What better way to follow-up Sydney Lumet’s Making Movies (and to celebrate his 90th birthday) than with one of his biggest movies: Murder on the Orient Express, a film so star-studded, you could enjoy a real train ride from Istanbul to Yugoslavia in the time it takes to get through the opening credits. You’ve got Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Lauren Bacall as just a few of the dozen suspects caught up in a murder mystery on rails, with Albert Finney sussing out the perpetrator as Agatha Christie’s fastidious Hercule Poirot.

It’s the makings of a smash when looking at the talent above line or below, but the reasons why Orient Express doesn’t seem to be one of Lumet’s better remembered works are pretty self-evident. Though packed wall-to-wall with notable actors from both stage and screen (a great anecdote from Making Movies has Lumet recalling how the actors sometimes mumbled during rehearsal due to feeling intimidated by their cross-form counterparts), there’s not a lot of time for development of a cast this large into anything more than a gaggle of suspects (I love Ingrid Bergman [who doesn’t?], but how she got an Oscar for about 5 minutes worth of screen time is the real mystery).

The structure of Christie’s story is confining both physically and narratively, as the rotating compartment door of interrogations gets a little tiring after a while. Finney is terrific in the lead, perhaps because, though I’m ashamed to admit it, this was my first experience with detective Poirot. The story lends itself well to reading or live theatre (I can vividly imagine how a stage working of Poirot’s 30-minute explanation of the crime would go), but as a film experience, Lumet gets trapped along with his guests in very tight spaces, adding an element of claustrophobia to the proceedings, but also a cheap staginess (in contrast, the most memorable shots are long tracking sequences that highlight the massive expanse and expense of the Orient Express itself).

The film has to frontload its exposition directly with a newspaper montage that makes for a dry follow-up to the extensive credits, but the final piece, a headline about a dead little girl that glows red like a hot brand, makes for an indelible image. Looking online makes it appear that the film was originally screened in black and white, so I have to wonder if my issues with the mis-en-scene would have been less severe had my viewing not been in colour. Regardless, the actorly wattage of Murder on the Orient Express will carry you through to its surprising and surprisingly morally ambiguous ending, and makes me think I should be spending more time with both Lumet and Mr. Poirot as soon as I can. 

Episode 1: Back

Hey, Louie’s back! Or was, anyway: the fourth season wrapped up last week. But seeing as I only just caught the premiere…hey, Louie’s back! After taking 2013 to kick up his heels for a bit, Louis C.K., who’s become pretty much the biggest thing in comedy over the last few years, has a new set of short films masquerading as TV to share with the world.

Like a lot of TV-loving people, Louie’s been a constant source of surprise and joy since it started airing, as much of its unique flavor is owed to C.K.’s complete control over just about every aspect of the show. This has allowed him to cover subject matter that’s controversial, personal, disgusting, insightful, or any combination therein, and do it all while playing with form in ways no other show can.

Season 4 opens with the show at its most oneiric, but considering David Lynch was part of a multi-episode arc last season, having Louie engage in a strange conversation with another comedian while everyone else in the café is texting on their phones really isn’t outside of the show’s version of reality. The opening bit about overly loud trash collectors was a great reintroduction to the show, mixing observational humor and ridiculous physical comedy with a nice reminder that the show is finally out of its long slumber.

“Back” plays up that sense of excitement that Louie has returned, as it’s something of a greatest hits showcase for some of the series’ previous highlights. Louie’s daughters are back for a couple of very endearing scenes that breakup the surrealism, and he ropes a bunch of his comedian friends back in for another poker game, which is really just an excuse to here funny people riff about masturbation and sex toys. That the rest of the episode can then take all the dirty talk and build it out into a anecdote around Louie getting older is just another example of the show’s ability to have seemingly stream-of-conscious ideas pulled together into a single story.

I’ve felt the tremors from a greater Internet divide in the Louie community as it has aired over the last couple months, so it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of Season 4 develops. I’ve been wondering for a while if peak C.K. had been reached, and if success would not so much go to his head, as it might blind viewers to when Louie does make a mistake. We’ll find out.  

Episode 2 "Model"/Episode 3 "So did the Fat Lady"

Yup, I think I’ve got a bit of an idea how this season of Louie could end up being divisive. FX’s decision to air the fourth season of the show in double installments probably caused plenty of problems for viewers watching live, as there appear to be more multi-part arcs this year. Watching episode 2 and 3 back-to-back, I was getting the back half of week one, and the first of week two, and they represent such a drastic difference in quality, I’m not sure I’d have taken the viewing well with a week in between.

