What I'm Watching: May December, Dream Scenario, Doctor Who, and More

Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, May December, Netflix

Hi all! Here’s a not-so-quick rundown of everything I’ve watched, read, and wrote about in the past two weeks.

The shows:

• A Small Light was one of my final year-end catch-up shows for work, and I really did save one of the best for last. This series was made by National Geographic for some reason, but you can find it on Hulu and Disney+. It’s about World War II, which I usually can’t watch shows about without feeling overwhelmingly hopeless, but A Small Light makes its focus (on Miep Gies, a fiery and funny woman who hid Anne Frank and others) specific enough to feel much more vibrant and vital than most wartime stories. Bel Powley is amazing!
• Somebody Somewhere on HBO is a gem. It’s a slight but sturdy show about everyday moments in a Kansas town as seen through the eyes of a woman whose sister recently died and her gay best friend. Frank and funny with a surprising emotional punch.
• I know I’ve said this several times before over the years, but I might finally be in my Doctor Who era. I caught up on all three of the David Tennant-led specials yesterday and had a blast with them – especially “The Star Beast,” which made me cry all over the place. I’m still the type of casual watcher who has a hard time adapting to Who’s loose relationship with logic, but I love Tennant, love Ncuti Gatwa, and love Russell T. Davies, so I think I’m in it for the long haul now.
• Prime Video’s action show Reacher is not my typical cup of tea, but I’ve had a great time checking it out for work these past few weeks. Lee Childs’ knight-errant style hero is so much weirder and less cliched than any of his ass-kicking military man contemporaries, and the show has a streak of self-aware humor that I dig. Keep an eye out for my season 2 review soon.
• I watched the Apple TV+ docuseries Lennon: Murder Without A Trial months ago but since the embargo has passed, I can finally talk about it: it is sad.
• Speaking of docuseries, when I was sick I put on Netflix’s Murder Mountain mostly at random to pass the time and it was pretty bad, but in an engrossing way. The show is about murders taking place in the wild west of weed-growing Northern California, and it features the most ragtag bunch of interviewees – most of whom seem to be unable to retell this story without implicating themselves – I’ve ever seen. It’s also extremely redundant and far too long, but like I said, I just couldn’t stop watching for some reason.

The movies:

• Todd Haynes’ May December, which is now on Netflix, is an award season contender and one of my favorite films of the year. If you've ever read my reviews of The Tale or A Teacher, you'll know I'm especially sensitive to movies about these topics for unfortunately personal reasons, but I'm relieved to say that I loved May December. It’s a tremendously clever exercise in looking askance at something that's too big to face, and all three lead actors – especially Charles Melton – are incredible.
• The Killer (also on Netflix) might be one of David Fincher’s more thematically thin movies, but I found the two-hour dive into the life of a wildly overconfident assassin to be darkly hilarious and totally worth my time. It’s not peak Fincher, but it’s Fincher having fun, and I like that.
• Dream Scenario, the trippy new movie in which everyone starts dreaming about Nicholas Cage, has one of the most interesting premises I’ve come across in years. As someone who is not really interested in self-important middle aged academic men movies (this really is a whole genre), I can’t say I was incredibly enthralled by the execution of this plot, but the details of the movie are so memorable that I liked it overall.
• I wasn’t super impressed with Anatomy of A Fall when I watched it about a week ago, but the French crime movie has already grown on me a bit since (though I’m still not sure it has the depth needed to carry this award season). If you like tense courtroom dramas, this one, which borrows elements from the true story behind The Staircase, might be your type of barn burner.
• I expected to love Fair Play, the Netflix thriller about a couple whose relationship fractures dangerously when one gets a raise at their cutthroat job and the other doesn’t. I really liked the movie until the end, but its bold final 10 minutes felt oddly unconvincing and forced to me, and ultimately left me cold on the whole thing. This is a movie that needed to stick the landing to work.
• I watched Nimona, the Netflix adaptation of ND Stevenson’s graphic novel, when I was sick as a dog so I already feel like I need to give it another shot. The voice cast was great and it was cute, but I find its particular animation style really off-putting for some reason I can’t quite articulate.
• Horror Hangover’s Scottish horror movies episode got me interested in the genre, so I took a break from award season titles to check out 2004’s Incident at Loch Ness. It’s kind of incredible that this movie isn’t talked about more, given that it’s a straight-faced mockumentary about famed documentarian Werner Herzog going on a dangerous expedition to find the Loch Ness Monster. This movie spends way too long getting started and its central tension isn’t that interesting, but it’s got a few great comedic moments.
• Like all of my movie-watching plans for the year, my goal to support as much Vietnamese cinema as possible has kind of gone off the rails, but I’m hoping to finish strong! This week I checked out Dreamy Eyes, a two hour romantic epic about two childhood friends whose lives are defined by the path they didn’t take. The movie is as dreamy as its title suggests, and I was wholly invested in its slow burn plot and lush visuals – until it took a wild, distressing turn towards the end.
• A lot of my horror-loving colleagues have been singing the praises of the new slasher It’s A Wonderful Knife, and frankly, I wish I watched whatever movie they saw because this was not for me. The movie from “Tragedy Girls” director Tyler MacIntyre plays its campy premise – a girl goes on a George Bailey-like journey but has to stop a serial killer in the process – too straight, underutilizes its great cast, and drenches every shot in the drabbest gray you’ve ever seen. This may be an odd comparison, but it maintains the lukewarm waiting-for-it-to-actually-start vibe that made most of Blumhouses’ “Into the Dark” installments so frustrating.

The reads (+ pods):

• As someone who recently found out the hard way that a British Hot Cheeto is nothing like an American Hot Cheeto, I enjoyed The Guardian’s ultra-deep dive into the weird world of regional chip flavoring.
• On a much darker note, I was captivated by this story from the New Yorker about a guy who started working as a recovery diver seemingly in hopes of becoming Youtube famous. There’s a lot in here about true crime ethics, which we all know is like catnip to me.
• I’m working my way through Gerard Way’s comic backlog, though I keep distracting myself listening to their entire discography and looking at Tumblr gifs and interviews. At any rate, I finally finished the original run of The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys this week and it was pretty much everything I’d expect from Way: ambitious, creative, nonsensical, beautiful, angry, and slightly unhinged.
• On the podcast front, I thought NPR’s On Our Watch was extremely interesting. The series takes advantage of a recent California law that allows for more transparency about the ways the police police themselves; investigators dug through the piles of paperwork and audio recordings made legally available by the law and shared the often shocking results – stories about police misconduct run rampant.

Odds and ends:

• Hot off the presses, here are my final picks for the 10 best TV shows of 2023. Thanks to Slashfilm for finding a home for this list this year!
• I interviewed Rhys Darby about Our Flag Means Death, his standup, and his underrated back catalog. I get wildly nervous before every interview but this one totally exceeded my expectations!
• I’m honored to have been able to commemorate the life of TV pioneer Norman Lear.
• It’s been a heck of a week for big projects: I also ranked every season of Fargo.
• Here’s my belated review of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which we have already established rocks.
• By the way, Critics Choice just made a daily movie and TV trivia game and it’s a whole lot of fun. If you come to a grid square with multiple answers, be sure to try to guess one you think might be less popular! It’s like a reverse Family Feud.

I’m signing off quickly here as I’m headed to an appointment to finalize my visa application – if you haven’t heard the news, I’m (hopefully) moving to Scotland soon! As always, I’d love to hear about what everyone’s been watching, reading, and listening to lately – after all, I’ll have a lot of time to pass during some long plane rides in my future.