Based on the life of Stanley Milgram, Experimenter pokes and prods at the mind as the late social psychologist did in his controversial obedience experiments conducted at Yale in the 1960s. The reality-bending film stars the charismatic Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram, who intermittently addresses the camera directly, commenting on his unlikely life story as we watch it unfold. Milgram’s obedience experiments—which involved a subject administering electric shocks to a second volunteer—changed the landscape of social psychology, though Milgram’s career would suffer due to many of his colleagues disagreeing with the ethicality of the experiment. Odd, mesmerizing and wildly inventive, Experimenter is one of the most unique things you’ll see this fall.

We spoke to director Michael Almereyda about the film, which also stars Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, and Winona Ryder (as Milgram’s wife, Sasha).

Experimenter is out in theaters and VOD now.

How were you introduced to Milgram’s work?
It’s called Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It has transcripts from the experiments and a detailed account of its genesis and execution. It was very compelling to me and I thought it would make a good movie. The more I read and researched, I began to recognize there was a bigger scope than those experiments. His mind was reaching past those experiments, but they kept creeping up on him from the shadows.

How long ago was this?
2008. I’d heard of [the experiment] before, but not with attention or definition. I didn’t know how clever, rich and exhaustive it was. I didn’t know he worked on it for two years. I also didn’t realize the controversy and repercussions.

I like the way the movie slips between different planes of reality.
I’m grateful that you say that, but in some ways it’s a pretty straightforward movie. It’s pretty chronological, there’s one flashback, and otherwise it’s really broken into three sections. It’s more flexible than most movies because there’s a playful recognition that it is a movie and he can talk to the camera. That idea was part of the original thought I had for the movie, before House of Cards happened, but not before Ferris Bueller. Talking to the camera has been with us for a long time, but it felt appropriate that someone as self-conscious and self-confident as Milgram would do it. In fact, Milgram made a series of films in which he talked to the camera. Milgram was aware that reality shifts and we have different ways of interpreting things.

Talk about your use of rear-projection.
It was meant to reflect the way that a lot of situations in life are staged, that we’re constantly acting. There’s a level of reality that feels distanced from our more immediate experience. Going to see an old mentor with your new wife can be a play, almost. You’re dressing up and trying to be somebody bigger than you are. Throughout the movie, there are these elements of staged reality where I wanted to be candid about it and allow the audience to see that there’s an element of play and performance.

Peter is very likable in the movie, and I think that’s critical.
I hoped he’d be charming and compelling. I’d known him for a while, and the key to casting this role was that he had to be agile with language. You had to believe he could write a book. Peter’s a really good writer on his own, and I think he’ll be directing movies soon. The last shot of the movie was his idea, and it wasn’t in the script and it wasn’t meant to be the last shot. When we were shooting, he said, “It could be interesting if I tried to wave to Sasha but she doesn’t see me.” I was grateful for that and it ended up being a very poignant way to end the movie.

How did you decide which aspects of Milgram’s life outside of the experiments to show?
Almost nothing in the movie is made up. The biggest liberty I took was that he never visited the set of the made-for-TV movie. I simply took what I thought was compelling. I thought it was pretty organic and cohesive that one experiment led to another and they reflect back on each other and his own experience being a human in a city. We often have these barriers that are unspoken, and he tried to make us more aware of them.

You said you wanted to make the kind of movie Milgram would make himself.
I was trying not to make a plodding, literal-minded biopic. He was a talented filmmaker. He made two films that I think are truly wonderful films. One is called Obedience, which was shot during the last two days of the experiment. It’s very compelling and Roger Ebert called it one of the ten most important documentaries ever made. The other is The City and the Self, where he was roaming around New York with a camera, staging experiments. It’s a city portrait from the ’70s, a very lyrical documentary. In 1974, he was approached by a BBC crew to talk about the experiment and he was apparently so authoritative and compelling that they let him write his own movie [instead of being the subject]. It’s called We Do As We Are Told.

