I must admit to having a complicated relationship with Dinesh D’Souza’s documentaries.

As much as I have enjoyed several of them, I find that they falter in a few ways: They often lack staying power, offering little incentive to return to them after the moment has passed; they are too self-referential — filtering every issue through D’Souza’s own perspective; and they are preoccupied with energizing sympathetic audiences rather than persuading skeptical ones.

Where the film is likely to receive its fiercest pushback is on the subject of eschatology — the theology of the end times.

This last flaw is especially frustrating. Catering to the conservative base is easy, but with D’Souza’s resources and backing, his films could be far sharper — and far more enduring — if they focused on timeless themes rather than re-litigating the 2020 election or attacking whoever happens to be running for president that year.

Chasing the 'Dragon'

It was with this in mind that I went into D’Souza’s newest effort, "The Dragon’s Prophecy." A loose adaptation of the Jonathan Cahn book of the same name, the Angel Studios production examines the fallout of the October 7 terrorist attacks and the subsequent two-year war between Israel and Hamas (which effectively ended with a ceasefire on October 10).

Sharpness, at least, is not a problem this time. The film arrives at a harrowing moment. Tucker Carlson is condemning “Christian Zionism” as heresy; New York City has just elected a mayor who wants to arrest the prime minister of Israel; and bipartisan resentment toward American Jews hasn’t been this pronounced since Pat Buchanan implicitly blamed them for supporting the Gulf War.

Anti-Zionism — and its adjacent anti-Semitism — is enjoying a fashionable resurgence, while support for the Israeli government sits at an all-time low.

D’Souza confronts these trends head-on. He calls out Carlson — as well as the far-left bloc of House Democrats known as "the Squad" — by name, even integrating footage from Carlson’s combative June interview with Ted Cruz. The result is a forthright defense of Israel, one that bluntly characterizes Hamas as rapists, murderers, and terrorists — and depicts the group's atrocities in unflinching detail, including phone calls in which militants boast to their parents about their killings.

Intentional shock

It’s a grisly watch. The film includes insurgents shooting dogs and civilians, and it lingers on the aftermath of violence. But the shock is intentional. As Ambassador Mike Huckabee tells D’Souza, the war is “an eternal battle between good and evil,” with Israel on the side of the angels and Hamas aligned with “the Dragon.”

Amid this devastation, D’Souza wanders the Holy Land and laments that Israel is a place where “nothing is ever solved or resolved,” a region with “no solutions and no idea what the problems even are.” Yet his moral clarity never wavers. He even calls the construction of the Islamic Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount “the true colonialism.”

His mission is to locate meaning in the conflict. To that end, he speaks with Jewish victims, archeologists uncovering evidence of ancient Israelite history, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who uses the occasion to swat at his American critics and to praise Donald Trump.

Disputed dispensation

Where the film is likely to receive its fiercest pushback is on the subject of eschatology — the theology of the end times.

Because D’Souza’s target audience is predominantly Christian, the most vocal critics may be anti-dispensationalists, whose views have become increasingly common among Catholics and mainline Protestants. They correctly note that dispensationalism is a 19th-century American theological development and that the popular notion of a “rapture” is relatively recent.

As the Protestant theologian Brian Mattson writes, “In the grand historical sweep of Christian theology, Dispensationalism is a new arrival.” He explains that its architects argued that salvation unfolds across distinct dispensations, meaning that God’s promises to Israel remain intact for ethnic Jews even as the New Testament opens salvation to Gentiles. “God has two separate ‘tracks’ for the salvation of humanity,” he writes. Thus the national promises to Israel persist in perpetuity.

This is the framework behind the "Left Behind" franchise — 16 books and five films — and it places the modern state of Israel at the center of Revelation in a way that traditional Christian readings do not.

There are legitimate biblical critiques of dispensationalism, just as there are bad-faith motives for attacking it. Mattson notes that many Gen Z “America First” Catholic converts now regard Israel as an unnecessary “foreign entanglement,” while others deploy “heresy” language as a thin veil for anti-Semitism.

Phelim McAleer

End-times evidence

Still, D’Souza’s film is thoroughly dispensationalist. Israel’s present turmoil is portrayed as evidence that the end times are near, that evil is intensifying, and that God is making Himself more visible through signs and miracles. The fate of Israel, in this reading, is inseparable from the fate of the world.

The film’s second half is a series of interviews with Israeli archeologists who discuss evidence for figures like King David and Pontius Pilate, treating their discoveries as confirmations of Scripture. When combined with commentary from a Messianic Jew such as Jonathan Cahn, the Israeli-Gaza conflict becomes a mystical drama between cosmic good and cosmic evil.

That argument rests on a contested theological system. However one responds to the film’s defense of Israel, it must be filtered through the angular lenses of American dispensationalism — a hurdle many viewers may be unwilling to clear.

Centrist appeal

There are smaller criticisms as well: The film appears to lean heavily on AI-generated imagery, which raises its own questions about execution. But in the main, the film is preaching to the broad American center — those who support Israel without belonging to either extreme.

Despite these theological quirks, the film ultimately does something I have long wished D’Souza’s documentaries would do: It speaks clearly and with conviction about an issue that possesses lasting moral weight.

Israel will remain a defining struggle for decades. October 7 is only one chapter of that broader conflict. In taking it on, D’Souza presents a moral argument to a conservative audience that is increasingly drifting from him. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, he is operating on the level of enduring questions of faith rather than the transitory skirmishes of electoral politics. For once, he isn’t simply preaching to the choir.

'The American Revolution' keeps founders at arm's length

If America had an official "documentarian laureate," Ken Burns would be a shoo-in for the job.

Over the last four decades, the filmmaker has devoted his career to capturing the country's history and culture, in works ranging from "Baseball," "Jazz," and "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" to his groundbreaking 1990 masterpiece "The Civil War." And despite his avowed "yellow-dog Democrat" tendencies, he has done so with remarkable nuance.

