The story’s center isn’t strong enough for the rest of its disparate parts to hold.
Despite its timely trappings, the sci-fi series works best as an empty-calorie thriller.
The series suggests that winning hearts and minds is a naïve pipe dream, a strategy more fit for TV than for electoral politics.
The show’s fundamental goal isn’t to present love that’s unique to the current moment, but to expose the universality of its stories.
The film simplifies Winston Churchill’s legacy for the dubious purposes of narrative momentum and emotional lift.
The film devotes too much time delivering information to establish a convincing visual foundation for its account.
The film is a redundant showcase for Seth MacFarlane’s racy, dick-centric sense of humor.
Last night’s episode of Mad Men is all about life as a series of entrances and exits.
The dark truth at the center of the episode is that business is always personal.
Before one can start new business, one must settle old business.
Bookended by Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” the episode opens with a telling bit of trickery.
Matthew Weiner and company make a point of echoing Cutler’s flippantly opportunistic nature twice over before the episode concludes.
Throughout, it becomes difficult to know whether we’re meant to empathize with these characters or laugh at them.
The first episode since “Time Zones” where the narrative constantly felt busy with story rather than depending on symbolic acts and pauses.
Showrunner Matthew Weiner and company crafted an episode riddled with allusions to business as a love affair.
The purgatorial mood that Matthew Weiner and his crew conjure here sets the stage for Don and company’s final season-long cocktail hour.
Mad Men’s meandering, beguiling sixth season arrives on home video looking and sounding better than ever.
It’s knitted together by its sense of place and lived-in performances, yet unraveled by anemic false melodrama and overbearing music.
Even the historical events in Mad Men are part of its empty surrealism.
This season’s journey toward the final act of Mad Men’s American epic promises to be its most challenging and rewarding.