Jesse Plemons

Noah Hawley’s Coens-inspired anthology series is back and it’s shaken off what little didn’t’ work the first time around for a fresh, funky new tale of small-town violence and intrigue.

The idea of doing a TV show inspired by the Fargo film is one that could have gone wrong in so many ways, but miraculously Hawley did everything right in the first season.

Though this year’s Noah turned a lot of heads and made more than a handful of viewers frustrated, be it for declining to use the word “God” or just including Rock Titan Angel things into a Biblical story, Darren Aronofsky still remains a highly valued director and ever rising auteur in Hollywood. Aronofsky is currently …

Set during the pioneer era, The Homesman subverts the usual trajectory of westerns set in this time by instead focusing on a journey from what will eventually become Nebraska territory in the West to more Eastern Iowa, wherein defeat via the frontier is a primary concern, whether it be a defeat of the mind, body, soul, or all together. Director Tommy Lee Jones’s last theatrically released film was The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), a contemporary neo-western with shades of Sam Peckinpah in its flavour. The Homesman may have the set dressing of a more traditional, old-school genre entry, but this film, adapted from Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel, is much more offbeat than one might expect.

Breaking Bad is not a series generally noted for its lightness of tone, but Vince Gilligan and his collaborators have always managed to wring humor and quirk out of what would seem to be a hopelessly grim set of story beats. That’s what makes “Granite State,” the series’ super-sized penultimate episode, so hard to watch. Save for a few passing moments of sewer-downhill-from-the-gallows “humour,” “Granite State” is a relentlessly bleak hour of TV, wherein even the glimpses of “hope” are really just (in all likelihood) presaging more carnage.

Breaking Bad, Season 5, Episode 5: “Dead Freight” Written by George Mastras Directed by George Mastras Airs Sundays at 10pm ET on AMC Remember “Live Free or Die,” the fifth-season premiere of Breaking Bad, and its nifty but slight little magnet-powered heist? In retrospect, that was little more than a dry run for ‘Dead Freight,” …