Those rallying around the American cause are portrayed as a loose collection of criminals, anarchists, slavers, and exiled aristocrats united by high Enlightenment ideals.

Now, just in time for America’s 250th anniversary, Burns has returned with a new six-part PBS series exploring how it all got started.

Fanfare and apprehension

"The American Revolution" arrives with suitable fanfare — and an almost absurdly star-studded cast of voice-over artists. Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Giamatti, Josh Brolin, Meryl Streep, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, and Michael Keaton are among the luminaries who provide narration.

Even so, there has been a level of apprehension surrounding the show, particularly among conservatives. Could a commemoration of America's founding even work in our current moment — when even mild appeals to patriotism and national unity seem to stir up bitter partisan disputes?

Burns seems to have a found a way around this by making his retelling as clinical and unromantic as possible. He is clearly passionate about the American project, but he is unwilling to embrace the mythological or nationalistic sides of that passion.

Whose revolution?

“It’s our creation story,” historian Rick Atkinson says as he discusses the importance of the Revolution. But most of the experts Burns showcases prefer to focus on the negative, puncturing what one calls the “unreal and detached" romanticization of the founders.

Instead, we're invited to ponder the role that slavery and the theft of Native American land played in the fight for independence — not to mention a fair amount of unsavory violence perpetrated by the revolutionaries.

While the series does a good job of covering the conflicts between 1774 and 1783, it takes frequent detours to discuss the issues surrounding the revolution: the role of women contributing to the war, the perspectives of English Loyalists as they became refugees fleeing the conflict, the madness of the Sons of Liberty’s antics, and the perspectives of slaves trying to survive and find liberty too.

Interim Archives/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Living in the tension

A pronounced classical liberalism pervades the storytelling, one reflecting the secular Enlightenment idealism that a “new and radical” vision for mankind could be found through self-determination and freedom, apart from the aristocratic and theocratic haze of Europe.

This vision acknowledges progressive criticism of the era’s slavery and classism, but tries to integrate those faults rather than use them as grounds to discard the entire experiment. It attempts to live within the tension of history and sift out what is still valuable, rather than abandon the project altogether.

Indeed, Burns is generally good about avoiding any sort of score-settling or modern politicking, shy of a few buzzwords. He constantly uses the word “resistance” and ends with a reflection on the potential ruination of the republic by “unprincipled demagogues,” proudly quoting Alexander Hamilton that “nobody is above the law.”

The show’s consensus is overwhelmingly that the values of the Revolution were greater than the severely flawed men who fought it. To Burns, it was not merely a war, but a radical ongoing experiment in human liberty that escaped the colonies like a virus and changed the world forever. He certainly doesn’t want to throw out the liberal project, and so he constantly circles back on defending the war’s idealism.

Idealism and discomfort

This accounts for the show’s title, focusing on its revolutionary implications. It wasn’t just a war, but a change in the way people thought. The show argues that “to believe in America … is to believe in possibility,” and that studying the Revolution is important to understanding “why we are where we are now.”

Unfortunately, the intervening 12 hours require the viewer to swallow a fair share of dubious and rather inflammatory claims, including that George Washington was primarily driven by his class interests as a landowner, that popular retellings often “paper over” the violent actions of the revolutionaries, and that the founders were, on balance, hypocrites.

Its overall perspective is that it is impossible to tell the nation’s origin story in a way that is “clean” and “neat,” with clear heroes and villains. Those rallying around the American cause are portrayed as a loose collection of criminals, anarchists, slavers, and exiled aristocrats united by high Enlightenment ideals.

"The Revolution" wants both this idealism and discomfort to sit equally in your mind, as you ponder how morally compromised men could change the world. As one of the historians asks, “How can you know something is wrong and still do it? That is the human question for all of us.”

Overall, Ken Burns’ latest proves a very bittersweet watch, hardly the sentimental reflection on Americanism that the country’s approaching 250th anniversary demands, but also too idealistic and classically liberal to comfortably fit anyone’s agenda. It wants to lionize the founding’s aspirational values of democracy, equality, and revolution, while assiduously avoiding praising the people involved.

It's a remarkably watchable and entertaining work of sober disillusionment.

Do we love the 'Wicked' movies because we hate innocence?

As I watched Jon M. Chu's "Wicked: For Good" last week, I kept thinking about another, very different filmmaker: David Lynch.

Specifically, the Lynch that emerges from Alexandre Philippe's excellent 2022 documentary "Lynch/Oz," wherein we discover just how deeply the infamously surreal filmmaker was influenced by one of cinema's sweetest fantasy films: the original "Wizard of Oz."

In the era of #WitchTok ... a story like 'Wicked' has built-in appeal.

Philippe's film includes footage from a 2001 Q and A in which Lynch confirms the extent of his devotion: "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

The logic of fairyland

And that shouldn't be surprising given how much it shows up in his work. From Glinda the Good Witch making an appearance in "Wild at Heart," to the hazy, dreamlike depiction of suburbia in "Blue Velvet," his films exist in a dual state between the realm of fairyland and the underworld.

Indeed, Lynch doesn't reject either. In proper Buddhist fashion, these two forces exist in balance, equally potent and true. There is both good and evil in his world. Neither negates the other's existence. And when darkness spills over into the light, it may be tragic, but it is also just another part of the world. Like Dorothy, his protagonists find themselves walking deeper into unknown territory. The protagonists of his films truly "aren't in Kansas anymore."

"The Wizard of Oz" is potent because it captures the logic of fairyland better than almost any film ever made. Channeling the fairy stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald, it transports the mind to a realm that is more real than real, where even the most dire intrusion of evil can be set right according to simple moral rules.

As G.K. Chesterton famously puts it:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Wicked good

"Wicked" and its new sequel reject this comforting clarity for something altogether more "adult" and ambiguous. Instead of presenting good and evil as objective realities that can be discerned and defeated, the films show how political authorities manipulate those labels to scapegoat some and exalt others.

