Cocaine Bear suggests a feature-length expansion of an SNL digital short.
Alan Ball quickly loses sight of the sense of power that fuels the film’s early moments when his characters basically just gaze at each other.
The series suggests that winning hearts and minds is a naïve pipe dream, a strategy more fit for TV than for electoral politics.
The film never veers into wink-wink self-consciousness that its opening might have suggested.
The film never meaningfully reckons with the complexity of the characters’ motivations and the consequences of their actions.
Payne’s defenders might call his often acidic touch Swiftian, though it comes off more toothlessly noncommittal.
Scene after scene transpires as a discussion about togetherness—as eternal ideal and currency.
The Americans is the rolling stone that gathers no moss.
Maybe the ultimate project of The Americans is to recognize its characters’ collective disillusionment.
Throughout its runtime, the episode remarkably threads together the impressions of shared torment.
Another week, another episode of The Americans that’s notable for its pervasive lack of hurry.
The latest episode of The Americans is practically a treatise on the psychodynamic theory of guilt.
The episode thrillingly and daringly comes close to completely pressing down on the reset button.
Craig Johnson’s film lurches from poignant melancholy to cartoonish slapstick, unable to settle on a consistent tone.
“Amber Waves” is an immediate reminder that The Americans is an edifice brilliantly constructed of contrasts.
The film’s ruefully honest tone is periodically drowned out by the blare of stagey coincidences.
The notion that one can simply pick up the pieces and move on is the season’s central illusion.
Indeed, it’s another faintly electronic rhythm, this one a music cue, that sends this dazzling season of The Americans hurtling toward its conclusion.
Throughout The Americans, there’s an ever-present sense of an unwieldy narrative arc being perpetually built up, which has become a noticeable trend in primetime television.
Heaven Is for Real is by Christians, for Christians, and deliberately, if subtly, antagonistic toward everyone else.