“Model” is Louie devoting a whole episode to self-loathing navel gazing , something the show has dealt with plenty of times before. The setup is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld is present to play himself as a kind of anti-C.K.: rich, respected, and together, but something of a dick, which Seinfeld plays well. But there’s only so much of C.K. in “universal piñata” mode I can follow before it seems like a one-note gag, despite dressing it up with class implications. It’s a purely comedic episode in which the joke is how increasingly discomforting the situation becomes for Louie, but it doesn’t have the follow-through other C.K. shaggy dog stories have had.   

Now, try washing that out with “So Did the Fat Lady,” and you remember what C.K. can do when playing with uncomfortable truths instead of just awkwardness. Part of the contrast is that “So Did the Fat Lady” is an episode with happiness in it; even Louie’s self-loathing bang-bang ritual (in which he and his brother eat a meal at one restaurant, followed immediately by another meal somewhere else) has joy to it. The source is mainly Sarah Baker, who pursues a date with Louie with all the charm and warmth he himself lacks when he’s not onstage.   

The chemistry the two have together as they walk and talk around New York is meant to make Louie look like a yutz for putting her off for the first half of the episode, but there’s more to it than that. After a seemingly insignificant comment, Baker has an absolutely inspired monologue that dregs up all the unspoken subtext of their relationship up to this point, and it’d be painful to watch if it wasn’t so specifically, pointedly true. The episode then, in contrast to “Model”, finds a way back to joking about what Louie’s experienced in a why that makes the punchline feel earned, and I’m in love with the show again. Things could still get plenty bumpy through the rest of the season, but “So Did the Fat Lady” is already a frontrunner for its highpoint. 

Hey, it’s one of them paper thingies. Like a script, but without stage directions, and written entirely in prose.

Seeing as Making Movies is considered one of the holy texts of the film world (and I had it on loan temporarily), I managed to burn through this over a couple sittings. I had originally been holding off until I had seen more of Lumet’s work (Dog Day Afternoon and 12 Angry Men being the only two I recall watching with any clarity), but turns out that shouldn’t be a barrier to entry. True to its reputation, the value of Making Movies is pretty universal to any film fan, as it offers an insider’s perspective on the day-in, day-out, honest-to-god work that’s required to make movies.

Or, was, anyway. Released in ’95, a fair few years removed from Lumet’s best work, the industry has changed quite a bit since. The word “digital” pops up occasionally like someone in Game of Thrones hearing rumors of a dragon overseas, so what of Lumet’s experience still practically applies to today’s Hollywood is a bit of a mystery. Despite opening the book by stating it will not be a laundry-airing tell-all, Lumet is just as engaged talking about stars and industry people as he is craft. He sounds pained to ever say a bad word about anyone, even when not naming them, and his constant stream of praise, be it for actors like Pacino, or tireless studio bigwigs like Margaret Booth, is endearing.

Making Movies is a vital text for film lovers not just for how effectively Lumet takes you through every stage of the filmmaking process -helpfully defining jargon where necessary and using his own films as examples regularly-, but for how clearly it makes you understand the effort and passion required to make even bad movies. Audiences, myself included, often take for granted the sheer number of hands and hours that go into developing even the most minor details of a production (following a difficult and limited location shoot, Lumet describing his lighting coordinator discovering a bad setup while watching rushes for The Wiz is almost heartbreaking).

Perhaps it’s that digital beast that’s made it easier for us to slip into cynicism about moviemaking more readily, seeing as everything these days increasingly feels like it was made on a computer. There’s romanticism for “the good old days” about the book, some problematic elements of which Lumet himself readily acknowledges. His superlatives are never more exhausted than when talking about Spielberg, whose Schindler’s List is frequently cited as the best work to come out of the (then) modern era. In that respect, I’d like to see Spielberg write his own Making Movies at some point, and have him share his experience with modern Hollywood the way Lumet has for middle age Hollywood. Overall, Making Movies makes for a brief but enlightening tour behind the scenes as led by one of the greats of a bygone era.  