They do so by swapping the original's heroes and villains. The Wonderful Wizard is a cruel tyrant. Glinda is foppish and self-obsessed. Dorothy is the unwitting tool of a corrupt regime. And Elphaba — the so-called Wicked Witch — is reimagined as a sympathetic underdog with a tragic backstory, a manufactured villain invented to keep Oz unified in ire and hatred.

Elphaba exudes a whiff of Milton's Lucifer — an eternal rebel in a tragic quest to upend the moral order. But unlike "Paradise Lost," "Wicked" presents rebellion against its all-powerful father figure not as a tragic self-deception, but as a justified response to systemic cruelty.

Witch way?

"Wicked: For Good" takes the ideas of its predecessor even further than mere rebellion. If "Wicked: Part One" is about awakening to the world's realities and becoming radicalized by them, "Wicked: For Good" is about the cost of selling out — the temptation to compromise with a corrupt system and the soul-crushing despair that follows.

This is where the irony of the film's title, "Wicked: For Good" comes in. Once a person sees the world for what it truly is, they can't go back without compromising themselves. They've "changed for good." They've awakened and can't return to sleep.

It's worth considering why the "Wicked" franchise is so wildly popular. Gregory Maguire's original 1995 novel has sold 5 million copies. The 2003 stage show it inspired won three Tony Awards and recently became the fourth longest-running Broadway musical ever. And the first film grossed $759 million last winter, with the sequel poised to make even more money.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this outsize success comes at a time when Wicca and paganism have grown into mainstream cultural forces. In the era of #WitchTok, in which self-proclaimed witches hex politicians and garner billions of views on social media, a story like "Wicked" has built-in appeal. It offers glamorous spell-casting and a romantic tale of resistance to authority.

Photo by The Salt Lake Tribune / Contributor via Getty Images

A bittersweet moral

The temptation of witchcraft is one that always hovers over our enlightened and rationalistic society. Particularly for young women, witchcraft offers a specific form of autonomy and power — over body, spirit, and fate — that patriarchal societies often deny. Many view witchcraft as progressive and empowering; "witchy vibes" have become a badge of identity.

Thus the unsettling imagery of Robert Eggers' 2015 film "The Witch" comes into focus: A satanic coven kidnaps and kills a Puritan baby, seduces a teenage girl, and gains the power to unsubtly "defy gravity" through a deal with the devil.

"Wicked" is all about this power to transcend. Even as its protagonist grows despairing in the second film and abandons her political quest for the freedom of the wastelands, the film presupposes that it is better to resist or escape a corrupt system than submit to it.

Ultimately, the two films leave their audience with a bittersweet moral: Society is dependent on scapegoats. The Platonic noble lie upon which all societies rest cannot be escaped — but it can be redirected. A new civic myth can be founded that avoids sacrificing the vulnerable and overthrows the demagogues atop Mount Olympus. And the witches play the central role in overturning the world of Oz. Their rebellion sets it free.

But because the films blur the clear, objective distinction between good and evil — even while acknowledging that real evil exists — the characters in "Wicked" often drift in moral grayness, defining themselves mainly in relation to power. The world becomes overbearing, radicalizing, and morally unstable.

Sad truth

This is far afield from the vision of Oz presented in the 1939 film, the one David Lynch venerated as vital to his understanding of the world. But it reflects how modern storytellers often grapple with Oz. Almost every sequel or spin-off struggles to recapture the sincerity of the original. The 1985 sequel "Return to Oz" reimagined the land with a dark-fantasy twist. 2013's "Oz the Great and Powerful" comes closest to the original tone but centers on fraudulence and trickery.

"Wicked," too, falls in line with the modern tendency to subvert and complicate traditional stories of good versus evil. "Frozen," "The Shape of Water," "Game of Thrones," and "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" all explore morally conflicted worlds where bravery is futile or where Miltonian rebellion is celebrated.

Of course, seeing the stories of our childhood with a jaundiced adult eye can be quite entertaining; it's perfectly understandable why even those not in covens love these films. They are well-made, well-performed, and especially irresistible to former theater kids (I am one).

Their popularity isn't inherently bad either. They are perfectly fine in isolation. It is only when we contrast them with the clarity and beauty of the original — and place them within the context of our society — that a sad truth emerges: Finding fairyland is hard. Most of us prefer to live in the Lynchian underworld.

'Slam Frank': The Anne Frank musical with something to offend everyone

Ten years ago, I sat in the dark at the Public Theater in downtown New York City, surrounded by a murmuring crowd, waiting for the curtain to rise on a brand-new play called "Hamilton."

At that point in time, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical had yet to become the behemoth it is now. Quite the opposite — there were no cast albums or Disney+ recordings, and aside from a few regional workshops years earlier and its word-of-mouth reputation as the “next big thing,” no one in the audience had any idea what we were in for.

A pansexual Latina Anne Frank with an Afro-Caribbean tiger mom and a chronically 'neurospicy' closet case for a dad? Now you've gone too far.

Expanding the form

The next few hours were filled with a strange, albeit thoroughly impressive, showing of lyrical prowess. Miranda had somehow managed to turn historian Ron Chernow's 818-page Alexander Hamilton biography into a crowd-pleasing, pop-culture-infused depiction of the earliest days of a fledgling America.

More provocative was Miranda's deliberate choice to cast primarily black and Latino actors to portray the founding fathers. While a few nitpickers balked at the spectacle of "people of color" portraying slave owners, most marveled at the audacious ingenuity of it: What could be more revolutionary than retelling the American story so that it reflects all Americans?

The crowd left the theater excited. There was no doubt that we had witnessed something groundbreaking. If Aaron Burr could be black and Alexander Hamilton Puerto Rican, what else was possible?

Decolonizing 'Diary'

Eight years later, lyricist and composer Andrew Fox stumbled upon an answer. It came to him in the form of a (since-deleted) 2022 Twitter thread hotly debating a never-before-asked question: Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege?

