Category Archives: Reviews

Mad Men’s Messy Redux


Syke Mad Men returns in 4K, sharp enough to see its greatness and its seams.

Los Altos Mad Men came back this week in 4K, and the return felt like meeting an old friend under bright lights. You recognize the voice, the posture, the charm.

You also see the lines around the eyes that you once missed.

The upgrade reveals a tension at the heart of period drama. Mad Men was built on memory. It moved through the early 1960s with the patina of recollection, not the clarity of a microscope.

The grain helped. The slight haze around the edges gave the story the distance it deserved. The world of Don Draper should feel lived-in, not sharpened to clinical edges. We remember a decade through shape and shadow, not forensic detail. A little fog goes a long way.

The sharper image shows the world with more accuracy than the world ever needed. In Season 1, Episode 7, “Red in the Face,” John Slattery staggers into his office after a wild lunch and loses his battle with the meal.

In the broadcast version, the gag stays behind him. In the 4K frame, the picture widens. Two crew members crouch beside him, pumping the practical effects line. The shot lasts only a beat, but the restoration peels back corners the original broadcast kept hidden.

None of this touches what matters. Jon Hamm still moves like a man trying to outwalk his past. Elisabeth Moss still builds a life in front of you one scene at a time. The writing still cuts in clean strokes. The camera still finds the narrow gap between ambition and shame.

Mad Men carries its own weather system. No resolution changes that.

The return matters. It introduces a new generation to a series that shaped modern television. It reminds older viewers why the show worked. I waited years for this revival. The grain of the earlier airings matched the grain of the era, but the story survives the translation.

The show continues to carry the weight of its own excellence, even when the picture reveals more than it should.

’Battle’ A Hefty Blast


Paul Thomas Anderson may have dropped the year’s most dangerous film.

It feels like the director got a little bit drunk and binged movies by Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick. One Battle After Another plays as a black comic action thriller about revolution, corruption, and the cost of devotion, but beneath the gunfire sits a father trying to keep hold of his daughter and whatever is left of his ideals.

Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, once walked away from the radical world that shaped him. That retreat ends as soon as Willa is pulled into the long shadow he tried to outrun.

The movie’s early trouble comes fast. For the first half hour, Anderson leans on a charged scene between Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The motel scene between them is brazen, hungry, and pitched at a height that strains belief. The power dynamic never quite finds natural footing, and the moment rushes through a psychological turn that the actors work hard to sell.

Yet that scene sits at the center of the plot. Lockjaw’s obsession begins there. Perfidia’s gamble begins there. The entire chain of consequences sparks off that uneasy interaction.

Once the film moves past that hurdle, though, Anderson finds the pulse. When the plot folds back onto Bob and Willa on the run, the movie snaps into its true shape.

The action carries weight and real tension. The shootouts and raids feel earned rather than decorative. The story settles into a chase that blends political paranoia with a bruised parent’s panic.

The father-daughter thread, brief in shared screen time but heavy in emotion, sharpens into the film’s core. You feel years of regret and unfinished sentences between DiCaprio (who is aging with remarkable grace) and Chase Infiniti every time the camera gives them a quiet beat.

The runtime asks a lot. At 162 minutes, the film carries scenes that could shed a few beats without losing power. But Anderson fills the excess with character work worth watching.

These moments turn the story from thriller to something more personal. The cost of belief. The damage of loyalty. The way old ideals echo through the people who never asked to inherit them.

Jonny Greenwood’s score binds the film with a mix of tension and mournful beauty. The camera holds faces long enough to let the actors earn their turns. The landscapes look scorched and alive.

By the final act, Anderson ties the threads with force. Past sins collide with present violence. The film lands as a contemporary reckoning, and unwittingly prescient in its take on the blending of police with military power.

It’s too long and a little preachy, but, flaws and all, One Battle After Another stands as one of the year’s strongest contenders. It belongs squarely in the Best Picture race.

And Penn should run the awards circuit in that haircut.

’Frankenstein’ Not Quite Sum of Its Parts

Guillermo del Toro has never met a monster he didn’t love.

His Frankenstein, now streaming on Netflix, is a love letter to the misunderstood and the malformed, a visual sonnet draped in fog and candlelight. It looks extraordinary. It feels monumental.

Yet somewhere inside all that grandeur, the heart seems faint.

Oscar Isaac gives Victor Frankenstein an elegant mania, a man cracked by ambition and remorse. Jacob Elordi’s Creature moves like a wounded stag, huge yet careful, his face a map of awe and confusion. Mia Goth’s Elizabeth softens every room she enters. The cast performs with precision and poise, a company that knows its world is painted in tragedy.

The film’s look astonishes. Dan Laustsen’s cinematography turns stone to smoke, shadow to velvet. Lamps bleed gold. Snow drifts in slow suspension.

For a while, that beauty carries the story. But then the pulse starts to fade.

Scenes stretch longer than they should. The film, over two and a half hours, begins to labor under its own weight. Its elegance overshadows its urgency.

The deeper fault lives in the spirit. Frankenstein wants sorrow and awe, and it earns both.

But true horror breathes colder air. Last year’s Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s fevered hymn of shadow, plague, and lust, captured the era it reached for. It felt carved from early cinema.

Frankenstein follows another path. It mourns rather than terrifies. Elordi speaks through gesture and breath, his Creature learning love and loss simultaneously. Isaac lets guilt bloom, then hides it beneath control. Their shared scenes hum with voltage, often literally.

Sound gives the world body. Wind grinds over stone. Sparks snap from coils. Heartbeats rise beneath strings. You can feel the room’s pulse.

Del Toro still finds grace in corners. A candle gutters at the right moment. A child’s toy rests where it shouldn’t. His world feels tended, handmade, personal. No one directs wonder like he does, and no one finds such kindness in monsters.

The film’s finest passage unfolds in snow. The Creature learns cold, solitude, and small mercy. The camera gives him space to build a soul. Those minutes achieve what the long middle never quite sustains.

Frankenstein becomes a painting rather than a pulse. It reminds you how gifted del Toro remains, but also how indulgence can dull even a master’s edge.

The film’s beauty glows like a cathedral, every corner perfect and patient. The story inside that cathedral feels funereal, as if the soul it once housed has quietly slipped away.

It’s a grand, gorgeous vision. It just never quite comes to life.