October Movies Part 5: Wildwood & Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother

In this movie-packed month I have managed to get in two more viewings before month end. Two very different films, with something for everyone. Let's get into it.

Wildwood: Directed by Travis Knight and written by Chris Butler, who adapted Colin Melloy and Carson Ellis's 2011 YA novel, this movie is from Laika, the studio famed for their stop-motion animation. This is the longest stop-motion animated movie ever created, and boy will you be mesmerized by it. There is so much beauty in this film, and you'll be flabbergasted that this whole thing was created so meticulously and painstakingly. It's a piece of art from start to finish.

But, let's get to plot. Set in Portland, the story centers around Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teenage girl who has been tasked to take care of her baby brother, Mac, while her hippie parents are off at a craft fair. They've told her not to leave the house, but of course, she knows better and takes him out on a jaunt through Portland where they run into Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), a nerdy boy she knows from school. Then a murder of crows appears and steals her brother. She and Curtis chase them into the Impassable Wilderness, a forest at the edge of town that everyone knows not to enter. But Prue is of course going to find a way in to rescue her brother, and Curtis follows. Which leads to a dangerous magical adventure as they enter an enchanted realm with talking animals, a mysterious Dowager Governess named Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), and lots of warring factions. 

There's a lot more plot, and let's be clear, it's all very dark. Do not take a young child to this movie, it's rated PG-13 for a reason. It will keep you engaged, but it can also be a bit wearing, and there were definitely multiple extended chase sequences in this movie that felt like they existed so the filmmakers could show you how hard they had worked on their stop-motion skills. If you love animation, this is the movie for you. But if you don't care that much about artistry, you might find yourself getting a bit fidgety in spots. I enjoyed this film, but my biggest takeaway from it was that I would never have the patience to be a stop-motion animator. And also, I'm never moving to Portland.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother: Written and directed by Bassam Tariq, this is a unique film about a Muslim hitman, Latif (Mahershala Ali), who is having a difficult time. His wife has just died, leaving him the single parent of their three children, one of whom is a baby who is allergic to formula, which means Latif is constantly having to figure out how to get a steady supply of breastmilk. In the meantime, his boss, Mike (Laith Nakli) needs him to carry out a hit on a Christian vigilante named Hwan Yoon (John Cho) who is targeting Mike's nephew, Hatty (Abubakr Ali) because Hatty runs a "halal" porn studio.

Yes, there's a lot going on, and this movie can be deeply overwhelming from Latif's point of view, particularly as there's a crying baby in the background most of the time. His eldest daughter, Fatiha (Adia, who delivers a really moving performance and might be the standout of this film), in the vein of all eldest daughters, is helping out a lot, but there's only so much she can do, and she's also a teenager who's trying to cope with her own shit. After all, her mother just died. And his young son, Qadir (Jahleel Kamara) is a good Muslim boy who is trying to follow all the tenets he's been taught, despite the fact that his father and sister seem to have stopped praying and may have lost their faith in the wake of all the upheaval this family is going through.

This movie is really sublime when it's dealing with Black Muslim identity. The local imam of their mosque is played by Giancarlo Esposito, and I wished this film would just be about the Muslim community rallying around Latif during his time of grief and him learning how to navigate single parenthood and find a more stable career. Unfortunately, Latif IS a hit man, so a lot of this film devolves into an action thriller with a ton of violence. I did not care for this. It's an intriguing script, the actors are all doing impeccable work, the cinematography is great, and the score is excellent, but...there's just something incoherent about the narrative. It's trying to be two movies at once instead of one seamless story, and you're going to prefer one or the other (unless you're my husband, who has declared this movie to be his favorite movie of the year!) You will definitely walk away from this film with some great quotes, but ultimately, this movie didn't fully stir my soul in the way I was hoping it would.

October Movies Part 4: You Can See Everything & Wicker

There are too many movies in theaters right now and I am watching them all. If you are planning a foray to the movies, here are my thoughts on two films people have been eagerly anticipating!

You Can See Everything: Directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, this is the documentary about how they were invited into disgraced inventor Elizabeth Holmes' house 34 days before she was due to go to prison to serve an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors in her company, Theranos. The first half of the movie consists of Fielder interviewing Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, while their two young children run around blissfully unaware of the sordid life they have in store for themselves. And this is where we get those memeable moments we all saw from the trailer, where Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes are having intense conversations with unblinking eye contact and talking around in circles. Fielder seems thoroughly perplexed as to why they even agreed to do this, and he is determined to figure out whether this woman is just incredibly naive or an incredible liar. Which leads to my favorite scene of the movie, where they all watch the Abbott & Costello "Who's on First" routine.