This is probably the worst show to write about using this arbitrary time limit I’ve given for myself. Hey guys, there’s this really amazing show on Sundance that’s meditative and reflective, and I’m going to compress the experience of watching it into a writeup that takes less time than your average drive-thru trip. It’s a disservice to the show to try and be so off-the-cuff about it, but it’s not like I’ve had better luck talking about it after deliberating greatly on its worldview and merits. The little blurb I wrote about it for last year’s Top 10 Shows list was the hardest to generate, as the show is a bit like that physics principle about interacting with an event changing its properties.

Now I’m at the risk of hyperbolizing it too much, so maybe just read Matt Zoller Seitz’s review for the Season 2 premiere over here to get what is is that makes the show so appealing, and hard to write about. As for the premiere: I thought it was a somewhat weak installment for the show, which is typical of many follow-ups to the climactic finales of the year previous. The fallout from Daniel’s assault (that’s as big as the show goes: a guy gets beaten up, and it feels like the end of the world) gives us plenty of time to get reacquainted with the people of Polly, Georgia, and play a bit of catchup as to where they are emotionally.

It plays a bit like busywork at times, which is unlike the show. Much as I was happy to see Amantha, Tawney, and even Ted Jr. again, there’s almost a surfeit of plot (by the show’s standards) to get through in order to set things up for the next 9 episodes. Of the plots, Sherriff Daggett investigating Daniel’s attack is the most engaging so far, as it’s the most connected to the characters we care about. For now, I’d rather the senator, Bobby Dean and the other good ol’ boys stay in the background, and the focus remain on the Holden family and Daniel.

When the show does that, as the premiere does in the opening and closing scenes, the show becomes hard to describe as anything other than transcendental. Rectify is a show that grapples with faith in ways that are unlike anything else on TV. Even shows I love, like Hannibal, use existential questions as a means of heightening the drama behind the plot. Here, the spectrum of beliefs these characters provide is organically drawn from everyday ways of in which people find themselves asking the big questions. Daniel’s dreamlike-state for the premiere lets Rectify foreground its struggles with the unknown more than usual, and it’s not cheating: the show has earned the weight of its inquiries, and both the pace and method in which it wants to explore them. The six episodes we got last year would have been enough to make Rectify something special, but it’s my hope that series-creator Ray McKinnon was just getting started. 

It’s probably for the best that there’s been a flurry of thinkpieces today about the Fargo finale which address my main issue with it, namely that it sidelines the series’ best character. Willa Paskin over at Slate has an interesting look at whether or not the show subverted or embraced the White Male Anti-Hero tropes I thought it was playing with when it premiered, while James Poniewozik over at Time has a read on who the real heroes worth rooting for on the show were.

There’s been a lot of good writing and thinking that’s come out of Fargo, which just makes it even more difficult to believe that the whole thing wasn’t a giant disaster. Beyond the issue of trying to stretch out and remold 98 of the best minutes the Coen brothers ever filmed, the show had interests and a tone that have become wearying; emasculated men lashing out at those around them, impossible-to-touch evil masterminds that always get away, a lot of poe-faced philosophy about man as an animal, good and evil, the heart of darkness blah blah blah.

The obvious point of comparison Fargo has had in this television season has been True Detective, and thanks to last night’s finale, I can say pretty definitively I prefer the former to the latter. True Detective masked a well told and trod procedural in the yellow cloak of an eldritch horror story, before deciding it was really just about two bros dealing with their man-pain. Fargo wove in biblical and fable-like elements much the same way, but at least had a sense of humor about it (more than two characters worth caring about).

These are both bleak shows in their ways, but only one justified its rally for sanity and goodness at the end. Fargo similarly left its fair share of unanswered questions and loose threads, but the ending was true to all that had come before it. I’m not entirely sure of whether FX will go through with a season two, or how they could; maybe we should just thank our lucky stars one season turned out to be such a surprise success. But if there is more to this story and theme that Noah Hawley feels needs telling, then so be it. 

I’m not really sure how to feel about Game of Thrones anymore. I really liked the premiere episode for this season, for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with getting to see it early thanks to a screener. It was good enough to watch on a muddy, watermarked DVD 3 times, and every time I watched it I felt like new depths to the story and the craft were revealing themselves. But Season 4 closing out on two weeks of spectacle and climax has dulled the remaining excitement I had for the show that had been slowly being whittled away over the course of the season.