As is often the case, the online arguing devolved into acrimonious ad hominem and fruitless whataboutism. Fox realized that mere words would never get to heart of the matter. As with "Hamilton," it would take the power of musical theater to win hearts and minds. And he would do Miranda's non-white casting one better — reimagining Anne Frank herself as a person of color.

And so Fox and librettist Joel Sinensky set out to transform the "Diary of Anne Frank" into "Slam Frank," an intersectional, multiethnic, gender-queer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.

Originally slated for three weeks at small off-Broadway venue the Asylum, "Slam Frank" has become a massive hit for the theater, which recently extended its run through the end of December.

Piercings and Patagonias

Want diversity? Look no farther than the viewers showing up in droves. At any given performance, you can find a septum piercing, a Patagonia vest, and a pair of bifocals all in the same row.

Yes, even liberals enjoy "Slam Frank," despite the outrage it has provoked in some of their compatriots. “This whole project is head-spinningly grotesque and offensive,” went one post to the r/JewsOfConscience sub-Reddit. “Bringing up the holocaust and not mentioning the current genocide in Gaza just gives me the ick,” lamented another.

The irony of takes like these is thick, since one can imagine these same critics of "Slam Frank" being perfectly open to the idea of race- and gender-swapping other historical characters. But a pansexual Latina Anne Frank with an Afro-Caribbean tiger mom and a chronically "neurospicy" closet case for a dad? Now you've gone too far.

TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images

A real production

The show's earliest marketing attracted attention with a simpler question: “Is 'Slam Frank' a real musical?”

The answer is a decisive "yes." "Slam Frank" is not a social media gimmick or an expertly crafted exercise in long-form rage- bait. Again: It is a full-length show, with a cast, that is being performed on regularly scheduled dates at the Asylum NYC.

I know because I've seen it. "Slam Frank" is not just a real production, but an entertaining one. It is smartly written, balancing humor with sincerity, featuring songs composed and performed with impressive musicianship. Think Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s "The Book of Mormon" or the award-winning puppet extravaganza "Avenue Q" — but with a final gesture of leftist piety that pushes the logic of your average keffiyeh-clad student protester at Columbia to uncomfortable extremes.

The shocking finale is played so straight that plenty will miss the satire, and even those in on the joke may notice how easily it could be mistaken for peak-wokeness agitprop. If there is a clear "message" here, the show's creators aren't about to clarify it. "Slam Frank" is happy to offend each viewer in whatever way he, she, or they wish to be offended. How's that for inclusive?

'Landman': Is Taylor Sheridan's gritty oil drama the last honest show about America?

The days of "The Wire," "The Sopranos," "Boardwalk Empire," "Breaking Bad," and "Better Call Saul" are gone. And they're never coming back.

Instead of quality TV, we get a stream of shallow muck that insults our intelligence and wastes our time. Seth Rogen peddling the same stale stoner humor for the thousandth time. Pedro Pascal starring in a dystopian video-game adaptation so obsessed with gay "representation" that it might as well list Grindr as a co-producer.

Sheridan shows a country held together by early mornings, long shifts, and people who take pride in work most citizens rarely notice.

Then, just as you’re about to suffocate in the hothouse atmosphere of algorithm-driven fake-prestige TV, one show comes stomping in with a pair of steel-toed boots and kicks the door off its hinges. Fresh air floods the place — enough that something real might actually grow again. That show is "Landman."

Drill, baby, drill

Forget "shame"; it's time to drill, baby, drill. Taylor Sheridan's hit is back for season 2, with the TV auteur once again proving that he is one of the few people in Hollywood who actually understands the America he is depicting. Many viewers know him from "Yellowstone," the rare modern hit that refused to treat ranchers the way Hollywood treats anyone who still works with their hands. Where executive elites see deplorables, he sees Americans with stories worth telling.

Sheridan brings that same respect to "Landman." He writes ordinary Americans with dignity rather than derision. He shows them as they are: hardworking, flawed, loyal, funny, and strong enough to carry a story on their backs. "Landman" is no cheap cousin of "Yellowstone." It stands tall: lean, mean, focused, and built with the same skill that made Sheridan’s early work impossible to ignore.

The show moves effortlessly between blue-collar reality and white-collar brutality, revealing the canyon between those who pull the oil from the ground and those who profit from it. There’s a real honesty to that contrast. Sheridan knows this world, and it shows. You feel it in every shot of the Permian Basin. You hear it in the blunt, believable way his characters speak.

Billy Bob at his best

And then there’s Billy Bob Thornton. One of America’s finest actors, doing his best work since he stole "Fargo" as a soft-spoken psychopath who could change the temperature of a room with a single line. As Tommy Norris, a ruthless oilman, he brings back that same menace, just a little more restrained. He’s the perfect Sheridan creation: bruised, stubborn, quick to size people up, and capable of cruelty when pushed.

Season 1 worked best when it put Norris at the center and let everything else orbit around him. The very first scene of the very first episode sets the tone. Norris, blindfolded in a room with a cartel heavy, cracks a dry line about how they both traffic in addictive products. His just happens to make more money. It’s a joke with teeth. Sheridan doesn’t shy away from the darker corners of the oil world, the places where danger, deceit, and obscene wealth share the same bed.

Norris once ran his own outfit. Now he’s a fixer for M-Tex Oil, answering to Monty Miller, a billionaire played by Jon Hamm of "Mad Men" fame. Hamm leans into one of the last great “man’s man” roles on TV. He moves through marble corridors and executive suites with the relaxed confidence of a man who has never had to fight for a parking space or a paycheck.

Norris gets the other Texas. The asylum-adjacent McMansion he shares with co-workers. The long, unforgiving drives that eat up whole days. And the late-night waffle joints where truckers, rig hands, and the down-and-outs swallow bad coffee and brood over worse decisions.

