André Øvredal’s film is largely devoid of any palpable atmosphere or tension.
The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.
As David Benioff and D.B. Weiss show with this masterful rebuttal of an episode, it’s never too late to choose a different narrative.
The episode gives the audience exactly what it expects, and absolutely nothing else.
The episode is, above all else, a resolute detailing of the final calm before a spectacular storm and what it means to be human.
Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing us to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.
Three episodes into this truncated seventh season and Game of Thrones is spiraling toward a preordained place.
The episode manages to set up future conflicts without interrupting its rapid pace.
Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
Death is momentarily thrilling, but the struggles of those who live on are what sustain the series.
The power of the latest episode of Game of Thrones is that it leaves nothing to abstraction.
When Game of Thrones leans on its history, it takes on a resonance rarely found in fantasy.
Many of the events in Game of Thrones are developing so quickly that plot, by necessity, substitutes for development.
The episode sees the writers ruthlessly beginning to sew up loose (or underdeveloped) plots.
Neil Marshall’s debut film is a competently mounted cult item with terrific werewolves and anonymous workmanlike action sequences.
It’s long been a given on Game of Thrones that “All men must die.” The question, then, is less a matter of whether they will, but how they will.
As you’d expect from a series with such a dismal track record of successful weddings, its idea of presents isn’t much better, and even the most sincere, like Sam’s, comes with a disclaimer.
The problem these men face is that there are plenty of boys who find themselves in positions of power, and that’s not even mentioning King Tommen in King’s Landing.
There’s plenty of death in the fifth season of Game of Thrones, and those deaths are understood as cautionary symbols of power.
The unifying element of “The Laws of God and Men” may be the profound silence of the show’s architecture.