Before this gets too negative: I still really like the show for a lot of reasons. The production values and designs are some of the most visually engaging I’ve ever seen, TV or otherwise. The scope is consistently awe-inspiring, and that the show can juggle all its various balls as well as it does is a real feat. But it’s gotten to a point where I recognize that what the show wants to be good at, and what I want it to be good at, are separate things entirely.

One of the big climactic scenes from last night’s finale had two sets of characters that never overlap in the books crossing paths with one another. The change makes sense: it adds weight to both of the show’s versions of these threads, and the motivations behind what happens during the meeting are sound. What we get is a fantastically choreographed and brutal fight scene, which is great and exciting on its own terms. But that’s not really what I look for from this property; while the show was teasing us with hands on hilts, just waiting to draw blood, all I wanted to shout at the screen was “Put the weapons down and have a conversation, dummies! You’re all too interesting to just be used as grist on the murder mill!”

Game of Thrones is about as good an adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s books as could ever reasonably be expected, but its malignant case of adaptation-itis is only getting worse with each season. Scenes that work within the ephemera of Martin’s text fall flat when actually filmed, as is the case of Bran and the episode’s little Harryhausen tribute. As has been said elsewhere, the show is often at its best during monologues, particularly when it’s one character telling another a story. I’d be lying if I said last week’s free-for-all at The Wall didn’t have me making noises unbecoming of a person my size, age, or gender, but the thrill was fleeting. The characters, their challenges, and the choices they have to make: that’s what makes Game of Thrones tick.

For as little as her plot actually moved forward this season, the scenes with Daenerys were among my favorite in the finale for the quiet manner in which they capped off the theme of her story for the season, condensed as it may have been. Similarly, the big fight scene of the episode I alluded to got the blood pumping, but it didn’t engage my brain the way a painful and drawn-out goodbye that followed did. I wish the show could find more time to just settle down with these characters and just get to know them. It sometimes feels like Game of Thrones's reputation is so caught up in shock-value and spectacle that it becomes a disservice to the work the show achieves artistically. Ignoring that big-dumb-stupid-inexcusable thing that happened between Jamie and Cersei earlier this season? Big mistake, and one that overshadows any scene shared between Lena Heady and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who are really just terrific. Ditto for the night’s scene between Peter Dinklage and Charles Dance, who do some of their best work in service of another #OMG plot twist that we’ve barely had time to process the setup for.

The fact is, I’ve never liked the show more than during the first 9 episodes of season 1, back when I hadn’t read any of the books. Deciding to read the books and having an outline for what to expect is on me. The book’s the book, the show’s the show: I have no problem with that. They are separate and unequal entities. That doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge that the strengths of Game of Thrones as a story are better served by a literary medium than a TV one. Each can have their respective strengths and weaknesses, but I’d rather see each medium work with material naturally suited to the format, not just grafted onto its bones.    

If nothing else, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla reboot has made me realize that the real Godzilla movie I want would be less a tribute to the original Toho pictures, or a modern update of them, and would play something more like 22 Short Films About Godzilla. Ideally, if the creature isn’t going to be humanized and made a character the way some of the cornier Godzilla movies made him, and you truly want to show him/her/it as a force of nature, then capture that impact from a diverse array of perspectives, with many different people all affected by the same crisis.

The obvious problem there is that Godzilla ceases to be the main character of the Godzilla movie, but this newest reboot ran into it all the same, so at least we’d be par for the course. It’s surprising to find that, in an otherwise terrific summer movie season, this monster blockbuster has turned into the most divisive. I find myself squarely in the camp of those disappointed, as while I strongly agree with the film’s critical proponents that Edwards is very talented and the film is well-crafted, the utter absence of interesting characters in the film just killed the whole thing for me.

“But Sam, Pacific Rim had unrealistic characters, and you never shut about how much you loved that particular giant monster movie,” you might say. Well, the difference between the two is that even though Pacific Rim had stock characters, they at least filled a role. They represent human emotions and desires in response to a fantastical premise that were more varied than just “family is important.” At least in their one-dimensionality, Pacific Rim’s characters served a purpose. What was Sally Hawkins’ purpose in Godzilla as Ken Watanbe’s assistant? Did she have a name? Did Aaron Taylor Johnson’s thick-necked marine have any defining characteristic besides his family, and his occupation? Why is David Straitharn’s general guy desperately looking for someone in this war room to deliver his expositional monologue to, other than the audience? There are so many amazing shots, and small moments in Godzilla, but they’re in the wrong movie.