Talk about casting known actors in the roles of the subjects as opposed to more obscure names.
To me, they weren’t that well known. I wanted interesting people who were compelling. I wanted each role to have an impact. Part of the luxury of making a low-budget film is that I asked the best people I know if they had anything better to do, and they said yes. There’s another version of the movie where everyone is more anonymous, but I didn’t think it served the story any better.

I thought Jim Gaffigan was great.
He was an early choice. I didn’t know about him. I’d thought about Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I’d asked to be in about seven of my movies and who kept not being in my movies. He was actually signed, but he got a better offer. He looked like the real guy. Gaffigan was recommended and I started watching these Youtube clips and I was completely captivated by him.

Sasha Milgram is in the film. What did she think of it?
I think she liked it. She’s frail and she’s so supportive. I showed it to her at her house on DVD. What was touching was, at a certain point, when her character comes up she turns to me and says, “That’s Winona Ryder!” She was very excited. She’s great.

What do you think Stanley’s greatest fear was?
I think the real Stanley was probably more prideful than he is in my movie. But at the same time he’s smart and aware of his own foibles. There’s one quote of his I didn’t put in the movie that had something to do with that, to be a good social scientist, you have to have courage. I think, whatever fears he had, he was pretty good at mastering them.

To watch Experimenter is to subject yourself to a form of filmic mind manipulation, in which the movie’s central character, Stanley Milgram (played by a coolly cerebral Peter Sarsgaard), looks directly into the camera, at us, and seems to measure our reactions to his unlikely life story. It’s a strange, unsettling, but almost playful experience watching Sarsgaard watch us. It’s this mischievousness that makes the film, directed by Michael Almereyda, one of the more unique, oddly entertaining things you’ll find at the cinema this fall.

Milgram is  a real-life figure, a late, influential social psychologist whose most notable (notorious) work was a Yale experiment in which subjects would administer increasingly violent electric shocks. A volunteer is told that a fellow lab rat (Jim Gaffigan) is sitting on the other side of a wall, his fingers hooked up to the electric shock machine that’s under their command. The second volunteer plays a memory game, and for every wrong answer he receives a shock by their counterpart on the other side of the wall. In reality, the second “volunteer” is actually an actor and isn’t hooked up to anything (Gaffigan feigns wails of pain with each fake zap). Milgram’s interest is the subject’s behavior: How much punishment are the subjects be willing to inflict on another, innocent human being?

The results of this “obedience” test are alarming—65% continued administering shocks despite the man beyond the wall pleading with them to stop. The film shows a variety of test subjects, each played by famous character actors. Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Taryn Manning each play subjects and while their screen time is fleeting, they get their mini chamber stories across. Watching the inner turmoil bubble up in their facial expressions is mesmerizing and unsettling.

The intermittent moments when Milgram turns to us to comment on what we’re seeing are unforgettable not just because it’s visually, but because Sarsgaard is magnificent. As Milgram he’s calmly deceptive, as if the words coming out of his mouth are a cover-up for the ominous thoughts he’s processing behind his steely eyes. It’s easy to fall into a state of hypnosis as he slips his heady ideas underneath your eyelids and into the back of your mind.

Milgram’s ethicality comes into question when we learn that he rarely interacts with his subjects despite arguably putting them through a form of emotional torture. Surely he owes them the baseline courtesy of a personal interaction, or even a thank you. But no. He’d rather leech behavioral data from the volunteers and promptly kick them back to wherever they came from. His proclivity for emotional detachment starts to affect his personal life when his supportive wife, Sasha (Winona Ryder), starts to feel as shunned as his lab subjects. Milgram’s personal life is covered in a cursory way that wastes Ryder’s talents and makes his home life feel not just secondary, but disposable to the larger story. This bit of narrative negligence may be a fair reflection of Milgram’s state of mind at the time, but if this part of his life was so unimportant, why include it in the movie to this extent? At the very least, Ryder and Sarsgaard work very well together, and it definitely doesn’t hurt that they look good as a couple.

