serves Up An Amusing but Messy Slice of Dark Comedy: Review
The Pitch: Amber (Alison Brie) runs the Bakersfield outpost of Tuscany Grove, a popular Olive Garden-adjacent family eatery chain. Great at her job but yearning for something more, Amber gets the opportunity of a lifetime when her boss (Lil Rel Howery) selects her for an all-expenses-paid work retreat to Italy. Amber’s excitement is doubled when her best friend Emily (Ego Nwodim) suggests a tantalizing possibility during her time in Europe: What if she falls in love? On the trip, she meets a group of other lucky Tuscany Grove managers, including the nosy Deb (Molly Shannon), the arrogant Fran (Tim Heidecker), and the friendly Dana (Zach Woods). Most notably, she’s introduced to Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), the chain’s wealthy, handsome owner. Nick immediately takes a liking to Amber ...
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Is as Funny, Charming, and Occasionally Awkward as Its Heroine: Review
The Pitch: What if there was a lady… who was also a Hulk? And also a lawyer? Yeah, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law pretty much tells you exactly what the show is from the start. Quite literally, in fact: The newest Marvel series to come down the Disney+ pipeline features newly minted meta-human Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) speaking directly to the audience about how her life recently got upended by an accidental exposure to her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo)’s blood. Because Jen and Bruce are related, Jen’s able to survive the sudden infusion of gamma particles into her system, and she also manages to get a handle on being a Hulk with a working human brain relatively quickly. But while she’s learning control over her new persona (with the advantages and disadvantages that accompany it)...
Echo & The Bunnymen’s 40th Anniversary Tour Off to a Rough Start Due to Ian McCulloch Illness: Review
Echo and the Bunnymen have embarked on a long-awaited tour in celebration of their 40th anniversary, though things were off to a rocky start at Atlanta’s Tabernacle concert hall on Monday night (August 15th). Dubbed “Celebrating 40 Years of Magical Songs,” the tour (grab tickets here) kickoff saw both longtime and Gen Z-aged fans rubbing shoulders with each other like friends, with everyone seeming to be in agreement that the Liverpool act won’t be on the road forever. Save for a few festival sets, the Atlanta gig marked the band’s first outing since a UK tour in March, and anticipation Stateside has been high. Unfortunately, vocalist Ian McCulloch was under the weather, as the band confirmed on social media after the set. At one point, McCulloch left the stage for about 20 minutes, while ...
The Undeclared War Is a Prescient But Ponderous Cyberthriller: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2024, and a post-Brexit Great Britain faces a general election beset on all sides with misinformation, anti-government grievance, and stark division on all sides. What’s more, a foreign cyberattack hits the country’s Internet access, hitting everything except social media. Luckily, it hits the same day 21-year-old student Saara Parvan (newcomer Hannah Khalique-Brown) starts her work placement stint at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s first defense against cyberterrorism. She quickly figures out how to disable it, and even finds a second exploit that would have further crippled England’s infrastructure. It’s a hollow victory, though, as the young Muslim woman struggles to fit into the “tediously male, stale, and pale” organization even after her im...
Megan Thee Stallion’s Traumazine Is a Kaleidoscope of Pain and Gain
Do not let the title of Megan Thee Stallion’s sophomore album, Traumazine, fool you — she is stronger than ever, even as she processes her pain through vulnerability. Honesty is at the heart of working through any kind of trauma, and Megan has decided to let us into her process. Meg comes out swinging with “NDA,” finding pockets within pockets of the beat — one of her greatest assets as a rapper. “I ain’t perfect, but anything I did to any of you n****s, y’all deserved it/ You see me in that mode, don’t disturb me when I’m workin’,” she declares. She’s focused over the entire 51 minutes of the project, zeroing in on the intensity that pulsed beneath the surface of her earlier mixtapes Tina Snow and Fever. Traumazine (released Friday, August 12th) is absent of obvious club bangers, which wi...
Better Call Saul Series Finale Review: This Is How They Get You
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the series finale of Better Call Saul, “Saul Gone.”] Sometimes you hit play on an episode of television and see the runtime and groan to yourself, “This did not need to be longer than an hour.” But with the Better Call Saul series finale, coming in at a cool 70-plus minutes (per AMC+, anyway), every extra second of goodbye was quite welcome. After Gene Takovic (Bob Odenkirk)’s unsuccessful attempt to flee the law, as summoned by that nice old lady Marion (Carol Burnett), the identity of Gene is shed forever (following one last diligent phone call to Krista at Cinnabon). Instead, Saul Goodman suits up (eventually literally), using his formidable weaseling abilities to weasel out of “life plus 190 years” for the many, many crimes he com...