Plus, the destruction, when it finally does occur, is so darkly lit, you can barely tell what’s happening. I blame it on a 3D lens filter being left on my theatres projector, so your mileage may vary.  

I’m having trouble envisioning a top 10 Movies of 2014 list right now that doesn’t include Ida, a vibrant black and white picture that’s a quiet heartbreaker. Set in post-war Communist Poland, it’s essentially last year’s Philomena, just with teeth. It follows two generations of women, separated by circumstance and religion, as they track down the remains of their family tree left over from Nazi-occupation.

The most surprising thing about Ida is how light it can be on its feet. The black and white imagery makes the film’s interest in dichotomy apparent visually, as does the contrast between its two leads, the church mouse, soon-to-be-nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), and her vivacious but pragmatic aunt, Wanda (Agata Kulesza). Yet the film is tonally consistent throughout. The mood of the film reflects the elements of the scene: it can have suspense and intrigue one moment, and then quickly sneak in a laugh the next, because it plays by the rules of the road trip film, cataloguing random, chaotic life experience one mile and pit stop at a time.

It’s also an amazing directorial exercise, as Ida manages to do more with just one third of a given frame than most others can with the whole thing. Welles famously dug a whole to make Kane loom mightily over the screen, but director Pawel Pawlikowski will literally have his characters dig ditches to keep them confined to the bottom third. You know that game where you try to draw a house with an X through it without lifting the pen off the paper? Ida basically does that with its opening shots, placing the focal point of the shot in the bottom third, left third, right third, upper third, even diagonally from corner to corner, all in rapid succession. It’s incredible to watch, and tells you everything that’s not being said between the characters.

It even manages to play with subtitles in fascinating fashion, as moments of true revelation often shift the text from the bottom of the screen to the top. Shot of the year for me right now might just be a two-shot between Anna and a hunky, sax-playing suitor, they, filmed head-on against the outer wall of a pub, their conversation captured in small white text along a black beam hanging over them. It’s terrific, I really can’t recommend Ida highly enough. 

That we would get a Tom Cruise summer sci-fi action flick as forgettable as Oblivion last year, and one as fun as Edge of Tomorrow this year, just kinda puts into perspective how much better summer 2014 has been compared to years past. It’s a little sad that EoT gets a heaping helping of bonus points for feeling like an original creation, because its problems are ones shared with a lot of the other sequel/reboot blockbusters out there. Mainly, its third act is a cliché fireworks display and the ending is something of a let down.

But, man, all things considered, I still left my screening of this with the sort of charge that you often won’t get from tentpole releases. Pacific Rim was last year’s original property surprise for me, and while EoT isn’t quite up to that level of originality or purity of insanity, it’s admirably close. Perhaps the collective surprise at how good the film really is has as much to do with its premise as it does its quality: Tom Cruise plays a Tom Cruise hero, Cage, as he relives the same day of combat against an alien menace over and over again. Dying causes Cage to wakeup hours earlier on the same day, leaving him to figure out how to stop the invaders, and how it is he’s gotten into this Groundhog Day­-style loop.

When the studio changed the movie’s name from the gleefully aggressive All You Need is Kill to something as generic as Edge of Tomorrow, my worry was all the unique and weird edges of the premise would be sanded off as well. Far from it: director Doug Liman and writer Chris McQuarrie play into their central hook for all it’s worth, and as a result, the picture makes for an engaging philosophical mind-bender that’s also a flat-out hilarious action-adventure ride to boot. Montages of Cruise getting himself splattered, blown-up and toasted make for grim, hysterical breaths of fresh air, as the usual summer movie playbook gets flipped on its head once it becomes clear just how vincible Cage is compared to every other action movie hero.

I wrote about this more in the comments section over at film site The Dissolve (the comment then being highlighted for discussion in the link above), but I saw a real subversive streak in Edge of Tomorrow that gave it a lot of juice. Shame it hasn’t done better at the box office, as original blockbusters like this should be the rule, not the exception.  

