Ken and Robin Consume Media: Mission: Impossible, Attila the Hun, and Vintage Fantasy Films

June 17th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Film, Germany, Lotte Reiniger, 1926) Heroic prince battles monsters and an evil magician to save the lovely ruler of a demon island. Cinema’s first animated feature is a straight up swords and sorcery yarn, shot in a beguiling, delicate style with articulated 2D silhouette figures.—RDL

Lost Horizon (Film, US, Frank Capra, 1937) Diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) and four others get hijacked to the peaceful realm of Shangri-La. 21st-century viewers may find Capra slow going, not willing to relax into the scenic and cultural idyll he paints. But there’s a scorpion sting in the tail (and occasional other places) that provide the needed venom beneath the seemingly placid (and visually arresting) action.—KH

Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (Film, US, Christopher McQuarrie, 2025) Superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) continues his quest for the source code that can unmake the Entity, a rogue A.I. destroying truth and threatening apocalypse. Alternately talky and taut, the film does a creditable job of rounding off the whole franchise with one last world-saving mission. Also worth examining as part of Cruise’s lengthy cri de coeur for reality and story in film over AI, CGI, IP, and the other besetting sins of the current age.—KH

Zvenygora (Film, Russia, Alexander Dovzhenko, 1928) During the 1917 German invasion of Russia, an old man and his grandson scheme to find the cursed treasure buried in a magic mountain. Allegorical fantasy with a weird hypnagogic intensity has a lot of mystical Ukrainian nationalism in it for a film its director thought would win over Party cultural apparatchiks.—RDL

Good

Attila the Hun: A Barbarian King and the Fall of Rome (Nonfiction, John Man, 2005) Historical biography traces the rise of the Huns, the impact exerted by the titular leader as he occupied the Balkans and threatened the 5th century Roman Empire(s), and his outsized role in later myth. A solid comprehensive treatment weighed down by putatively flavorful you-are-there-while-I-talk-to-this-museum-curator narrative flourishes.—RDL

Blue Light (Film, Germany, Leni Riefenstahl, 1932) Travelers in a mountain town read the story of Junta (Riefenstahl), a fey “witch” who could climb to the inaccessible blue crystal grotto, and the stranger Vigo (Mathias Wieman) who loves and destroys her. Magnificent climbing sequences provide the highlight of this alternately sententious and tender film, which aims for mysticism and achieves it only sporadically.—KH

Monkey Man (Film, US, Dev Patel, 2024) Man employed as a simian-masked human punching bag at underground MMA matches (Dev Patel) infiltrates a high end nightclub/brothel on a mission of vengeance. Intense actioner blunts its impact by withholding its revenge motivation sequence until the end of act two, instead of putting it up front where it belongs.—RDL

Okay

Destiny (Film, Germany, Fritz Lang, 1921) A grief-stricken young woman (Lil Dagover) begs a weary, remorseful Death (Bernhard Goetzke) to spare her fiance, prompting him to show her vignettes of his inevitable power set in Arabia, Renaissance Italy, and a fanciful China. The heavy hand of Orientalism weighs down this mordant anthology film of the fantastic.—RDL

Fascinatingly Wrong

The Wizard of Oz (Film, US, Larry Semon, 1925) After henchmen from Oz arrive in a biplane to assassinate their unknowing rightful queen Dorothy (Dorothy Dwan), she is whisked there by a tornado, where her farmhand friends (Larry Semon, Oliver Hardy, Curtis McHenry) dress up as a scarecrow, a tin man and a lion. Now-forgotten slapstick star Semon ruined his finances and health with this massive flop, which audiences perhaps thought would bear some resemblance to L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. CW: racism.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Andor, The Phoenician Scheme, Ballerina

June 10th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

The Pinnacle

Andor Season 2 (Television, US, Disney+, Tony Gilroy, 2025) Run by an increasingly ruthless Luthen (Stellan Skarsgard), Cassian earns his spurs as an Alliance intelligence officer; Dedra (Denise Gough) and Syril (Kyle Soller) assist a genocidal Imperial resource extraction scheme. Packed with incident, constantly forwarding its story, this suspenseful, incisive meditation on authoritarianism and the compromises needed to defeat it does serialized television right.—RDL

