dvr this HBO, Sundays, 9 p.m. HBO’s latest water-cooler hit is a miniseries about a Pakistani-American college student named Nasir (Riz Ahmed, in a career making performance) who wakes up after a one-night stand to find the woman he’s slept with brutally stabbed to death. He panics, runs and then he’s caught and charged with…
dvd of the week Lewis Bloom, played by a balls-out brilliant Jake Gyllenhaal, is a nightcrawler, a freelance reporter who spends the nights wandering the city, waiting for a police scanner to announce a car crash or a murder that can be filmed and turned into the bloody local TV news. Pathologically ambitious, solicitous and…
Sites like Gawker, papers like the National Enquirer and stations like HLN give it some serious competition, but local television news is still arguably the crassest, most cynical and often least ethical news medium in the United States. This has been the case for decades, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has become a cliché…
dvd of the week If you were offended by Zero Dark Thirty, and there’s good reason to be, you may find solace in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is as subversively anti-American and anti-imperialist as Zero Dark Thirty was pro-American and pro-fascism. Based on the novel by Mohsin Hamid, it is the story of how Changez…