I had this movie completely spoiled for me, so don't read any further if you don't want to know about the second half. OK? You've been warned. This is when the actress Amanda Seyfried shows up and Fielder uses her to re-enact certain moments from before the documentary began, when he was still in negotiations with Holmes and Evans to begin filming. Nothing is more meta than watching Seyfried watch Holmes watch Seyfried playing her in The Dropout. It is clear that Seyfried is a girl's girl, because when she watches all of the footage that Fielder has compiled so far, she is horrified by what a terrible man Evans is and immediately says, "I want to break them up!" There are some more unpleasant altercations with Evans and overall, the movie makes it clear that this guy is an absolute nightmare of a human being. 

Does this movie need to be three hours long? Absolutely not. It's extremely self-indulgent and a bit of a slog until Seyfried shows up to make it truly surprising and novel. But this movie also has no answers to provide and just adds on to the endless speculation and weirdness that swirls around this unfathomable woman and her terrible husband. The movie itself is so stylized, with sumptuous cinematography that oftentimes made me even forget I was watching real people - Holmes and Evans can feel like they're just actors, and everyone's working off the world's most incomprehensible script. It's an absolutely unique and mindboggling cinematic experience, but only one that I would recommend to people who really love cinema or are very obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes.

Wicker: The minute the trailer for this movie was released, the straight women of the world collectively clamored to see it ASAP. I mean, Alexander Skarsgard as a man made of wicker who is going to rail Olivia Colman? I'm sold! Written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, based on a short story by Ursula Willis, this movie is funny and gorgeous but is not just wicker porn. Which is a little disappointing. Foolishly, I wasn't expecting an actual plot.

The film takes place in a backward ye olde English village where women are expected to marry and birth babies and obey their husbands. Colman is the local Fisherwoman, a lonely, orphaned lady who always smells of fish and is a source of ridicule. Fed up and a little sad, she goes to the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) and asks him to make her a husband. He is surprised by the request but rises to the challenge, and in a month's time, she is married to a man made of wicker (Skarsgard). The marriage is very happy because not only is her husband a great lover, he also wants to make her happy by doing chores around the house and making sure everything is neat and tidy. She works, while he tends to the house, and the patriarchal villagers are all appalled by these goings-on, but also secretly curious at this new way of living. 

Elizabeth Debicki plays the Doctor's Daughter/Tailor's Wife who is the Fisherwoman's main antagonist. I won't ruin the rest of the film, but suffice to say, once we stop focusing on the Fisherwoman's love life, there's a lot of plot to get through about these terrible villagers who are jealous of her good fortune and the uproar that she generally causes among the wives because she's getting some good lovin' while they are not. The husbands are also annoyed that the Wicker Husband is showing them up, and this quickly devolves into a movie about gender politics and how women deserve to be treated. The movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at, and it had better be in the running for a Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar because Skarsgard's wicker presence is utterly beguiling. I'm not sure that I particularly cared about the plot though, as it was fairly simplistic. But if you're in the market for a very funny and unusual romance, that features wonderful leading performances and then a supporting cast of actors you may recognize from a slew of British shows, this is a great way to spend two hours at the movies!

October Binges: Lanterns, Sterling Point, East of Eden

Some days you want to watch a dark superhero show set in rural Nebraska, other days you want a twisty teen summer drama set in Canada, and then other days you want a literary Steinbeck adaptation set in early 1900s California. Depending on which of those days you're having, I've got a recommendation for you.

Lanterns: Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, this is a show about the Green Lantern but it's also a murder mystery so get ready for some True Detective-esque hi-jinks. Aaron Pierre stars as John Stewart (a name that will never not immediately make me think of the Daily Show), a man who has spent his entire life in training to be selected as the next Green Lantern after his father initially failed the test posed by the Guardians (the galactic group that picks the Lantern). When his father failed the test, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) was selected instead, and he has been parading around Earth and space as a superhero ever since. But now, John is officially Hal's trainee as the next Lantern-in-waiting, a state of affairs that neither one of them is too pleased by.

