Sundance Channel’s Rectify Takes a Mighty Swing at Greatness

At any prior point in TV history, Rectify, a six-part drama on the Sundance channel, would be a shake-up-the-medium astonishment: A sober, even stately investigation into a curious kind of afterlife, that of a death-row inmate given freedom twenty years after his conviction. For all the finely crafted mysteries of…

Room 237‘s Best Theories

Theory: The Shining is about the genocide of Native Americans. Evidence: The Overlook Hotel’s Navajo décor; Calumet baking powder cans (logo: an Indian chief) appear at moments when characters are “making treaties”; Nicholson’s Jack Torrance asks a phantom bartender to commiserate about “the white man’s burden”; the Overlook is built…

Room 237‘s Best Theories, and a Very Kubrick Week at O Cinema

Like the blood that gushes from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the Internet’s dead ends, blind links, and circular arguments just might be another part of the…

In Top of the Lake, Peggy Olson Goes to Hell

Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers — a mouth that suggests her…

Other Ozzes, Great and Terrible (but Mostly Terrible)

Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…