{"id":3780,"date":"2025-06-10T13:04:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T13:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/?p=3780"},"modified":"2025-06-10T13:04:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T13:04:00","slug":"ken-and-robin-consume-media-andor-the-phoenician-scheme-ballerina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/ken-and-robin-consume-media-andor-the-phoenician-scheme-ballerina\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken and Robin Consume Media: Andor, The Phoenician Scheme, Ballerina"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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<\/a>. 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\u2019ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.<\/i><\/p>\n

The Pinnacle<\/h2>\n

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.\u2014RDL<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/h2>\n

Everybody\u2019s Live With John Mulaney (Television, Netflix, John Mulaney, 2025) This second season of Mulaney\u2019s 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 \u201cMulaney in the wild\u201d type segments), the taped comedy hits a peak early (a focus group entirely made up of actors who have played Willy Loman) and doesn\u2019t quite hit thereafter. But given the desuetude of the American talk show nowadays, Mulaney still provides a joyful refresher.\u2014KH<\/p>\n

Hilma <\/a>(Film, Sweden, Lasse Hallstr\u00f6m, 2022) Obsessive painter Hilma af Klint (Tora Hallstr\u00f6m\/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. Hallstr\u00f6m\u2019s 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.\u2014RDL<\/p>\n

Juror #2<\/a> (Film, US, Clint Eastwood, 2024) Doting expectant father and recovering alcoholic (Nicholas Hoult) gets seated on a murder jury, only to realize that he\u2019s the responsible party in the victim\u2019s death. Calmly observant courtroom drama plays its melodramatic premise straight, more moral fable than thriller.\u2014RDL<\/p>\n

The Monk and the Gun <\/a>(Film, Bhutan, Pawo Choyning Dorji, 2023) When election officials arrive in a remote village to stage a practice vote prior to Bhutan\u2019s 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.\u2014RDL<\/p>\n

The Order<\/a> (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.\u2014RDL<\/p>\n

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\u2019t be his finest, but it\u2019s great great fun.\u2014KH<\/p>\n

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.\u2014RDL<\/p>\n

Wasp<\/a> (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\u2019s 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.\u2014KH<\/p>\n

Good<\/h2>\n

Ballerina (Film, US, Len Wiseman, 2025) To avenge her father\u2019s death at the hands of the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) joins the Ruska Roma to learn the assassin\u2019s art. The marketing tag \u201cFrom the World of John Wick\u201d 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.\u2014KH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019ll talk about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-3780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audiofree","tag-ken-and-robin-consume-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}