Tag: Hulu

Line of Duty—A Killer of a Murder Mystery

Written by Diana Paul on March 21, 2022. Posted in Television reviews. 1 Comment on Line of Duty—A Killer of a Murder Mystery

Line of Duty (2012-2021), a multiple-award winning BBC police procedural, is a gripping crime drama like no other, with a shocking death in episode one, series one (2012), the catalyst for all six seasons which build upon it. This is a killer of a murder mystery. Line of Duty is BBC’s most popular series outperforming both “Dr. Who” and “Downton Abbey.” Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) is transferred from the anti-terrorism unit to the internal affairs unit charged with uncovering police...

“Pig”–Fatty with Little Meat

Written by Diana Paul on March 8, 2022. Posted in movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Pig”–Fatty with Little Meat

Pig (2021) is an odd indie film about a truffle forager, Rob Feld (played by a mostly grunting Nicolas Cage), a former elite restaurateur who has fallen on hard times. In the middle of the night, his beloved truffle-finding pig has been stolen somewhere deep in the woods where he lives in a cabin far from Portland.

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Written by Diana Paul on February 22, 2021. Posted in Film Festivals, movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Toni Morrison (1931-2019), the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was a complex artist who did not hold back from confronting the worst of human history. The documentary, Toni Morrison: Pieces I Am, is a historical panorama of a slice of history dating from the 1930’s until the conclusion of the film in 2019. Morrison emerges as a powerful, iconic, and formidable moral and intellectual force. The film gives us a retrospective of her groundbreaking novels which challenged the literary status quo, rewarding the reader with imagining black...

“Mrs. America”–A Closet Feminist?

Written by Diana Paul on June 23, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 1 Comment on “Mrs. America”–A Closet Feminist?

Mrs. America is the history-packed and binge-worthy nine-episode Hulu series created by Dahvi Waller (of “Mad Men”). We see a dazzling sweep of history from the early 1970s to 1982 as the fight against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment unfolds. Still unpassed, the ERA would create a constitutional ban on discrimination against women. Its failure to win approval was due in large measure to the brilliant political strategist Phyllis Schlafly. Cate Blanchett embodies captivating contradictions as Schlafly, the antiheroine in Mrs....

“Hillary”–Unmasked

Written by Diana Paul on May 19, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 2 Comments on “Hillary”–Unmasked

Hillary, an intimate and candid four-part series about former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton– one of the most admired and vilified women in the world–features never-before-seen footage of her life from birth in a close-knit family in Chicago, Illinois. The mission of this documentary is not only to interview Hillary Clinton (for a total of thirty-five hours) and several dozen colleagues and personal friends but also to try to analyze why people found Clinton so compelling—and so polarizing. Yet Hillary is so much more than a...

“Little Fires Everywhere”–Incendiary at Its Best

Written by Diana Paul on April 27, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 3 Comments on “Little Fires Everywhere”–Incendiary at Its Best

Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio during the late 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere is based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel by the same name. Reese Witherspoon (Elena)and Kerry Washington (Mia) steal the show as mothers from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds. This is a suburban saga with a painfully close lens focused on the income gap, class, and racial divide we know only so well. In the opening scene a house in Shaker Heights is engulfed in an inferno. Is it the target of arson? We will find out. The year is 1997. ...