This is a relatively short series of eight episodes, so I have already given away more plot than necessary. Let's just say that in the vein of most superhero and DC properties, there is a lot of lore that blew right over my head, and I didn't care for much of this show (though Episode 3 does offer particularly excellent commentary at race in America). However, I love both of the leads, and it also stars two actresses I adore: Kelly Macdonald as the Sheriff of the rural Nebraska town that may harbor some evil aliens and Poorna Jagannathan as the woman who is married to the richest man in town (played by Garret Dillahunt) and who proves to be a very sexy grandmother. The show is great to look at, and the actors are undeniably excellent, but do I care enough about the Green Lantern to be into this show? Sadly, no.

Sterling Point: Created by Megan Park, this is a soapy teen drama about a 17-year-old named Annie (Ella Rubin) who has lived a bougie life being raised in a Brooklyn brownstone alongside her twin brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo) by their single dad, Steven (Jay Duplass). Their mother died when they were young, and their father has forbidden any contact with their maternal grandfather, Gordon, but when Gordon dies and leaves the twins a house in Sterling Point, Canada, Annie decides to head on up there and explore the surroundings. Which is how she comes across a girl named Ramona (Amelie Hoeferle) who was Gordon's granddaughter. Which makes her Annie's sister?

The family relations are all very complicated and there are several teens on the island who are ready to complicate matters even further. While we have the central tension between Annie and Ramona, who start out as antagonists but then become fast friends, there's also a great deal of romance for both of them, even including the obligatory teen love triangle, where Annie finds herself torn between a rich boy she grew up with in New York who summers in Canada, and the local boy who enjoys scamming these rich tourists for a little extra money each summer. The setting is gorgeous, the characters all talk in very Gen Z fashion but have plenty of rizz, and the plot sizzles along, with cliffhanger after cliffhanger that will have you mashing the "Play Next Episode" button. There are new revelations all the way into the eighth episode and while everything does wrap up neatly, we are also set up for a Season 2 that promises to be delicious. If you need something mindless and thoroughly entertaining to binge, you can't do any worse than this!

East of Eden: Created by Zoe Kazan (whose grandfather directed the 1955 movie adaptation of this Steinbeck novel) this is a sprawling miniseries about Adam and Charles (Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist), two young men growing up on a farmhouse in the late 19th century under their demanding father's thumb, and what happens after Adam falls in love with a mysterious stranger, Cathy (Florence Pugh) who shows up bleeding at their door. There are only seven episodes and I had never read the novel, so I just let this story wash over me hour by hour, reveling in the excellent acting, cinematography, and production design. Pugh is unsurprisingly great at portraying Cathy, a literary heroine who is mostly known for being a villain, but this adaptation spends a lot of time giving her a robust backstory that explains the lot of women during this time period. Sure, Cathy is evil, but she has her reasons, you know?

Another standout to me was Hoon Lee as Lee, a Chinese servant that Adam hires when he moves to California. That character has so much depth over the course of the series, and similarly to Cathy, I suspect that character is not remotely as fleshed out in the novel. This is an outstanding miniseries that is bound to rack up a lot of awards. It manages to bring the past to life in a very vivid way and makes all of its characters feel real and multi-dimensional, instead of just being literary caricatures. There's no higher praise I can give to a movie or TV adaptation than to say it immediately made me want to read the book, but in this case, I strongly suspect I'm going to discover I prefer the show.

October Movies Part 3: Primetime & Sense and Sensibility

This weekend, my husband and I enjoyed a double feature designed to induce tonal whiplash. We enjoyed both movies but for very different reasons. Read on!

Primetime: Written by Ajon Singh and directed by Lance Oppenheim, this is a very dark, twisty, and weird movie that dramatizes the real-life events behind the show To Catch a Predator that aired from 2004-7. Robert Pattinson plays the show's host, Chris Hansen, an NBC journalist who is obsessed with his mission to conduct sting operations in partnership with a vigilante group called Perverted-Justice to catch child sex predators. A noble mission, to be sure, but as the movie develops, it becomes clear Hansen is a strange man who might be more obsessed with getting an Emmy for his work than actually doing some good.

This movie is shot in the style of To Catch a Predator, so there's a lot of grainy camera footage, and the visual storytelling by cinematographer David Bolen is incredibly stylized and compelling. The performances by Pattinson and Merrit Wever (who plays Andie Bender, a fictional composite of the show's producers) are incredible, both of them playing unhinged, ambitious people who are desperate for acclaim and to defeat Lost in the ratings. As the show keeps scaling up, they become increasingly chaotic and frenetic in their pursuit for greatness, and this movie will definitely stoke your anxiety. Skyler Gisondo is also fantastic as Daniel Plum, a young actor who is hired to play the decoy that lures the predators into houses for the show. His evolution is remarkable, starting out as a fresh-faced ingenue who desperately wants to earn his SAG card, and then eventually realizing that maybe the work he's doing on this show is not entirely ethical. 

