One complaint I’ve brought up about Game of Thrones is the way each episode often feels more like a collection of greatest hits moment than a full-fledged narrative. But last night’s “Second Sons” was the biggest improvement yet.

… but STAR TREK Into Darkness doesn’t really know what it wants to be, its plot is vague, and it lacks a sense of climactic drive or build.

Love and what cannot be done–this week’s Game of Thrones begins weaving deviation and devastation…

My Brother the Devil is a solid example of how meat-and-potatoes craftsmanship, combined with an influx of cultural and ethnic diversity, can invigorate cinema and its genres. On its surface, the film is a standard Boyz N The Hood narrative frame: a young man from an economically devastated neighborhood decides its time for him to [...]

The most humanistic and the most horrific of what the Game of Thrones world has to offer…

At the end of the day, I just wasn’t moved.

Rather like Game of Thrones’ writers, I have so much material to work with here that I’m forced to let things slide by unremarked-upon some weeks. So let’s revisit what I had to leave out previously. Last week’s “And Now His Watch Has Ended” and this week’s “Kissed By Fire” clarified the machinations over who [...]

One gripe I’ve had with Game of Thrones, is the amount of plot threads the writers jump through per episode. As my fellow BYTer Alan Zilberman put things, sometimes it feels more like a greatest hits reel than a coherent and sustained act of storytelling. And I still think it would behoove Benioff, Weiss, and [...]

Original science fiction cinema is something of a precious commodity these days. Oh sure, we’ve got comic book movies and the all-consuming Hollywood drive to exploit established franchises. But a self-contained, start-to-finish original science fiction drama with earnest creative and visual ambitions? We haven’t really had one of those since Inception. (Or Serenity, if a [...]

Well, that was probably the biggest “What the fuck?!” moment Game of Thrones has ended an episode on since the penultimate installment of Season One. Of course, the odious and mercurial Jaime Lannister losing a hand isn’t so purely devastating as the capricious execution of the straight-forwardly decent Ned Stark. At the same time, it’s [...]