What I'm Watching: Nosferatu, No Other Land, A Complete Unknown, and More

Plus: Conclave, Christmas classics revisited, /Film's best shows of the year, and what the It Ends With Us news means for, well, us.

Here’s a quick rundown of everything I’ve watched, read, and written about lately:

The shows:

• I caught up with English Teacher, FX’s breakout comedy from Brian Jordan Alvarez, just a few days before news broke that he’s been accused of sexual assault and has an alleged history of sketchy behaviors. I can’t pretend the show about a gay teacher working in a Texas high school isn’t irreverent, timely, and a touch absurd in the best way, but I also don’t want to diminish the bad news about Alvarez and his co-star and best friend Stephanie Koenig (who comes across as dismissive and complicit in the Vulture story linked above). It’s unrealistic to say that I didn’t clock English Teacher as one of my favorite shows of the year when I watched it, but given the lack of accountability behind the scenes, I’ve also found myself hoping we won’t see a second season anytime soon.
• HBO’s The Franchise is a brutal and brutally funny satire of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and, to a lesser extent, the DCEU) that’s executive produced by Veep and Avenue 5 creator Armando Iannuci. With awful characters as far as the eye can see, it’s the sort of comedy I typically cringe away from, but I’m glad I stuck with it if only for the deeply pointed, super-cutting (I’m talking hot knife through butter here) indictments of modern-day Hollywood. From faux-feminist symbolism to studio interference to complicated international relations – one standout episode is about a shoehorned product placement deal with a Chinese farm equipment company – The Franchise is whip-smart and unapologetic. It’s also so hyper-specific that I’m shocked Disney hasn’t tried to sue it into oblivion.

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• I’ve probably written more about Watcher Entertainment than any of you care to read this year, so I’ll keep my review of Ryan Bergara’s great new one-off show Ghost Files Alone (which will drop on Youtube in the coming weeks) to one sentence. It’s fun, scary, cinematic, and psychologically taxing – plus, it has a lot more empathy and emotional oomph behind it than the vast majority of programming that falls under the “paranormal investigation” umbrella.
• The Rankin & Bass stop-motion Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is so much longer and odder than I remember, but watching it as an adult last week made me appreciate how meaningful its odd-one-out themes have been for generations of marginalized kids. Plus, that lil red-nosed baby is still adorable.

The movies:

• If you’ve been curious to learn more about what’s happening in Palestine but are overwhelmed with information or have no idea where to start, the beautiful, Oscar-shortlisted new documentary No Other Land is essential viewing (if you can find it). The doc about a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist who band together to document the colonial violence threatening the former’s mountain community is fantastic no matter your entry point, but one of its best qualities is its ability to focus on one specific, verisimilitude-driven story set in a single location over a multi-year period. No Other Land is harrowing and infuriating, but it’s also intimate, lovely, and poetic in its portrayal of the lives of the families who have endured decades of mistreatment at the hands of Israeli forces. I know the 24/7 news cycle tends to leave Americans thinking about victims of atrocities as numbers on a page, but it’s impossible to come away from No Other Land with anything but love for its very real subjects.
• In case you were wondering, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation holds up way better than I expected it to. What did we lose between the ‘80s and today that makes it so hard for wacky and broad yet pure-hearted comedies like this one to work anymore?
• The new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown goes down easy, with great performances (Chalamet, you bastard, you’ve done it again), above-par cover songs, and sturdy direction from James Mangold. Despite all that, though, I found myself aggravated by the end: whatever message the film wants to telegraph about Dylan’s stubborn, alienating genius gets partially muddled thanks to the script’s over-reliance on songs as character development. Way too many scenes substitute necessary, plot-moving conversations with shots of the various women in his life looking at Dylan in awe or disappointment while he sings.
• Here’s a surprise: I ended up being lukewarm on Nosferatu, my most anticipated film of the year. I think Robert Eggers is one of the best directors working today, and my love for his past works may have inflated my expectations here, but I think there’s more than overhype wrong with his new F.W. Murnau adaptation. Wooden acting, tedious pacing, and a strangely shallow exploration of its themes and settings kept me from loving Nosferatu despite some truly cool cinematic tricks (like those shadowy, ever-reaching claws!). I have a feeling I’ll appreciate the movie more on rewatch, but for now, I’m going to keep being that obnoxious guy who laments Eggers’ post-The Lighthouse studio switch from A24 to Focus Features.
• Conclave, AKA the bitchy pope-crowning drama starring Ralph Fiennes, is interesting and propulsive – if more muted than I expected given the reviews. I neither loved it nor disliked it, but I certainly walked away from it feeling entertained.
• If you like those nature documentaries that teach you wildlife facts while the narrator makes corny jokes about how the animal kingdom is just like human society, you can’t go wrong with Peacock’s Queer Planet. It’s exactly that, but it’s about gay animals and Andrew Rannells is the one cracking jokes about West Hollywood and Grindr. It’s both informative and dumb – in other words, perfect to watch when you’re stoned.