The movie’s disappointing final act is concerned with the fallout of the experiment and the devastating impact it had on Milgram’s reputation and career. Both Almereyda and Sarsgaard seem half as emphatic in depicting Milgram’s downfall as they are the movie’s strong front-end. Experimenter is gripping in that it allows us to spend time with this brilliantly realized character, an outcast who’s so out of touch with others that he only opens up completely to us, his imaginary friends. That’s when the movie works best, when we’re falling down the rabbit hole of Stanley’s mind. The movie’s imagery turns surreal, with literal elephants in the room trailing Stanley as he spouts his babble at us and rear-projected images that reflect the academic artifice that defines his personality. His behavior is more shocking than his poor subjects’. And yet, we want to be near him.

Need a refresher? If so, be sure to read our reviews for Part 1 & 2, and Part 3 & 4 first.

“Are you happy with the house? I’d like to think it was worth it.”

The words of F. Scott Fitzgerald hang over the final two chapters of David Simon’s and William F. Zorzi’s Show Me A Hero like the Sword of Damocles. Except, in this case, fear hangs over everyone equally, not just those in positions of power. Part 5 and 6 spans events from early ’91 to late ’93, and with this being the final two chapters, the narrative has naturally shifted away from the confines of the judge’s chambers and noisy council meetings, in order to focus on the tenants we familiarized ourselves with from the West side of the Parkway. Hank Spallone (Alfred Molina) is mostly mentioned by name, and seen a brief two times in the whole two hours, before the new mayor Terry Zaleski (Daniel Sauli) takes office. Not much time is spent with Zaleski, but enough to know that he’s the shiftiest Democrat presented in the entire miniseries, and the biggest nemesis to our hero, Nick (Oscar Isaac). Judge Sands (Bob Balaban) and Michael Sussman (Jon Berenthal), so instrumental in getting the housing bill passed, don’t make a single appearance, while Oscar Newman’s (Peter Riegart) greatest contribution is to hand over the housing counselling to the most important new character, Robert Mayhawk (The Wire alumnus, Clarke Peters).

Parts 5 and 6 distance themselves by some margin from the politics that dominated proceedings in the previous parts, and is mostly split between two narrative strings. The first follows Nick, desperately seeking recognition and a way back into office. The more he fails, the deeper he sinks into an egotistical vortex of self-loathing, even costing Nay’s (Carla Quevedo) job by playing political games with her bosses (only to eventually realize that the only one being played is him). At the beginning of Part 5, his friendship and alliance with Jim Surdoval (Michael Stahl-David) is severed because Jim is backing Zaleski for mayor. Vini Restiano (Winona Ryder), the friend Nick comforted in Part 2 when she got shut out of politics, makes a powerful comeback in Parts 5 and 6, only to find herself in direct opposition with Nick when he decides to run against her as City Council President. When she asks him, with tearful resentment, if he really believes in anything but himself, the gist of the message is clear; the ugly, cruel game of politics is frightfully masochistic in nature. As I mentioned in last week’s recap, the strong sense of the corrupt nature of politics being the primal theme of the show rings deafeningly true all the way to the soul-crushing conclusion. For those who have resisted the urge to Wikipedia the real Nick Wasicsko, I will refrain from spoiling, but, with Fitzgerald’s words in mind, you can probably guess what happens.

The second narrative thread is the only one with some hopefulness, though not before it gets tangled up in fear. Billie (Dominique Fishback)—who gets little sympathy from me and whose storyline remains the most ubiquitously irritating thanks to her godawful choice in partner—, Norma (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), who is still reluctant to mingle with white people, and Doreen (Natalie Paul), who has come a long way from her junkie days, all move to the new low-income townhouses. Doreen gets involved with the new local community and through that befriends Mary (Catherine Keener). That’s right, what we expected all along finally materializes at the beginning of Part 6: Mary officially switches sides when she starts to focus on those trying to do right by their neighborhoods and be upstanding citizens. Meanwhile, Carmen (Ilfenesh Hadera) remains stuck in the projects because her name is put on the waiting list for the next houses, but her story’s conclusion is appropriately cathartic all the same. Mayhawk councils a team of volunteers (Mary included) on how to approach and help the new neighbours assimilate themselves into their new surroundings, coyly saying at one point that they’ll be learning more about themselves than the new families. As expected, the predominantly white community doesn’t take kindly to the new residents at first, instilling distrust, fear, and prejudice; all the more reason why the final image is a ray of sunshine.