Recommended

Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney (Television, Netflix, John Mulaney, 2025) This second season of Mulaney’s talk show sadly proves less wonderfully shambolic than the first, but Letterman-style stunts (lining up 25 men by height, Mulaney fighting three 14-year-olds) go some distance to erase the second-season polish. The live remotes are much missed (replaced by clearly producer-driven “Mulaney in the wild” type segments), the taped comedy hits a peak early (a focus group entirely made up of actors who have played Willy Loman) and doesn’t quite hit thereafter. But given the desuetude of the American talk show nowadays, Mulaney still provides a joyful refresher.—KH

Hilma (Film, Sweden, Lasse Hallström, 2022) Obsessive painter Hilma af Klint (Tora Hallström/Lena Olin) flummoxes the 1880s Swedish art establishment by inspiring a collective of spiritualist women, including jealous lover Anna Cassel (Catherine Clark), to fashion her pioneering works of abstract art. Hallström’s script avoids biopic syndrome by rigorously hewing to its emotional and thematic throughline. Due to vagaries of film financing this extremely Swedish film is in English.—RDL

Juror #2 (Film, US, Clint Eastwood, 2024) Doting expectant father and recovering alcoholic (Nicholas Hoult) gets seated on a murder jury, only to realize that he’s the responsible party in the victim’s death. Calmly observant courtroom drama plays its melodramatic premise straight, more moral fable than thriller.—RDL

The Monk and the Gun (Film, Bhutan, Pawo Choyning Dorji, 2023) When election officials arrive in a remote village to stage a practice vote prior to Bhutan’s transition to democracy, a lama orders his junior monk to find him a pair of guns, so he can make things right. Gently amusing, breathtakingly photographed social realist comedy.—RDL

The Order (Film, US, Justin Kurzel, 2025) Reassigned to a rural field office, an FBI agent on the edge (Jude Law) investigates an Aryan Nations terrorist splinter group led by a charismatic young philanderer (Nicholas Hoult.) Tense true crime police procedural mirrors its characters against expansive landscape.—RDL

The Phoenician Scheme (Film, US, Wes Anderson, 2025) Unscrupulous arms dealer-fixer Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) survives his sixth plane crash and decides to name his novitiate daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) as his heir, so that his scheme to bring water and transport to Phoenicia will outlive him. Behind a series of sketches presented as business negotiations, Anderson tells a story of morality and redemption; his most Coen-Brothers-esque film can’t be his finest, but it’s great great fun.—KH

The Phoenician Scheme (Film, US, Wes Anderson, 2025) After yet another assassination attempt resulting in a fiery airplane crash, a ruthless businessman (Benicio del Toro) plucks his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton) from her impending vows as a nun to accompany him as he attempts to knit back together a massive infrastructure deal in a fictive Saharan nation. With less grief and fewer layers than usual for Anderson, this journey into recondite silliness plays like one of his animated features, albeit with actors who move more than a frame at a time.—RDL

Wasp (Fiction, Eric Frank Russell, 1957) Inserted into the hostile and totalitarian Sirian Combine, James Mowry begins a one-man campaign of propaganda, sabotage, and distraction to tie down the enemy forces long enough for Earth to strike a fatal blow. Barring a few super-chemicals and an interstellar radio, the SF level of this WWII war story is almost nonexistent, but as a thrilling adventure it’s hard to beat. Unlike many similar works, Russell constantly conveys the danger of enemy countermeasures; both Mowry and his foes get lucky just enough for verisimilitude.—KH

Good

Ballerina (Film, US, Len Wiseman, 2025) To avenge her father’s death at the hands of the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) joins the Ruska Roma to learn the assassin’s art. The marketing tag “From the World of John Wick” tells you everything wrong with this movie: it slogs through a bunch of Wickiverse world-building before it gets to the bang-bang. The fights are universally great to jaw-dropping; Stahelski (who allegedly re-shot them in post) convincingly sells tiny Ana fighting guys whose legs weigh more than she does. Two of the fight scenes in here are all-timers, but Keanu looks tired of the whole idea in both his cameos.—KH

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Last Bullet, Die Nibelungen, and John Buchan’s Template for Folk Horror

June 3rd, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

The Pinnacle

Die Niebelungen Part I: Siegfried (Film, Germany, Fritz Lang, 1924) Teutonic hero Siegfried (Paul Richter) kills a dragon and steals the cursed treasure of the Niebelungs on his way to woo Kriemhild (Margarete Schön), princess of the Burgundians. Richter is a stiff, but even that might be on purpose in Lang’s obsessively composed, highly stylized take on the medieval epic poem. Nearly every shot is one that generations of filmmakers will later swipe, which makes watching the original an experience in fantastic deja vu.—KH

