Dylan Roth Dec 30, 2021. 8 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 7 “…But to Connect” Review
Star Trek: Discovery’s fourth season began with great promise, and after a few rough weeks it now feels like the show is back at full speed. “…But to Connect” is one of the strongest episodes of Discovery to date, conjoining a classic Trek “message” plot with some tense character drama…
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TV/FILM
Dylan Roth Dec 23, 2021. 7 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 6 “Stormy Weather”
All season, the producers of Discovery have seemingly tried to incorporate more classic Star Trek flavor into the new show’s recipe. The results have been mixed, as Discovery’s format of juggling self-contained stories alongside chapters from ongoing arcs hasn’t always allowed for the old school “dilemmas of the week” to…
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TV/FILM
Dylan Roth Dec 21, 2021. 5 minute read
“Mother/Android” Review: The Apocalypse is a Real Downer
Earlier this year, I happened across Little Fish, an indie sci-fi romance that I now count as one of my favorite films of 2021. Little Fish follows a couple, deeply in love, struggling to maintain their relationship in the face of a slow-burning viral apocalypse. When I learned that Mattson…
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TV/FILM
Dylan Roth Dec 17, 2021. 8 minute read
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” Review: Greatest Hits
The Spider-Man film franchise has the dubious distinction of having been rebooted twice in the space of a decade. The first Spider-Man trilogy, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire, launched in 2002 and defined the superhero film genre for a generation. The hasty 2012 Amazing Spider-Man relaunch led…
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TV/FILM
Dylan Roth Dec 16, 2021. 7 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 5 Review: “The Examples”
For the past few weeks on Star Trek: Discovery, the storytellers have struggled to deliver self-contained adventures while still dedicating time to advancing the season’s ongoing character arcs and mystery plot. There’s still not quite as much meat on the bone as I’d like, but “The Examples” succeeds where the…
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TV/FILM
Dylan Roth Dec 14, 2021. 8 minute read
‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Death From Above
In 2017, two years after stepping down as showrunner of the HBO comedy Veep, veteran political satirist Armando Iannucci spoke about his career to a panel at the Sydney Writers Festival. The conversation soon turned to the White House, both the useless West Wing-obsessed Obama Democrats and the newly-installed mad…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Dec 9, 2021. 8 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 4 Review: “All is Possible”
In a previous episode review, I praised Discovery for having found a balance between its own identity as a fast-paced, emotionally-charged adventure show and the themes and superficial trappings of a more traditional Star Trek series. This week, however, Discovery’s growing resemblance to Treks past works against it. “All is…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Dec 2, 2021. 8 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 3 Review: “Choose to Live”
The first two chapters of Star Trek: Discovery season four introduced us to this year’s ongoing mystery plot, centered around a devastating gravitational anomaly that is roaming the galaxy and swallowing entire planets whole. This week’s new episode, “Choose to Live,” is the first to relegate the big mystery to the…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Nov 29, 2021. 6 minute read
The Mass Effect TV Series Won’t Star Your Shepard, and That’s Fine
Just before Thanksgiving, Deadline broke the news that Amazon Studios is in negotiations to adapt BioWare’s beloved sci-fi video game series Mass Effect for television. While no further details have emerged about the project, the announcement alone has stirred up some trepidation among fans. Like its sister series Dragon Age,…
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FEATURES
Dylan Roth Nov 25, 2021. 7 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 2 Review: “Anomaly”
Three years ago, the mark against Discovery was that it “wasn’t really Star Trek.” Granted, every new series since The Next Generation was met with a similar fan response at first, but Discovery did start a bit farther afield than any of its predecessors. While watching this week’s new episode,…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Nov 19, 2021. 7 minute read
‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ Review: This Does Not Make Me Feel Good
It’s hard for any viewer to walk into a movie theater without some degree of prejudice about what they’re about to see. That’s part of what movie marketing is for, after all, to create a set of expectations. As a film critic, I try to mitigate that prejudice as best…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Nov 18, 2021. 9 minute read
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 1 Review: “Kobayashi Maru”
When Star Trek: Discovery debuted in 2017, it was a dark, violent prequel series with a serious case of Game of Thrones envy. The show has been reshaped and retooled over three seasons, shedding its original tone and setting in favor of a far-flung, optimistic future centuries beyond the rest…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Nov 10, 2021. 4 minute read
‘Finch’ Review: Bot Baby
It’s been over twenty years since Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis pulled off the massive flex that was Cast Away, a film in which Hanks spends an hour alone on a beach acting against a blood-stained volleyball. Finch, the new post-apocalyptic road movie streaming now on Apple TV+, offers…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Nov 6, 2021. 7 minute read
‘Eternals’ Review: The Ride Never Ends
From the moment it was announced that celebrated independent filmmaker Chloé Zhao (now the Academy’s reigning Best Director) was attached to direct a Marvel movie, fans have known that they were in for a weird one. How would such a naturalistic, humanist cinematic voice blend with that of a computer-polished,…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Nov 2, 2021. 7 minute read
‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ First Look: Trekking Hard or Hardly Trekking?
Since the franchise was relaunched on streaming television in 2017 with Star Trek: Discovery, CBSViacom has sought to expand Star Trek into a four-quadrant brand, something it hasn’t been since the mid-1990s, if ever. Rather than try to mold a single product to satisfy all audiences, producer Alex Kurtzman has…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Oct 29, 2021. 6 minute read
‘Last Night in Soho’ Review: We Have to Go Back
Edgar Wright is a writer-director with a distinctive personal stamp, recognizable for his persistent use of popular music, his meticulous plotting and payoff, and for underlining comedy with cutting and camera movement. He’s one of the most deliberate popular filmmakers around — his films are fun and approachable, but they’re…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Oct 22, 2021. 7 minute read
‘Dune’ Review: Dune Two! Dune Two!
We’re in the midst of a boom period for sci-fi on the small screen. Nearly every streaming service has its own space opera spectacle with production values that rival major motion pictures. Between Foundation, The Expanse, The Mandalorian, and a never-ending parade of Star Trek shows, there’s been little need…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Oct 18, 2021. 5 minute read
‘Hard Luck Love Song’ Review: An Authentic and Unglamorous Portrait
I tend to have a hard time with movies about pop musicians. Having grown up in a record store and been a performing songwriter for most of my life, I find that movies about music culture have a tendency to inflate its glamor and mystique, and that has a recursive…
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TV/FILM
Dylan Roth Oct 11, 2021. 8 minute read
Heels Episode 8 “Double Turn” Recap & Review
When Heels first began, I praised its first episode for delivering “the best parts of wrestling that aren’t wrestling — the soap opera, the family strife, the backstage squabbles — with a level of accuracy that is simplified for the uninitiated but not totally insulting to the smart marks in…
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REVIEWS
Dylan Roth Oct 8, 2021. 6 minute read
‘No Time to Die’ Review: One Last Ride
Actors who take on the role of secret agent James Bond rarely get to go out on a high note. Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Pierce Brosnan’s final Bond films (Diamonds are Forever, A View to a Kill, and Die Another Day, respectively) each number among the worst in the…
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REVIEWS