The tone of the show’s final hours is very much a somber one. As with the episodes that preceded, Simon, Zorzi and Paul Haggis show off their artistic range with equal touches of subtle deftness and emotional hemorrhaging. Recall—and try to do so without getting goosebumps—the final montage of Bruce Springsteen’s eternally tender “Lift Me Up.” The fate of every character reminding us that these are real people’s stories. Then consider the opening of Part 6, mid-sentence in Mayor Zaleski’s speech, “-which for Yonkers has been a long time coming.” We know what he’s talking about, and thanks to this brilliantly understated opening, we also know he doesn’t care.

No, the only one who truly cares is Nick, and there are two profound scenes in these two hours where we see what all that care gets him. The first is when he visits the lottery spin to see which lucky tenants get to live in the new houses. He sits in the back, genuinely happy for the people, but slowly realizes that no one knows who he is and that he’s got no business being there other than to satisfy his own sense of pride. The second is when he literally goes door to door of the new houses to speak with tenants directly, to see how they’re feeling, perhaps get a modicum of gratitude. He gets the door slammed in his face until one person does recognize him. Blind Norma. It’s powerful stuff and the beating heart of Show Me A Hero. A man who jeopardized his political career to get the housing bill passed, but made the mistake of expecting a handshake instead of being satisfied with the work itself.

Show Me A Hero stands next to Simon’s previous sensational miniseries, The Corner (2000) and Generation Kill (2008), and under the auspices of his crowning achievement with Zorzi, The Wire, as essential television that drills into the truth of people. People with flaws and strengths on display, equally weighed. What happens to a good man when he gets a taste of that sweet poison of power? How does one navigate the moment in a person’s career when real change becomes a probable reality? These are the heavyweight questions we’ve come to expect of creator David Simon. The kind that keeps the Sword hanging above all our heads, and that will surely keep me revisiting Show Me A Hero again and again.

9.5/10

Just tuning in? Catch up with our review for Part 1 and 2 here.

“How come the only people talking about this housing thing are white?”

By the end of Part 2, we left Mayor Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac) confounded over the mess the housing crisis created. With council members Henry Spallone (Alfred Molina) and Nick Longo (Jim Bracchitta), along with two others, refusing to budge and “give in” to the supreme court’s order, Nick must either watch his city go bankrupt while the “fantastic four” assholes (an amazingly timed nickname for the four naysaying councilmen) are held in contempt and face jail time, or do whatever he can to turn whoever he can around and get the deal passed.

Part 3 of Show Me A Hero begins with Nick on the phone seeking help from fellow democrats in New York and getting shut out. It ends with the same Maalox-chugging prologue that began proceedings in Part 1. Nick goes through another mayoral election, this time losing to none other than Spallone, who, of course, used the housing crisis as a way to get voters in the booth. One of the highlights from this mid-section is in Spallone’s victory speech, when he mumbles how they’d have to abide by the supreme court’s decision if all else fails and Catherine Keener’s Mary is like, “um, what’d he just say?” It’s that David Simon blink-and-you’ll-miss-it wit on display again, this time aimed at the cruel nature of political games and the wishful thinking of drawing a line between people’s core issues and the politics that govern them. That line is never straight and rarely connects both ends.