Die Niebelungen Part II: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Film, Germany, Fritz Lang, 1924) When her weakling brother King Gunther (Theodor Loos) refuses to execute his adviser Hagen (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) for the murder of Siegfried, Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) marries Attila the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to get revenge on her countrymen. As wild and dark as Part I was orderly and bright, this film strips the fantasy from legend, leaving behind only cruelty. Schön’s superb face-acting carries and centers the film, which might otherwise fly apart in chaos; even Klein-Rogge’s Attila is weirdly passive despite a lot of shouting.—KH

Recommended

Last Bullet (Film, France, Guillaume Pierret, 2025) Hard-kicking, high-speeding driver Lino (Alban Lenoir) returns from custody in Spain to reluctantly help ex-partner Julie (Stéfi Celma) protect Areski (Nicolas Duvauchelle), killer of his mentor and his brother, until he can testify against his even worse corrupt cop boss. Astutely starting in mid-action and letting us catch up on the plot reset as we go along, this rounds out the Bullet trilogy in a suitably rousing rain of shattered vehicle parts.—RDL

My Heart is That Eternal Rose (Film, HK, Patrick Tam, 1988) Now an assassin for hire, a man (Kenny Bee) returns to Hong Kong to reunite with his teenage love (Joey Wang), who became a gangster’s girlfriend to secure his safe escape from the city. Dreamy heroic bloodshed in which romance replaces brotherhood as the central motif, with Christopher Doyle cinematography, a baby-faced Tony Leung Chiu Wai in the Nick Carraway role, and Gordon Liu cast against type as a sleazeball.—RDL

T’n’T: Telzey and Trigger (Fiction, James H. Schmitz, 2000) Eight stories, mostly written between 1970 and 1972, continue Schmitz’ super-tech, psionic, interstellar “Federation of the Hub” future to its near conclusion. Three superb novellas (“Child of the Gods,” “Ti’s Toys,” and “The Symbiotes”) effectively blur the line between seemingly omnipotent SF and stark horror; the only flaw of “Glory Day,” the promised team-up between super-psi Telzey and crack shot Trigger, is that it’s only novelette length. In “Compulsion,” the two tackle a threatening ecology from both ends, a little less thrilling if a little more clever.—KH

Trigger & Friends (Fiction, James H. Schmitz, 2001) A different, not quite as perfectly blended mix of heist adventure and space-monster (“Lion Loose”) and the somewhat opaque (not well served by Eric Flint’s edits) novel Legacy are the high points of this collection of six tales written between 1956 and 1974. Effectively spanning Schmitz’ career without showcasing it as well as the other three collections in the Baen series, this is perhaps the least essential. That doesn’t make it bad at all, and the hero of “Lion Loose” runs a fun version of the Yojimbo maneuver worth reading on its own.—KH

Violent Streets (Film, Japan, Hideo Gosha, 1974) Retired yakuza (Noboru Andô) just wants to run his Ginza district flamenco bar, but the botched kidnapping of a singer managed by his now-corporate ex-bosses pulls him back in. Poetically lurid gangster flick builds to a crescendo of bloodshed.—RDL

Witch Wood (Fiction, John Buchan, 1927) During the War of the Three Kingdoms, an idealistic neophyte minister assigned to a rural village discovers that the elders of his church perform Satanic rites in the surrounding deep woods. Theologically minded historical novel dense with Scottish lingo and references is not folk horror but nonetheless sets the template for it.—RDL

Good

The Passionate Friends (Film, UK, David Lean, 1949) Conflicted woman (Ann Todd) gets a surprise second reunion with the loving academic (Trevor Howard) she spurned to marry a dispassionate, wealthy banker (Claude Rains.) Affecting, thanks to Lean, Rains, and Howard, even as the Eric Ambler script carefully excises the entire point of the H. G. Wells source novel, and with it any chance of understanding the protagonist’s behavior.—RDL

Psychomania (Film, UK, Don Sharp, 1974) Aided by their sly sorcerer butler (George Sanders), the insolent scion of a wealthy occultist family (Nicky Henson) enlists his motorcycle gang in his scheme to wreak further havoc after returning from death by sheer force of will. Like most UK delinquent flicks, this odd fusion of the bike gang and folk horror genres regards youth rebellion with appalled disgust. I see the vibes responsible for its recent critical revival but due to its cursory narrative development can’t fully get on board. —RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Thunderbolts*, Final Destination, Daredevil

