Ken and Robin Consume Media: Superman, Eddington, Severance, Cloud
July 22nd, 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
Severance Season 2 (Television, US, Apple+, Dan Erickson, 2025) Seeking his supposedly dead wife, outie Mark (Adam Scott) attempts to communicate with his innie; the co-workers make a discovery about Helly (Britt Lower). Defies the sophomore slump of high-concept serialized TV with brilliant integration of SF thriller plot points and sublimely acted emotional beats.—RDL
Recommended
Cloud (Film, Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2025) Malign forces close in on a shady online reseller (Masaki Suda.) Slow burn paranoia thriller escalates through several tones and genres, resulting in the rare film that warrants comparison to both Franz Kafka and Budd Boetticher.—RDL
The Stone Flower (Film, USSR, Aleksandr Ptushko, 1946) Young Urals malachite carver (Vladimir Druzhnikov) forsakes his devoted fiancé (Yekaterina Derevshchikova) for the supernatural Mistress of the Copper Mountain (Tamara Makarova), hoping to gaze upon her stone flower and gain ultimate inspiration. Hard-edged Russian fairy tale with spectacular moving sets and a theme of artistic obsession aimed at an adult sensibility.—RDL
Superman (Film, US, James Gunn, 2025) Aided by Daily Planet colleagues, including new girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Superman (David Corenswet) fights back against Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) campaign to discredit and destroy him. Neither Gunn’s sense for the character’s intrinsic idealism or his sincere embrace of a kooky, overstuffed comic book universe would mean much without his grasp of kinetic action and story momentum.—RDL
Superman (Film, US, James Gunn, 2025) Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) mounts a multi-pronged assault on Superman (David Corenswet), whose friends (including an insanely lovable CGI dog, if somehow you missed the words “James Gunn” at the front) help him survive and win. In earnest conversation with best-of-Iron-Age DC and with Richard Donner’s 1978 Pinnacle, Gunn charts a new-old Superman by sticking the fights, the story, and the character. Not every swing is a hit, but it’s one of Gunn’s best at-bats overall.—KH
Sylvia and the Ghost (Film, France, Claude Autant-Lara, 1946) To cheer up his beloved teen daughter (Odette Joyeux) after selling the family painting of a dashing noble her fancies revolve around, a cash-strapped baron (Pierre Larquey) hires a motley trio to pose as his ghost at her coming-out party, not realizing that the actual phantom (Jacques Tati) has also manifested. This spectral farce would be utterly charming even without periodic appearances by its ghostly spaniel.—RDL
The Tales of Hoffmann (Film, UK, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951) Believing himself jilted by his love, the poet Hoffmann (Richard Rounseville) regales the bar with fantastic tales of his three previous lost loves (Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tcherina, and Ann Ayars). Vertiginously and lushly filmed English-language performance of the Offenbach operetta, an artifact of a time when you could just have a filmed opera as a major cinema release, and when our ecology of the fantastic still supported automatons, reflection-stealing magicians, and singing statues. A magnificent spectacle that must be seen (and heard) to be believed.—KH
Terrified (Film, Argentina, Demián Rugna, 2017) A former pathologist (Norberto Gonzalo), a parapsychologist (Elvira Onetto) and a ghost-breaker (George L. Lewis) team up with a police detective (Maximiliano Ghione) to investigate overlapping haunts in a suburban Buenos Aires neighborhood. Rugna loves to play with perspective, such that no two sightings (or two parts of the same sighting) quite align, adding even more uncertainty to the horror mix. The last act in particular is just unrelenting, perfectly calibrated terror.—KH
Good
Eddington (Film, US, Ari Aster, 2025) In May 2020, asthmatic sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is driven to confront and challenge Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), the connected technoliberal mayor of Eddington, New Mexico. I was much more invested in the first half of the film, a tooth-grindingly painful (and well-aimed) satire of the various insanities of 2020, than I was in the whipsaw-shift into an entirely different (and flatter and much less interesting though also less painful) movie. (The satire does return a bit, at the end.) In the final analysis, the superlative score by Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton, and the compelling cinematography by Darius Khondji, eke it over the Good line.—KH
