Ben’s Column: Ted Lasso Season 2, Episode 9: “Beard After Hours” – Review
A weird Scorsese riff comes out of nowhere after the emotional highs of last week’s episode.
Film and TV Reviews and Podcasts
A weird Scorsese riff comes out of nowhere after the emotional highs of last week’s episode.
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster sets an intriguing pace from the start and carries the human side of the plot through the majority of its runtime. Despite holding back on introducing the titular monster until nearly the end of the film, Ghidorah still manages to be engaging by focusing on the human story without devolving into melodrama like films before it.
A mostly conventional biopic that seeks to redeem its main subject, featuring one of the year’s best performances.
Ted Lasso’s longest episode yet may also be its best.
While the film invites direct comparisons to Sound of Metal, Mogul Mowgli has different ambitions on its mind.
“Headspace” doesn’t introduce new conflicts; rather, they feel like natural extensions of what the show has been building towards throughout the season.
A dynamic central performance and a solid directorial effort makes Anne at 13,000 Ft. a film that’s not to be missed.
If anything, “The Signal” shows that Ted Lasso can handle dramatic turns as well as it can the comedic moments.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings brings the MCU’s first Asian superhero to the screen in a film that dazzles with elaborate set pieces and an energetic buddy energy between leads Simu Liu and Awkwafina. With impressive visual effects in its third act, Shang-Chi is certainly one of the MCU’s best looking films to date (outside of the colorful and vibrate Guardians of the Galaxy films). But even with fantastic action and visual effects, the film suffers a bit from origin story issues and, specifically, its handling of important exposition through inconsistent and repetitive flashbacks.
Season two juggles new plot developments and ignores newer ones, to mixed results.
A solid entry to the beginning of a new era for Marvel
At times, The Night House feels like a paint by numbers psychological horror film with a surprising amount of visual flair. Other times, it’s a vehicle for a really fantastic and varied performance in lead actress Rebecca Hall. And yet, it is also guilty of being a convoluted mess housing bizarre occurrences in a maze of barely coherent plot threads. When it works, The Night House delivers effective jump scares and clever visual frights. Ultimately, however, the good parts of The Night House fight an uphill battle against a story that doesn’t quite know what it is until the last several minutes, when you’re likely to have stopped caring enough to piece it together.
Christmas comes early this year, in one of Ted Lasso’s best episodes.
If there’s one of Ted Lasso’s tertiary characters that I’m excited to see more of, it’s Sam Obisanya.
Heder’s script has a few plot hurdles that keep it from greatness, but her heart is in the right place, and the film represents a promising step forward for her and Emilia Jones.