This subject material has been covered by meticulously researched documentaries and articles, so a lot of people thought this movie felt a little pointless in its fictional portrayal of real-life events. But as a newcomer to this story, I was thoroughly engaged. This is such an A24 film, stylistically heightened and creepy, with actors who are absolutely chewing the scenery and having a whale of a time. It's such a morally icky and dubious tale, but man it makes for great cinema.

Sense and Sensibility: Adapted by Diana Reid and directed by Georgia Oakley, this is a sumptuous Austen adaptation that will probably be reviled by the book purists but is wonderful if you're just here to watch an entertaining movie. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles play the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, who adore each other but have very different temperaments, with Elinor being more restrained and reserved, while Marianne wears her heart on her sleeve. Like most Austen heroines, they are rendered penniless when their father dies and the estate they live on is entailed to their half-brother John and his odious wife Fanny (Tom Brooke and Stacy Martin). After some uncomfortable months where they all try to live together as one big happy family, Elinor, Marianne, their younger sister, Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and their mother (Caitriona Balfe) all move to a cottage rented out by a distant relative, Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw), who is an extremely well-meaning but terrifically intrusive woman.

As the movie progresses, both sisters fall in love, and many complications ensue with undeclared feelings and broken engagements, scandal and drama. My husband had no idea what was going to happen, so I can say this is a very entertaining adaptation that gives each sister a very robust love story. It's been a long time since I read the book, but I do remember feeling like the suitors were not that thrilling. This movie definitely ups the stakes though, and there's a scene towards the end that was very dramatic but thoroughly delightful. I do feel like the ballroom dance sequences were excessively sexy - everything has gotten entirely too Bridgertonised in our modern age and some of these dance moves involved far too much contact. But hey, you gotta roll with the times!

This movie does a wonderful job of keeping the sisters' relationship front and center. Yes, they are pining away for some men, but the true love story is between these two women, who are struggling to understand each other given their vastly different ways of existing in this world, but who desperately want each other to be happy. The cinematography by Arnaud Potier and score by Roger Goula are all excellent, the costumes are sumptuous, the locations highlight the best of the English countryside. This movie hits all the right notes, and I'm sure Jane would be proud. Even if she did feel some elements were too imbued with sensibility than sense.

October Movies Part 2: Forgotten Island, The Social Reckoning, The Love Hypothesis

I was on vacation for a few days so am trying to catch up on movies. Which is why I now present to you a real melange of reviews, ranging from gorgeous animation to biographical drama to steamy romcom. Let's get into it!

Forgotten Island: Written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, this is a very creative movie about two girls, Jo and Raissa (H.E.R. and Liza Soberano) in the Philippines who become best friends as children, grow into teenagers, and have one last adventure on the mythical island of Nakali where legendary creatures roam. Along the way, there will be themes of female friendship, found family, and discovering your purpose. All set to very bright and anime-esque animation, in a very unique setting, as everything takes place exclusively in the Philippines and draws extensively from Filipino folklore and mythology. As such, this should feel really unique and specific, right? Unfortunately, no.

The voice cast includes almost any Filipino actor who has become famous in Hollywood, but then we've also got folks like Dave Franco and Jenny Slate playing some of the creatures on the island because I guess fantastical beasts don't need to have a particular ethnicity. The two main characters are being voiced by Filipino-American actors, which sadly means that they have American accents, and according to my Filipino colleague, pronounce all the Filipino words with American accents, which was rather grating. It is very annoying to me when Hollywood Americanizes language like this - if your setting is the Philippines, why do your characters sound like they're from California? Oddly, the first 15 minutes of this movie, when the girls first meet, befriend each other, and grow up under the loving eye of Jo's grandmother (voiced by my girl Dolly de Leon), who is the one who tells them all the stories about Nakali, are the best part, when this genuinely feels like something you've never seen before. But once we get to the island, it just becomes a generic children's animated film, complete with weirdly cutesy characters that only seem to be there to encourage plushie sales. This movie is certainly trying to have a soul, but sadly, I don't think it fully succeeds.