May 20th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

The Pinnacle

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Film, Germany, Fritz Lang, 1924) With her brother King Gunther (Theodor Loos) refusing to turn over her husband Siegfried’s killer, his aggrieved widow (Margarete Schön) marries Attila the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), setting in motion her inevitable retribution. The second part of Lang’s seminal epic sets aside the fantasy tropes of part one for historical human tragedy with a mass-scale conclusion.—RDL

Recommended

Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 (Television, US, Disney+, Dario Scardapane, 2025) The assassination of friend Foggy Nelson and the rise of the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) to the mayor’s office test the determination of Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) to put his vigilante past behind him at a new law firm. Surprisingly coherent for a show that underwent a conceptual correction in mid-shoot, this doesn’t reach the heights of the original first season but at least understands what was great about it. Unusually for Marvel, which usually vaguebooks its politics, this not only deals with authoritarian criminality in high office but, in a subplot showcasing the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), addresses rogue cops’ co-optation of the character’s insignia.—RDL

The Gilded Lily (Film, US, Wesley Ruggles, 1935) When the charming stenographer (Claudette Colbert) he loves falls for an incognito English lord (Ray Milland) a cynical reporter (Fred MacMurray) turns her into a tabloid sensation. Smart romcom tackles such classic 30s themes as reality stardom and the friend zone.—RDL

Horse Under Water (Fiction, Len Deighton, 1963) Jaundiced MI6 agent accepts a dodgy-seeming mission to retrieve counterfeit currency from a sunken U-boat near the Portuguese coast. Applies knowing bureaucratic realism to a pulpy spy mystery.—RDL

No Greater Glory (Film, US, Frank Borzage, 1934) A put-upon boy strives to prove himself to his military-styled kid gang as dirt bomb warfare with older rivals approaches. Borzage’s depth of feeling lifts this anti-war parable, based on a Ferenc Molnar novel, from stifling didacticism.—RDL

Good

Background to Danger (Film, US, Raoul Walsh, 1943) American visitor to Turkey (George Raft) accepts the plea of a distressed traveler (Osa Massen) to smuggle an envelope into the country, placing himself in the crosshairs of a voluble Nazi operative (Sydney Greenstreet) and the excitable Soviet counterpart (Peter Lorre) opposed to his disinformation scheme. One wonders what Cagney, Bogie or Flynn would have done with the material, and whether writers W. R. Burnett and William Faulkner pared it down to fit the limitations of its stolid, once-popular star. Nonetheless, Walsh moves this wartime Eric Ambler adaptation along and gives Greenstreet and Lorre plenty of room to play.—RDL

Final Destination Bloodlines (Film, US, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, 2025) Fifty-plus years after a premonition of disaster allows her to prevent mass fatalities in a skyview restaurant in 1968, Iris’ (Brec Bassinger and Gabrielle Rose) granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) inherits the premonition and (along with the rest of Iris’ bloodline) Death’s Rube-Goldbergesque attentions. From the heightened surrealism of the initial disaster to the cunning sadism of the multiple kills throughout, this is exactly what one wants from the franchise, plus a touching farewell from semi-regular Tony Todd. Recommended for fans of the series, so Good for more character- or motive-focused horror fans.—KH

Okay

A Guilty Conscience (Film, HK, Wai-Lun Ng, 2023) Irresponsible jerk lawyer (Dayo Wong) seeks a redemptive underdog win after an influential family frames his client for her young daughter’s murder. Part of the recent cycle of Hong Kong courtroom dramas, this gets you rooting for the comeuppance of the bad guys while showing as much concern for legal procedure as wuxia films do for gravity.—RDL

Thunderbolts* (Film, US, Jake Schreier, 2025) Duplicitous biotech corpo turned CIA director Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) inadvertently creates a new albeit underpowered team when she tries to get her various loose-end semi-super contractors (Florence Pugh, et al.) to kill each other off. While superior to the recent ruck of Marvel outings, it’s not actually Good despite the presence of a Theme (depression), one (1) interesting super-encounter (Winter Soldier vs. three (3) Humvees), and Pugh’s actual acting chops. Moments of joy amid a tiresome slog are on theme, though, I guess.—KH