James Campbell

In what could have made for an engaging psychological spy thriller, this series really squanders its potential. It's a messy, drawn-out melodrama of implausible scenarios cluttered up by too many minor characters, with the main reels focused on protagonists who seem foolish, arrogant, careless, and just not genuine. If we can absolve some of the mechanical issues by way of blaming sloppy direction or editing, such as Elisabeth Moss's woefully inconsistent British accent, there's no getting around the bad storytelling. We just don't know what we're looking at from one scene to the next, and no character is given a chance of winning our empathy. We really don't know who's good or bad, and by the end, we just don't care. If I had anything to say to the creators of "The Veil," I would remind them of the importance of figuring out what you want before you start filming. The script uses Le Carré's "tortured spy" template like a paint-by-numbers set and blows it even worse by sprinkling in cartoonish action sequences. The viewer Is left to feel nothing but lost. We get several scenes of brooding self-reflection that just don't have enough context to be meaningful, and are then subjected to copy-pasted fight scenes that just leave us baffled. How can we trust a hero to be psychologically sophisticated when she walks casually away from the bodies of three armed thugs she killed with an iron pole on a busy city sidewalk? "The Veil" doesn't give us any reason to side with anyone, or to believe anything, or to feel any real tension, or even to keep track of which episode we last watched, because they all just blend together. With its big budget and big names, "The Veil" could have been so much more than how it ended up - another piece of streaming nonsense.

Not everyone will agree, but I found "Poor Things brilliant and hilarious. It's a retelling of the Frankenstein trope in a cinematic theater of the absurd. Every performance was outlandishly marvelous, and no corners were cut in the production. This movie seems destined to becone a cult classic, but it deserves to go further. You might call its deeper meaning comparable what came from the far more popular Barbie movie, but this takes it to a completely new level. My only criticism, if you can even call it that, was that it was a bit too long. I never tired of the relentless gags and its crazily upside down situations, but I can see it testing people who didn't lock in as well as I did. "Poor Things" is not for everybody, and for you parents out there, it certainly isn't for young kids. As far as my experience goes, you can see that I just loved this one. I hope you do, too.

You know that spooky feeling you get when someone mentions a scene in a show you just watched, but you don't remember it at all because you were too busy playing with your phone at the time? Then it makes you get a little jealous of your friend because they know how to put down a phone when they watch something, and you don't? That won't happen with this show. You can look at your phone as much as you want, and still get it all. In fact, you will be ahead of your friend, because at least your phone kept you awake.

On one hand, you can see this horror fable as a cross between 'Alien' and 'ET' and just let it fall there. That would be the main problem this movie has, if any - it's just familiar as it unfolds and that can make you feel disconnected. But you're doing it an injustice if you don't keep with it, because it's also a deeper exploration into how much an institutional and bureaucratic mindset ruins any chance of goodness emerging from science. Nuclear technology in Soviet Russia was a monster powered by fear that thrived in darkness. Here it is again, just now clearly revealing of how human life is the inevitable price. Just as it was taught in HBO's Chernobyl series, the only hope in overcoming this institutional evil is the individual's courageous adherence to justice through honesty.