Recognizably real

Sheridan shows a country held together by early mornings, long shifts, and people who take pride in work most citizens rarely notice. He zooms in on communities where faith still shapes daily life, where people curse when they have to, where men bow their heads before a meal and chew tobacco like there’s no tomorrow.

For conservatives, and especially for Christians who are tired of being reduced to stereotypes, "Landman" feels recognizably real. Season 1 had its flaws, including a few moments that leaned too hard into climate panic, but it never lost sight of what matters: good storytelling built on real characters and real consequences.

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Men at work

And yes, the progressive pearl-clutchers will claim "Landman" has a “woman problem,” the same complaint they threw at "Yellowstone." They insist that Sheridan sidelines women or turns them into cardboard cutouts.

The truth is far less dramatic. Both ranching and the oil fields are worlds dominated by men, and Sheridan writes them as they actually are, not as activists wish them to be. That’s not misogyny, but an accurate reflection of the reality millions of Americans live every day. Sure, some female characters could use more lines, but that hardly damages the show. It simply acknowledges that in these worlds, the danger, the decisions, and the dirty work fall mostly on men.

"Landman" also has something most modern shows forget: a genuine sense of place. Not the packaged Americana you see on postcards, but the West Texas that actually exists, where the heat melts your mind and vacation time is something you hear about, not something you get.

Season 2 promises to go deeper — underground for the oil and under the skin of the people who pull it out. More tension between the barons and the boys in the mud. More of Thornton’s world-weary wit. And more of what Sheridan does better than anyone around: crafting TV that wouldn’t look out of place beside the giants of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

If "Yellowstone" was Sheridan’s hymn to the American ranch, "Landman" is his sermon on the American worker. In an age of narrative nothingness, something on TV finally feels worth watching.

Louis CK's 'Ingram': Skilled comic spews self-indulgent self-abuse

For more than two centuries, the great American novel has tempted writers who dreamed of capturing the country’s soul between two covers.

From Melville’s "Moby-Dick" to Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby," from Faulkner’s haunted South to Steinbeck’s dust-caked plains, these novels shaped the way Americans saw themselves. Even in decline, the form still attracted giants. Updike, Roth, Morrison — writers who made words shine and sentences sing. Each tried to show what it means to be American: to dream, to stumble, and to start again.

To compound matters, 'Ingram' isn’t just a story of exploration, but also one of self-exploration, in the most literal and least appealing sense.

Now comes comedian, filmmaker, and repentant sex pest Louis C.K. to try his hand at what turns out to be ... a not-great American novel. In truth, it’s awful.

Road to nowhere

"Ingram" reads like a road map to nowhere — meandering, bloated, and grammatically reckless. The prose wanders as if written under anesthesia. Sentences stretch, then sag. The paragraphs arrive in puddles, not lines. There’s an energy in C.K.’s comedy — a kind of desperate honesty — that, on stage, electrifies. But on the page, that same honesty slips into self-indulgence. The book is less "On the Road" and more off the rails.

To be clear, I love his comedy. I’ve seen him live and will see him again in the new year. He remains one of the most gifted observers of human absurdity alive — a man who can mine a half-eaten slice of pizza for existential truth. But this is not about comedy. This is about writing. And C.K. cannot write. The pacing, the architecture, the restraint — none of it is there.

Rough draft

The story unfolds in a version of rural Texas that seems to exist only in C.K.’s imagination, a land of dull prospects and even duller minds. At its center is Ingram, a poor, half-feral boy raised in poverty and pushed out into the world by a mother who tells him she has nothing left to offer. His education consists of hardship and hearsay. He treats running water like sorcery and basic plumbing like black magic. C.K. calls it “a young drifter’s coming of age in an indifferent world,” but it reads more like rough stand-up notes bound by mistake.

The writing is atrocious. Vast portions of the book read like this:

I couldn’t see my eyes, but I knew what was on my throat was a hand by the way it was warm and tightening and quivering like you could feel the thinking inside each finger, which were so long and thick that one of them pressed hard against the whole side of my face.

Or this:

I sat up, rubbing my aching neck til my breath came back regular, and I crawled out the tent flap myself, finding the world around me lit by the sun, which, just rising, was still low enough in the sky to throw its light down there under the great road, which was once again roaring and shaking above me.

Sentences stretch on like prison terms, suffocated by their own syntax, gasping for punctuation. The dialogue is somehow worse. Ingram’s conversations with the drifters and degenerates he meets on his journey stumble from cliché to confusion, the rhythm of speech giving way to nonsensical babble.

Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

A gripping tale

To compound matters, "Ingram," isn’t just a story of exploration, but also one of self-exploration, in the most literal and least appealing sense. There’s a staggering amount of masturbation. C.K. doesn’t so much write about shame as relive it, page after sticky page. His public fall from grace plays out again and again, only now under the pretense of art. It’s less confession than repetition — self-absolution by way of self-abuse, and somehow still not funny.

Any comparisons to writers like Bukowski or Barry Hannah are little more than wishful thinking. Bukowski was grimy, but in a graceful way. He wrote filth with style, turning hangovers into hymns.

Hannah’s madness had a tune to it, strange but unmistakably his own. Even Hunter S. Thompson, at his most incoherent, had velocity. His sentences tore through the page, drug-fueled but deliberate.

C.K.’s writing has none of that. He tries to channel Americana — the heat, the highways, the hard men who dream of escape — but his clumsy prose ensures the only thing channeled is confusion. As C.K. recently told Bill Maher, he did no research for the book, and that much is evident from the first page. His characters talk like they were written by a man who’s only seen Texas through "No Country for Old Men."

Don't quit your day job

In the history of American letters, many great writers have fallen. Hemingway drank himself into oblivion; Mailer stabbed his wife; Capote drowned in his own decadence. But their sentences still stood. Their craft was the redemption. With "Ingram," C.K. has no such refuge. The book exposes the limits of confession as art — that point where self-exposure turns into self-immolation. It could have been great; instead, it’s the very opposite. The only thing it proves is that writing and performing are different callings. Comedy forgives indiscipline. Literature doesn’t.

