Eli Cash – Google

I liked the premise, the film itself is probably 3 stars but I've elevated the score for the incredible performance of Alexander Skarsgård. This film was amazingly well-cast, Jesse Eisenberg and Salma Hayek are brilliant as they always are, but it's such a powerhouse showing from Skarsgård that he just steals every scene he's in. Given how strangely dispassionately this film treats its subject and main characters, this is a good thing. Scorsese would have had a lot of fun with this movie, in the hands of Kim Nguyen it all falls a little flat. Still worth a watch.

A solid 3 stars from me. As you would expect this is an anthology, tied together by a single thread. The individual parts of the whole aren't that great, but the thread that ties them all together is pretty clever and makes the whole thing worthwhile. 30 years ago this was a TV movie, but in the Netflix age it's a standalone film in it's own right; but at its heart it is very much a TV movie and it should be viewed and enjoyed as such. A very solid and enjoyable 3 stars, well worth a watch.

Really well written series, part police procedural, part sci-fi drama with a strong vein of satire running through it. The writers set themselves a Herculean task of writing characters from four different time periods and melding them into a coherent comedy-drama, but their efforts were more than up to the task. The one drawback I can think to mention is that at an hour long (43 without adverts) the episodes felt a little long. Hopefully that's something they can address in a new series by working on their pacing to keep up audience engagement. Will definitely be watching if (hopefully when) there is a news series. Season 1 has done a fantastic job of setting the scene, we really need to see where this goes as it has so much potential and many unanswered questions.

Three stars doesn't accurately represent this movie. It's more of a four-star / two-star review. The four stars go to the excellent leads, the intriguing set-up / mystery elements and the unsettling, surreal horror that the film effectively invokes. The two star elements are mainly down to the plot development, insofar as there isn't really much of it, certainly not enough to be satisfying. I loved some of the imagery, felt stifled by the claustrophobic atmosphere just as I was supposed to, but just felt very 'meh' about the payoff. Without getting into spoilers, it's not difficult to figure out the nihilistic message of this film, but it doesn't really offer any insight into these themes it explores. It simply presents them as something horrific and that's that. I wanted more.