The Social Reckoning: Speaking of soulless films, Aaron Sorkin is back as the writer-director of this movie where he explores how Wall Street Journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Alan White) cultivated a source at Facebook named Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) in 2019, who ultimately became a whistleblower and testified before the Senate in 2021 about all the harm Facebook was causing with its algorithm designed to promote inflammatory and harmful content. That storyline runs parallel to a January 2021 practice session where Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) was meeting with his PR team to go over his responses for an upcoming Senate testimony about whether or not Facebook fact-checks political ads. If you discover something revelatory in this movie, it would mean you were living under a rock, because there's no new information here. We're treading old ground in terms of what a bane Facebook is to society and the many ways in which it has become a dangerous and immoral company that prizes profits over any other ethical obligation.

This movie is meant to be a serious drama, but to me it felt like an insane comedy because it is such a Sorkin film. The dialogue, the acting, the condescending tone and casual misogyny...it's all so terrible that it makes you laugh. White and Madison are great actors, but they have clearly been told to deliver the lines the way Sorkin intended and don't bother imbuing their characters with any nuance. Their scenes honestly feel like two Sorkin avatars talking at each other rather than the two real-life human beings they are meant to be portraying. Jeremy Strong therefore seems to be the only one doing any real acting here, but he is playing a man who is famously devoid of personality, so there isn't much he can do either. In a weird way, this movie feels like Facebook itself, with Aaron Sorkin as the demanding Zuckerberg who no one can say No to, while all the actors are Facebook employees, just showing up to collect a paycheck and turn a blind eye to the terrible work they are producing. So maybe that makes this film so Meta it's actually good? Wait no, it does not.

The Love Hypothesis: Based on the 2021 novel by Ali Hazelwood, writer Sarah Rothschild and director Claire Scanlon are here to offer us a diverting and sexy romance that follows all the usual tropes and gives us a happy ending (or two). Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman star as Olive and Tom, a biology grad student and a surly postdoc at Stanford who have to pretend that they are dating for...reasons. We all know the fake dating trope, and so yes, you can expect them to initially hate this idea but go along with it for a noble cause, and then to reluctantly catch feelings and realize maybe the other person isn't quite so hateful after all.

This movie is thoroughly charming, the actors have solid chemistry, and the supporting cast are also very fun and lovely, with Rachel Marsh playing Olive's best friend, Ahn, and providing the all-important female friendship that is so crucial to ensuring our heroine is a well-rounded human being and not just a woman in need of a man. It's a tale as old as time, but it's clear that a woman directed it with a very female gaze, which makes it oh-so refreshing. I can think of no better way to spend an afternoon than to lightly lust after these two beautiful people and watch them fall in love. I'm not made of stone, people.

October Movies Part 1: Finding Emily, Practical Magic 2, The Testament of Ann Lee

Let's kick the month off with reviews of three exceedingly random movies. Sounds promising right?!

Finding Emily: Written by Rachel Hirons and directed by Alicia MacDonald, this is a cute little British romcom about what happens when a young man named Owen (Spike Fearn) meets a girl named Emily at a student union bar at the fictional Manchester City University, gets her number, tries to call her later, and discovers he didn't get her complete number. Distraught, he decides he's just going to look for women named Emily who go to the university, which is how he finds Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), an American student who is getting her psychology degree in the UK. She has been struggling to write her thesis about how love is a form of destructive madness, so it feels like Owen and his desperate quest to find his lady love has fallen right into her lap. She agrees to help him, so she can secretly study him and see how his life falls apart, thereby proving her hypothesis.

Obviously, hi-jinks ensue and the two of them devise increasingly creative ways to find the real Emily, some of which may violate data privacy laws and get Owen into a lot of trouble. No points for immediately knowing how this plot is going to go -- it is very predictable -- but like with any good romcom, the journey matters more than the destination. Both of the leads are very charming, and the movie is full of swoony British vibes. This is a cozy film that will appeal to Anglophiles and is ideal for a lazy weekend afternoon. Enjoy!

Practical Magic 2: I had never watched the 1998 film Practical Magic, despite being a huge Sandra Bullock fan. So, I watched that movie in preparation for this sequel and thought it was exceedingly weird but had its charms. Which is now exactly how I feel about the sequel. Bullock and Nicole Kidman (what a cast!) play Sally and Gillian Owens, two women who were raised by their aunts (Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing) in a beautiful house in Massachusetts. Their aunts are witches, and they teach the girls how to wield their magical powers as well. But due to the doomed romance of an ancestor, the Owens women are cursed - they can never love a man. If they fall in love, that man will tragically die. In the first film, Sally falls in love, gets married, has two daughters, and then her husband dies, leading her to renounce her magic and deny her identity until circumstances force her to engage with magic again to save her sister. In this movie, the plot is almost exactly the same, except that she now has to engage with magic again to save her daughter.