The great American novel has survived worse assaults — from bored professors, from self-serious minimalists, from MFA factories that mistake verbosity for vision. But rarely has it been dragged so low by someone so convinced of his brilliance. There’s perverse poetry in it, though. A man who was caught with his pants down now delivers a novel that never pulls them back up.

'A House of Dynamite': Netflix turns nuclear war into an HR meeting

Netflix’s thriller "A House of Dynamite" very much wants to teach us something about the folly of waging war with civilization-ending weapons. The lesson it ends up imparting, however, has more to do with the state of contemporary storytelling.

The film revolves around a high-stakes crisis: an unexpected nuclear missile launched from an unspecified enemy and aimed directly at Big City USA. We get to see America's defense apparatus deal with impending apocalypse in real time.

It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm 'nukes are bad, mmkay?'

Triple threat

“Revolves” is the operative word here. The movie tells the same story three times from three different vantage points — each in its own 40-minute segment. From first detection to the final seconds before detonation, we watch a bevy of government elites on one interminable red-alert FaceTime, working out how to respond to the strike.

This is the aptly named screenwriter Noah Oppenheim's second disaster outing for the streamer; he recently co-created miniseries "Zero Day," which features Robert De Niro investigating a nationwide cyberattack.

That series unspooled a complicated and convoluted conspiracy in the vein of "24." "A House of Dynamite" clearly aims for something more grounded, which would seem to make accomplished Kathryn Bigelow perfect for the job.

And for the film's first half-hour she delivers, embedding the viewer with the military officers, government officials, and regular working stiffs for whom being the last line of America's defense is just another day at the office ... until suddenly it isn't. The dawning horror of their situation is as gripping as anything in "The Hurt Locker" or "Zero Dark Thirty."

Then it happens two more times.

On repeat

In Shakespeare’s "Twelfth Night," Duke Orsino laments a repetitive song growing stale: “Naught enters there of what validity and pitch soe'er, but falls into abatement and low price.”

Or put another way, the tune, not realizing its simple beauty, sings itself straight into worthlessness.

And somehow, this manages to be only part of what makes "A House of Dynamite" so unappealing. Our main characters — including head of the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson), general in charge of the United States Northern Command (Tracy Letts), and the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) — offer no semblance of perspicacity, stopping frequently to take others’ feelings into account before making decisions, all while an ICBM races toward Chicago. From liftoff to impact in 16 minutes or less, or your order free.

Missile defensive

So thorough is this picture of incompetence that the Pentagon felt compelled to issue an internal memo preparing Missile Defense Agency staff to “address false assumptions” about defense capability.

One can hardly blame officials when, in the twilight of the film, we’re shown yet another big-screen Obama facsimile (played by British actor Idris Elba) putting his cadre of sweating advisers on hold to ring Michelle, looking for advice on whether his course of action should be to nuke the whole planet or do nothing. The connection drops — she is in Africa, after all, and her safari-chic philanthropy outfit doesn’t make the satellite signal any stronger. He puts the phone down and continues to look over his black book of options ranging "from rare to well done,” as his nuclear briefcase handler puts it.

And then the movie ends. The repetitive storylines have no resolution, and their participants face no consequences. The single ground missile the U.S. arsenal managed to muster up — between montages of sergeants falling to their knees at the thought of having to do their job — has missed its target.

Designated survivors — with the exception of one high-ranking official who finds suicide preferable — rush to their bunkers. The screen fades to black, over a melancholy overture. Is it any wonder that audiences felt cheated? After sitting through nearly two hours of dithering bureaucrats wasting time, their own time had been wasted by a director who clearly thinks endings are passé.

No ending for you

If you find yourself among the unsatisfied, Bigelow has some words for you. In an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she justified her film's lack of a payoff thusly:

I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] "it’s bad that happened." But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons and — in a perfect world — getting rid of them.

Holy Kamala word salad.

Photo by dikushin via Getty Images

Bigelow-er

For much of her career, director Kathryn Bigelow has told real stories in interesting ways that — while not always being the full truth and nothing but the truth — were entertaining, well shot, and depicted Americans fulfilling their manifest destiny of being awesome.

That changed with Bigelow's last film, 2017's "Detroit," a progressive, self-flagellating depiction of the 1967 Detroit race riots (final tally: 43 deaths, 1,189 injured) through the eyes of some mostly peaceful black teens and the devil-spawn deputy cop who torments them. "A House of Dynamite" continues this project of national critique.

But what, exactly, is the point? It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm “nukes are bad, mmkay?” This is a lecture on warfare with the subtlety of a John Lennon song, set in a world where the fragile men in charge must seek out the strong embrace of their nearest girlboss.

It’s no secret that 2025 carries a distinct “end times” energy — a year thick with existential threats. AI run amok, political fracture edging toward civil conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, even the occasional UFO headline — pick your poison. And it’s equally obvious that the internet, not the cinema, has become the primary arena where Americans now go to see those anxieties mirrored back at them.

"A House of Dynamite" is unlikely to reverse this trend. If this is the best Hollywood's elite can come up with after gazing into the void, it's time to move the movie industry to DEFCON 1.

‘Nuremberg’: Russell Crowe’s haunting portrayal of Nazi evil

Say what you will about Russell Crowe, but he has never been a run-of-the-mill actor.

At his best, he surrenders to the role. This is an artist capable of channeling the full range of human contradictions. From the haunted integrity of "The Insider" to the brute nobility of "Gladiator," Crowe once seemed to contain both sinner and saint, pugilist and philosopher.

In a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.

Then, sometime after "A Beautiful Mind," the light dimmed. The roles got smaller, the scandals bigger.

There were still flashes of brilliance — "American Gangster" with Denzel Washington, "The Nice Guys" with Ryan Gosling — proof that Crowe could still command attention when the script was worth it. But for every film that landed, two missed the mark: clumsy thrillers, lazy comedies, and a string of forgettable parts that left him without anchor or aim. His career drifted between prestige and paycheck, part self-sabotage, part Hollywood forgetting its own.