Under the Skin gives you plenty to chew on after its over, but the conversation it made me have with myself had nothing to do with plot. It left me trying to gauge just how much the viewer needs to know going in to this movie, or any other one. The Scottish film from Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer is slippery when wet, which is basically all the time, as it follows Scarlett Johansson as a woman on a strange mission in Glasgow. Calling to mind Malick and Kubrick, Under the Skin is withholding and beautifully abrasive, opening with a audio-visual creation of life that makes you feel like you’re taking an aptitude test.

The film is loud in its experimentation, but rarely feels the need to speak. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum. Glazer does almost all the storytelling visually, and that alone makes this worthy of your time. See, I’ve got my reading on the events, and to my mind, the story is rather simple when you see through Glazer’s smoke and mirrors, but that doesn’t diminish the thought-provoking power of saying something simple in the most interesting way possible.

But I was able to piece together a challenging, engaging, and complete narrative because of a fact about the film’s plot I knew going in. My viewing companion for the Under the Skin did not have this piece of information, and arrived at a completely alternate read on the material. After we swapped notes, we agreed the narrative I had ginned up made more sense, but it’s got me thinking about just how much the viewer is responsible for knowing what they’re getting into.

Half the reason I feel like I spend so much time immersed in production news is so that I can properly identify new media that I’ll enjoy based on my interests. By learning about directors and the stories behind movies currently being made, you can walk into the theatre with some filters and shorthand for what you’re about to experience. Going into Under the Skin without knowing the key piece of information that’s never explicitly stated, only strongly hinted at, may well give you an entirely different experience than my own.  

At a screening the other day, discussion of the trailer for film we were about to watch got some people in the audience jumpy about spoilers. It left me wondering if there ever can be a baseline level of audience awareness that a film needs to cater to, and if that’s maybe what causes a lot of the bigger ones to feel like so much time needs to be spent on setup and exposition. I get why people argue that a truly great piece of art functions regardless of whether or not you know what’s going to happen, but the author’s vision can demand unawareness from the audience for a given moment or idea to work. Where’s the baseline established for what the audience needs to know? In a trailer? A logline? The poster -hell, even the title?  

Anyway, my point being: hey, Johansson’s character is an alien. Plenty of indication is given in the early parts of the film, but if you get caught off-guard by all the trippy visuals, you might end up tuning out the film when it’s trying to give you the facts without having to say them. I feel like the author’s intent would be for you to either know this information going in, or for you to arrive at that conclusion in the first 10 minutes. Now that you do have that tidbit, you can enjoy Under the Skin for all it’s worth, and really, it’s a lot. I dug the hell out of this, and figure that if the promise of naked Scarlet Johansson (just in the unsexiest context imaginable) is what it takes to get people to see it, then so be it.    

Woof, this is not one to watch at the gym. Sure, having fiction’s ur-serial killer as a star will make you want to work on your cardio in case you ever need to run away from something scary, but the show’s fatalism certainly blunts your will to improve yourself, seeing as we’re all hunks of meat waiting to expire. But it is dementedly graphic and gory, so at least you’ll lose your appetite.

I really loved the tone and operatic drama Hannibal was going for back in Season 1, such that I was able to forgive the forgettable case-of-the-week format. Season 2 ups the ante by removing the procedural elements almost entirely, instead making the entire season about Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter sniffing around one another like a pair of hungry wolves. All the elements that made the show stand out in its first year return for round two, and for the most part, they’re all better. The murder tableaus are more elaborate and sickening than ever, the humor is more appropriately used, and the look of the show is unlike anything on TV. It handles surreal nightmare fantasies just as capably as it does noir-detective imagery (it’s low quality, but this screengrab from midway through the season is one of the most strikingly composed shots I’ve seen all year).

The show’s dialogue has always had a habit of wallowing in the philosophical for too long, which eventually becomes a bit of a crutch. This is, after all, a show largely concerned with psychological and existential issues, but one can only hear so many coded conversations about the nature of good and evil in a given hour. And while the latter half of the season jumps into some ridiculous territory even by the show’s own standards, and you see a number of the twists coming, turns out, that’s all by design.

The finale for Hannibal Season 2 miraculously gave me that same feeling of “I’m an idiot, Bryan Fuller is so much smarter than me” that Season 1 pulled off so spectacularly, and much as I’m glad there will be at least 13 more episodes next year, where the show ended in 2014 could have made for one of the most daring endings in TV history. Anyway, whatever quibbles I might have, there’s really nothing like Hannibal out there, and the fact that it actually exists is the most insane thing about it.