Ken and Robin Consume Media: Play Dirty, Short Spy Stories, Livestreaming Horror, and Meta-Reacher
October 14th, 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
Black Angel (Film, US, Roy William Neill, 1946) To clear her wayward husband of a death row murder rap, a loyal wife (June Vincent) teams with the victim’s alcoholic songwriter ex (Dan Duryea) to get close to their prime suspect (Peter Lorre.) Cornell Woolrich adaptation ticks along as slightly off-kilter for its first two acts, then spins into full nightmare noir.—RDL
The Calder & Behrens Stories (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1962-1981) Calder and Behrens, both middle-aged British WWII veterans, do “distasteful” jobs for a special counterintelligence committee using a combination of fussy brio and unfussy brutality. Perhaps the hardest genre in short fiction to pull off is the espionage short, and Gilbert succeeds virtually every time at bat. Only when read in rapid succession do the stories seem even slightly formulaic, but good luck reading one short and not immediately inhaling both volumes.—KH
Freeway (Film, US, Matthew Bright, 1996) When cops haul off her crackhead mom (Amanda Plummer) and stepdad, an irrepressibly survival-minded at-risk youth (Reese Witherspoon) hitchhikes to Grandma’s house and is picked up by the sinister Dr. Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland.) Fairy tale retold as blackly comic juvenile delinquent flick derives its charge from the contradictions between the director’s gleeful midnight movie impulses and the absolute commitment of its deeply stacked cast.—RDL
GonJiam: Haunted Asylum (Film, South Korea, Jung Bum-shik, 2018) Click-hungry college age ghost hunters livestream their illegal exploration of a derelict mental hospital. Familiar premise skillfully executed, for example by cleverly establishing how the characters can be shooting their found footage from every possible angle.—RDL
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery (Film, Canada, Ally Pankiw, 2025) Documentary traces the origins, explosive growth, and loving vibes of Sarah McLachlan’s late 90s feminist touring festival. Focuses primarily on the show’s emotional impact on artists and audiences, while laudably finding time to depict it as a business enterprise.—RDL
Reacher Said Nothing (Nonfiction, Andy Martin, 2015) Martin, a Cambridge lecturer in French literature, watches thriller author Lee Child from the first keystroke to the last as he writes Reacher novel number 20, Make Me. An extremely interesting look at one writer’s process made even more interesting by Martin’s simmering undertone of flailing to justify his own project to himself. Reacher would never.—KH
Good
KPop Demon Hunters (Film, US, Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025) Demon-hunting kpop trio Huntr/x (Arden Cho, et al.), accelerate their project of locking demons away from human souls, leading the demon lord Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) to retaliate with his own boy band Saja Boys (Ahn Hyo-seop, et al.). Delightful animation and catchy songs do the necessary in this somewhat rote urban fantasy story that could use a skoosh more violence and horror to cut the anodyne flavor.—KH
The Last of Us Season 2 (Television, US, Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann, 2025) A shocking event sends Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her new ride-or-die (Isabela Merced) to Seattle on a mission of vengeance. With a high level of execution, this downbeat post-apocalyptic western took me to a place I did not particularly want to go, leaving me with the feeling that the filmmakers chose to punish the audience for a characters’ sins .—RDL
Play Dirty (Film, US, Shane Black, 2025) Master thief Parker (Mark Wahlberg) assembles a crew including regular sidekick Grofeld (LaKeith Stanfield) when an accomplice who betrayed his last crew (Rosa Salazar) points him to a treasure taken from a shipwreck. Terrible Parker movie; kinda fun Shane Black movie.—RDL
Okay
Play Dirty (Film, US, Shane Black, 2025) Heist planner Parker (Mark Wahlberg) survives betrayal by freedom fighter Zen (Rosa Salazar) and recruits his old crew including Grofield (Lakeith Stanfield) and Ed Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key) to get his own back. Ridiculously awful CGI in an early scene sets the low bar for this clunker, which in addition to miscasting Parker decides to make him Dortmunder to boot. Flashes of cleverness persist, annoyingly.—KH
Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Film, Japan, Takashi Miike, 2010) The schoolteacher (Shô Aikawa) who once saved the world from alien parasites as a striped costumed hero resurfaces as an amnesiac in the grim police state future of 2025. Sequel dives right into freaky tongue-in-cheek imagery without a pause to shape the narrative.—RDL