Exploring the abyss

But now the grizzled sexagenarian returns with "Nuremberg" — not as a comeback cliché, but as a reminder that the finest actors are explorers of the human abyss. And Crowe, to his credit, has never been afraid to go deep.

In James Vanderbilt’s new film, the combative Kiwi plays Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarschall standing trial for his part in history’s darkest chapter. The movie centers on Goering’s psychological chess match with U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who becomes both fascinated and repulsed by the man before him. Goering, with his vanity, intelligence, and theatrical self-pity, is a criminal rehearsing for immortality.

The film unfolds as a dark study of guilt and self-deception. Kelley, played with that familiar, hollow-eyed tension of Rami Malek, sets out to dissect the anatomy of evil through Goering’s mind. Yet the deeper he digs, the more he feels the ground give way beneath him — the line between witness and accomplice blurring with every exchange.

Disturbingly human

Crowe’s Goering is not the slobbering villain of old war films. He’s disturbingly human, even likeable. He jokes, he reasons, he charms. He’s a man who knows how to disarm his enemy by appearing civil — and therein lies the horror. It’s a performance steeped in Hannah Arendt’s famous concept of the “banality of evil”: the idea that great atrocities are rarely committed by psychopathic monsters but by ordinary people made monstrous — individuals who justify cruelty through bureaucracy, obedience, or ideology.

Arendt wrote those words after watching Adolf Eichmann, another Nazi functionary, defend his role in the Holocaust. She was struck not by his madness but his mildness — his desire to be seen as merely following orders. Crowe’s Goering embodies that same terrifying normalcy. He doesn’t see himself as a villain at all, but as a patriot — wronged, misunderstood, and unfairly judged. It’s his charm, not his cruelty, that unsettles.

The brilliance of Crowe’s performance is that he resists caricature. He reminds us that evil doesn’t always wear jackboots. Sometimes it smiles, smokes, and quotes Shakespeare. It’s the kind of role only a mature actor can pull off — one who has met his own demons and understands that evil seldom announces itself.

It is also, perhaps, the perfect role for a man who has spent decades wrestling with his own legend. Crowe was once Hollywood’s golden boy — rugged, brooding, every inch the leading man — but the climb was steep and the fall steeper. Fame, like empire, demands endless victories, and Crowe, ever restless, grew weary of the war.

Getty Images

A bygone breed

With "Nuremberg," he hasn’t returned to chase stardom but to confront something larger — the unease that hides beneath every civilized surface. Goering, after all, was no brute. He was cultured, eloquent, even magnetic — proof that wisdom offers no wall against wickedness. And in a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.

At one point in the film, Goering throws America’s own hypocrisies back at Kelley: the atomic bomb, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the collective punishment of nations. It’s a rhetorical trick, but it lands. Crowe delivers those lines with the oily confidence of a man who knows that moral purity is a myth and that self-righteousness is often evil’s most convenient disguise.

The film may not be perfect. Its pacing lags at times, and its historical framing flirts with melodrama. But Crowe’s performance cuts through the pretense like a scalpel. There’s even a dark humor in how he toys with his captors — the court jester of genocide, smirking as the world tries to comprehend him.

Crowe’s Goering is, in the end, a mirror. Not just for the psychiatrist across the table, but for us all. The machinery of horror is rarely built by fanatics, but by functionaries convinced they’re simply doing their jobs.

Crowe’s performance reminds us why acting, when done with conviction, can still rattle the soul. His Goering is maddening and mesmeric. He captures the human talent for self-delusion, the ease with which conscience can be out-argued by ambition or fear. "Nuremberg" refuses to let the audience look away. It reminds us that every civilization carries the seed of its own undoing and every human heart holds a shadow it would rather not confront.

Russell Crowe is back, tipped for another Oscar — and in an age when Hollywood produces so few films worthy of our time or our money, I, for one, hope he gets it.

John Leguizamo's 'The Other Americans' puts art before activism

“Do you know John?”

Yeah, LinkedIn. I know John Leguizamo.

There is no way John Leguizamo knows me, but following the professional networking platform’s suggestion, I went ahead and sent an invitation to the actor/producer to connect.

I grew up in Queens; my family has a butcher shop in Spanish Harlem. If you think Latinos are so united, see what happens when you call a Puerto Rican a Mexican.

I haven’t kept up with Leguizamo’s career. The only times I see him pop up now is when he’s complaining about the lack of Latino representation in show business. In fact, when it comes to complaining about representation, John Leguizamo is overrepresented.

'Liquor Store Gunman'

I read in Variety that early on in his career, Leguizamo “felt humiliated" playing the role of "Liquor Store Gunman" in Mike Nichols’ "Regarding Henry" (1991).

“I shoot this white guy [Harrison Ford],” Leguizamo explains. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m perpetuating what they want to see,’ which is negative Latino images.”

It’s interesting that Leguizamo felt humiliated playing a Latino stereotype in "Regarding Henry" but managed to put that humiliation aside a couple years later to play a Latino stereotype in "Carlito’s Way." To be fair: Latino gangster Benny Blanco from the Bronx is a far more memorable character than Liquor Store Gunman. (What kind of last name is “Gunman” anyway? It ain’t Latin.)

When not at the mercy of other screenwriters and casting agents for roles, Leguizamo, a one-man-show-making machine, made a career out of performing his own Latino characters — which are not all necessarily negative images but certainly stereotypical in many respects. I mean, this is the same artist who made "Freak," "House of Buggin’," and "John Leguizamo’s Spic-O-Rama," which is not to be confused with generic Spic-O-Rama.

In an interview with "NBC Nightly News," Leguizamo declares, “We’re almost 20% of the population, I want 20% of the executives, 20% of the stories, 20% of the principal leads, then I’ll be quiet.”