I am not going to get into much more detail. If you like the first movie, you'll like this sequel, but otherwise move right along. These movies are just so tonally weird and strange, but at the end of the day, you've got Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock being fiercely feminist and extolling the virtues of sisterhood over everything else, even romantic relationships (though Lee Pace does show up to inject a little bit of romance into the proceedings, because, come on. You can't have Sandy B. in a movie and not let her be a little romantic!) This movie is all over the place, but 28 years later, at least the special effects are better, and it has its moments when you can't help but smile. Give it a chance and experience the magic!

The Testament of Ann Lee: This movie came out last year, but it has taken me this long to finally summon it on streaming and give it a go. Directed by Mona Fastvold who co-wrote the screenplay with Brady Corbet, I was hoping this would be a Brutalist-esque vibey epic about a real-life woman I had never heard about but would be thoroughly compelled by. While Amanda Seyfried cannot help but compel you with her enormous eyes and charisma, I found this movie to be a slog.

Seyfried plays the titular Ann Lee, a woman in 1730s Manchester who was persecuted in the UK for founding the Shaker movement and subsequently moved to America to preach and create a religious community. Of course, she was also persecuted there and deemed to be a witch, because that's how we always deal with charismatic women who command a following. The script really plods along, but this is also a musical for some odd reason, which means that I couldn't help but feel like we were getting a religious Mamma Mia every time Seyfried started singing. Perhaps if I was in a theater for two hours, I would allow myself to be swept along in this story and give myself over to the religious ecstasy, but this is emphatically not a movie that works on streaming unless you are very disciplined and forego all other distractions. Much like Ann Lee herself. Am I a heathen for preferring Practical Magic 2 to this critically acclaimed film? Yes. Just burn me at the stake.

September Binges: Legends and Tommy & Tuppence

As September winds down, do you find yourself curled up on the couch seeking tales of British crime? Well, I've got you covered with a true story and an Agatha Christie adaptation (of sorts). What more could you want!

Legends: Created by Neil Forsyth, this six-part miniseries tells the true story of how a small team of British customs employees (played by Tom Burke, Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen, and Jasmine Blackborrow) were tasked with bringing down a heroin smuggling ring that was plaguing Britain in 1990. Lacking any prior undercover experience, they applied for the job and under the command of Don Clarke (Steve Coogan), they are taught the basics of undercover work, given new identities, aka "legends," and set out on a very dangerous mission. These people are all seeking something different from their mundane jobs, but all for very different reasons, and what initially feels like a bit of a thrill starts to evolve into something far more dangerous. They might have bitten off more than they can chew, but our heroes are going to get the job done, right?

While the series is definitely a bit of a hagiography, it is still wildly tense and entertaining. All of the actors are doing wonderful work, and it's always great to see Steve Coogan in a dramatic role, playing a hard-bitten and world-weary man who still has that characteristic dark humor underlying it all. This is the perfect kind of thriller for a rainy afternoon, eminently bingeable and satisfying, and it tells a very unique and compelling story. Plus, it's just one miniseries, so you get sucked in for six hours and then never have to worry about Season 2. Isn't that the dream?

Tommy & Tuppence: I have been a massive Agatha Christie fan since childhood and the five books she wrote featuring the (eventually) married detectives of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are very charming and fun. So creator Phoebe Eclair-Powell has decided to create a contemporary adaptation starring Josh Dylan and Antonia Thomas as the titular detectives. In this first season, they are presented as exes who decide to start a detective agency together after they spend the first two episodes solving a murder. It's a six-episode season, so you'll get two more mysteries that they need to solve, alongside their own personal will-they won't-they drama that arcs over the whole series.

Is this a very charming show? Yes. Does it have little to nothing to do with the original books? Also yes. Apart from the names of Tommy and Tuppence, everything is so updated for the modern era that I find it hard to understand why we even need to call this a Christie adaptation. Perhaps if I re-read the original books, I would spot lots of Easter eggs and could take delight in that, but otherwise, this is a perfectly frothy and serviceable mystery show with two engaging leads. There are a lot of romantic complications, so I do think I'll keep watching Season 2 to see how all of that gets resolved, but this is more of a "binge for distraction" show, not one that fully demands your attention.