Alexander Payne’s film is subtly attuned to the way that class constricts people’s lives.
The film threads classic horror tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.
Scene after scene transpires as a discussion about togetherness—as eternal ideal and currency.
The Americans is the rolling stone that gathers no moss.
Throughout its runtime, the episode remarkably threads together the impressions of shared torment.
The episode is unique in the canon of the series for the sterling self-reflexivity of its sense of humor.
The series proves once again that action need not be explosive to be effective.
The episode frames its constituent parts as opposing forces, but in the end each element contributes to a coherent, if half-hidden, whole.
The episode reexamines the distinctions we draw between offense and defense, between the necessary evil and the greater good.
The Americans Recap: Season 4, Episode 8, “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears”
The notion that one can simply pick up the pieces and move on is the season’s central illusion.
The episode establishes the rifts in the show’s key relationships through a series of skillful compositions.
If the episode can be said to have a central thrust, it’s an interest in bruising the characters’ convictions through a series of unexpected developments.
The Americans is as full of formal coups as any of its more flashy brethren.
Indeed, it’s another faintly electronic rhythm, this one a music cue, that sends this dazzling season of The Americans hurtling toward its conclusion.
Trust, you might say, is simply the time we spend waiting for the other shoe to drop, and in The Americans, it always does.
The second half of “Born Again” features a number of tautly composed images that jostle against each other as if conflicting emotions.
Professionals in the art of reading people are most vulnerable to misapprehension when their judgment is clouded by the personal.
The thumbprint of Alan Ayckbourn seems firmly impressed into the pages of playwright Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now?