Regarding 'us'

By “we,” of course he means Latinos — which includes me (even though, again, John doesn’t know me).

I doubt a perfectly equitable distribution of roles in show business along ethnic lines will quiet Leguizamo though. Even a world where an Al Pacino can’t swoop in to capture the leading Cuban and Puerto Rican roles will shut Leguizamo up.

Notice Leguizamo isn’t making this appeal for equity when it comes to other industries. Can you picture John Leguizamo showing up to a farm or construction site, demanding fewer Latinos — legal or undocumented — because they’re overrepresented?

So in the year 2025, we’re about 20% of the population, but looking back at the "Regarding Henry" year of 1991 — can you imagine if that were the movie that defined 1991! — Latinos were only about 9% of the population.

In the year of Benny Blanco from the Bronx, 1993, it jumped to about 9.5%. The further you go back, the fewer Latinos there are in the United States. To expect to see yourself represented when there are so few of you out there is quite something. Narcissistic, you might call it. Perfect for a talent like Leguizamo — who has made a lot of work for and about himself. Albeit a lot of good, original, entertaining, and funny work, I must say.

Hate-watch interrupted

Which brings me to his new play, "The Other Americans," at the Public Theater — which I only heard about because of Leguizamo’s media appearances that come across like he’s on a grievance tour.

So from a marketing standpoint, the Colombian American’s promotional shtick worked. I bought a ticket — but to hate-watch his play.

I don’t like going into a show expecting it to suck — let alone wanting it to suck. I tried to shake those intentions as best as I could. One thing I made sure not to do before the show was to read Leguizamo’s “note from the playwright” that’s printed in the playbill. I don’t know if it really made a difference, because once I stepped into the Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater, he'd won me over.

I had a seat center-stage in the second row. The set looked like an authentic house in Forest Hills, Queens, with a fenced-in backyard and even an above-ground pool that the neighbors could see from their second-story windows. If the Jeffersons had been Latinos, this is what moving on up from Jackson Heights would look like.

The change in neighborhoods is a punch line, as is the pool. One of the first arguments in the play is whether the above-ground pool is a real pool or not, because real pools are in-ground, you know. Yes, an above-ground is kind of trashy, but it still holds water.

Bruce Glikas/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Crowd-pleaser

Leguizamo plays Nelson Castro, a Colombian American laundromat owner, and from his first entrance onto the stage, I’m all in, whether it’s watching him mix a drink or listening to him curse into his cell phone — in English and Spanish. When his wife, Patti (played by actress Luna Lauren Velez), arrives, they’re soon dancing, like a stereotypical Latin couple. The audience loves it.

It feels like I’m on the set of a mult-cam sitcom. The live audience laughs, oohs and aahs. At one point in the play, an audience member caps one of Patti’s lines with what I think was a, “You go, girl!”

I remember Leguizamo saying he was out to create “a new type of American drama” — but what we’re presented with at first is something I could see running on network TV. They’d have to clean up the language and cut back on the Spanglish, but even the plot is perfect pilot material.

Complicated portrayal

Nelson and Patti are preparing for their daughter Toni’s wedding as well as the return of their son, Nick, who’s been gone for some time. Mami’s so nervous she keeps burning the sofrito!

During one of their dance passes in the living room, I notice a run in Patti’s stocking. That image — whether the wardrobe department meant for it to be there or not — has stuck with me.

It turns out their son is coming home after being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown — which his therapist attributes to his family not addressing the trauma he experienced when he was brutally beaten by a group of white boys his last year of high school.

The attack happened at one of his family’s ’mats. The perpetrators even tried to stuff him into one of the washing machines “to wash the brown off of him.” (I guess the racist white boys succeeded? Because the actor who plays Nick, Trey Santiago-Hudson, is rather pale-skinned.)

Nick is in pain and while Nelson wants a do-over with him, the Latin father is not equipped to deal with it. Imagine asking your son who was just released from a mental institution what he has to be anxious about?

It’s in these moments where Leguizamo really shines. He plays such a great dick! Although I don’t think “shines” is the right word for a performance that has so much darkness to it. Nelson is not just a flawed man — in many respects, he’s a wicked man.

The plot to "The Other Americans" is sowell-crafted that I don’t want to risk revealing too much, but in one exchange, a family member compares Nelson to Sisyphus of Greek mythology. It’s a setup to a perfect sitcom punch line, where Nelson assumes it must be a real Greek guy from Astoria. But while Nelson shares some traits with Sisyphus, I think he’s even more like Tantalus.

Who's 'we'?

In his note from the playwright, John Leguizamo writes:

I wanted to write a play about race, and I wanted it to be complicated. I didn't want it to be a morality play, but rather I wanted to show life as we Latino people experience it. We don’t always see the microaggressions, or the systemic road blocks in effect. Even though there's a subtle tokenism at work around us, we often witness the macroaggressions: those obvious, in-your-face type moments. We Latinos experience racism through poverty, the schools in which we are allowed to enroll, and the geographical areas in which we are packed. In New York City, we are equal to the white population, yet you never see us on the cover of newspapers and magazines.

There’s more to his note, but I think this bit above is worth addressing. Firstly, this “we” stuff has got to go. Latinos are not a monolith. I grew up in Queens; my family has a butcher shop in Spanish Harlem. If you think Latinos are so united, see what happens when you call a Puerto Rican a Mexican.

Secondly, in the play Nelson is the one who blames “the system” (which is synonymous with racism) for his lot in life — for example, the failure of his laundromats. “The toxicity of the American dream” is another way I’ve seen it described. But as Nelson’s secrets are revealed, what becomes clear is that he, a tragic figure, is the one responsible for his and his family’s downfall.

The system — if there is one — has actually been very good to the Castros. Just like in real life, the system has been very good to Leguizamo.

With "The Other Americans," Leguizamo fails to make his political statement but succeeds in making a powerful piece of art. ¡Bravo, hermano! Please accept my invitation on LinkedIn.