The reads:

• The New Yorker did an extremely long and thorough deep-dive into the controversy surrounding recently deceased Canadian author Alice Munro, and the result is a singularly haunting examination of dysfunctional mothering, child abuse, and the often-disappointing ways one’s art can cast light on one’s life.
• If you haven’t been paying attention to the drama between It Ends With Us director and star Justin Baldoni and co-star and producer Blake Lively, you should be. The recent New York Times breakdown of the scenario (here’s a gift link) isn’t just a case of gossip or rubbernecking: it’s a detailed exposé of an entire shadow industry that rich and famous people can use to smear one another via organic-looking “callout” posts on socials and planted stories in the press. This stuff has been going on in Hollywood forever, but the text exchanges revealed by Lively’s recent lawsuit shine a light on how overt and misogynistic they can be when social media is ground zero. If you like weighing in on celebrity discourse, you should be aware of how powerful and convincing this misinformation cottage industry can be.
• It’s hard to find the words to talk about Salon’s deeply researched look at the realities of estrangement within politically divided families, but I think reading it helped and broke me all at once. I’m hoping it can bring someone else peace or validation this holiday season.
• This Verge breakdown of the martial law fiasco in South Korea earlier this month is wild.
• It doesn’t look like I’m going to finish all the books I’ve been reading lately by New Year’s, but I did recently fly through yet another Dear America book. Lois Lowry’s Like The Willow Tree is set during the 1918 flu pandemic, and it kicks off with one of the bleakest inciting incidents in the famously depressing historical fiction series’ history. The book is a bit shapeless, though, and like most of the more recent Dear America installments, it seems to sand the rough edges off of its story about a girl sent to a Quaker community in Maine.

Odds and ends:

• For the eighth year in a row, I helped put together a list of the best TV shows of the year for my current home outlet! Since I haven’t been reviewing as much as usual this year, I was glad my editor decided to go with a group list at Slashfilm (as opposed to past years, when it was just me and my remote control curating the list), and I love almost every show that made the cut. You can read the full list here. I wrote the introduction, as well as entries 4, 5, and 12.
• Also for Slashfilm: I finally dug into HBO’s critically acclaimed yet frustratingly managed post-Game of Thrones years, which I get asked about more often than most pop culture topics.
• I really enjoyed The Legend of Swordquest, the recent podcast from Jamie Loftus about a massive Atari prize contest that took the world by storm in the ‘80s before mysteriously fizzling out. If you love classic games, stories about lost treasure, Halt and Catch Fire or (ugh) Ready Player One, you’ll dig this wild, energetically told stranger-than-fiction story.
• I’m trying to cram a few more pods in before the clock runs out on 2024, but I pressed pause on Audacy’s Cement City after just two episodes. The series, about two journalists spending a year in a dying Pennsylvania town, seems like it’ll make some interesting observations about America’s problems vis-à-vis this microcosm, but it comes across as unintentionally pandering about something so many of us have experienced firsthand. Next year, I hope we retire the podcast premise that hinges on observing rural, working poor people like bugs under a microscope.
• Here, have a joyful and heartwarming miniature Dick Van Dyke retrospective, courtesy of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, of all people.                

That’s all for now. I’ve got a few end-of-year pieces coming soon, so stay tuned for those. Also, if you haven’t yet, drop me a line and let me know what you’d like to see more of in the newsletter next year! I’ve reposted the little emoji feedback list I shared a few weeks ago, in case anyone else wants to weigh in by copy-pasting your picks into comments or social replies. 

I hope those who celebrated had a lovely holiday, and that you can make the world meet you at your own pace during this should-be-lazy week between Christmas and the new year.

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