A couple of characters go through major transformations in Parts 3 and 4. Starting with Nick, naturally, who manages to make the crucial vote pass in council before losing the mayoral election, and moves into a beautiful house with Nay (Carla Quevedo) whom he finally marries. He spirals out of politics for the time being. He visits his father’s grave, and says,—echoing Vini Restiano (Winona Ryder) from Part 2—“As miserable as it is when you’re in the middle of things, at least you’re in the middle of things!” One gets the strong sense that the corrupt nature of the political game, and its consequences on the person trying to do an effective job, is the primal theme hiding behind the housing crisis in Show Me A Hero. A point subtly elucidated when someone quotes the show’s title to Jim (Michael Stahl-David), who seems convinced the line comes from Fitzgerald the politician of this-or-the-other district, and not, the Fitzgerald. These people can’t think past their own congressional bubble, and it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Political Science to figure out what Simon and William F. Zorzi think about that.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the parkway, Doreen’s (Natalie Paul) character arc bends the furthest. Now a single mother, she goes from a decrepit welfare hotel in upstate New York, back to the projects, writes an emotional letter to her son at the end of Part 3, and becomes a full-time junkie in Part 4. Her father, noticing the latter, leaves her be and tells her to reach out whenever she needs to. Could this be Simon and Zorzi telling us, in ever-so-subtle ways, what part of the problem is? In any case, Doreen’s turn to drugs (considering her surrounding) isn’t as suspect as her father’s lack of care, but neither is as surprising as the slew of bad decisions made by a new character. Billie (Dominique Fishback) is a teenager who decides she doesn’t want to go school or work anymore because she doesn’t feel like it. She refuses to listen to her poor mother, and instead, meets a punk at a party, and gets pregnant. That she’s supposedly in love with this idiot comes second to her pretty horrendous life decisions, all the more confirmed when he gets caught and locked up in Rikers. If there are any redeeming qualities to Billie, I’m not seeing them yet, so here’s hoping for some life-changing decisions in the next two parts.

At least Mary continues to grow in redeeming qualities. After Nick’s futile phone conversations at the beginning of Part 3, we see her getting interviewed—hello, Catherine Keener’s highlight reel—over her thoughts on the housing. Her worries are legitimate and not covering up any interior racism, but over the course of the next two hours we begin to see her slowly lose faith in Spallone, and starting to second-guess her protests over housing units that are happening whether she likes it or not. Moreover, she begins to see that not everyone from the other side of town has much of a different lifestyle. In tandem, a conversation with Norma (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) reveals that some black people are just as hesitant to live with middle-class whites as the other way around; preferring, as she says, to “be with her own.” It’s a sentiment that’s all-too-easy to understand, with no room for naïve beliefs like, ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ It’s Simon, Zorzi, and Paul Haggis reminding us again of how complex society is: people fear change and intrusion in their comfort zones, regardless of any big-picture good intentions. The conclusion to Part 4, after Bruce Springsteen obliges with another suitable episode-closer in the form of “Secret Garden,” shows us just how ugly this fear can become.

With Parts 3 and 4, Show Me A Hero continues its strong bid as some of the best television of 2015. If there were any doubts around Isaac’s performance after the first two hours, they’re surely put to bed with these parts: the man is a shoe-in for Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and a strong candidate for wins. My only hope is that Keener and Molina (who is full of frame-worthy facial expressions and GIF-tastic gestures) get recognized too. What I chew on after these two parts is how seamlessly deeper Simon, Zorzi and Haggis go into the political belly of the beast, without grandstanding in the name of democracy. It’s a given that everyone’s got the right to a decent home, and that the people of Yonkers are turning more and more ugly with their racism, but there’s a plethora of problems on the other side of the parkway and it’s good they aren’t going ignored or justified. Oscar Newman (Peter Riegart) gets his 15 minutes in these two hours, bringing forward a crucial question on how different structures of these housing units could lead to crime and disenfranchisement. And, as fun as it is to watch Jon Bernthal huff, puff and roll his eyes, one wonders if Sussman is helping or hindering the cause. In any case, a healthy dose of debate has been injected to both sides of the argument in Parts 3 and 4, while the flawless narrative progression and supremely immersive characterizations continue.

The stage is set for Part 5 and 6 to conclude the proceedings with a bang, but it wouldn’t be a David Simon show without a few whimpers on the way. I expect nothing less, and won’t be surprised if we get more.

Rating: 9/10

“Hey, this mayor thing…when’s the fun part start?”

In the opening moments of the new HBO miniseries, Show Me A Hero, so much is said without a single word spoken. A man parks in front of a cemetery, panting and hyperventilating before chugging two-thirds of a Maalox (antacid to treat dyspepsia), and ignoring his beeping pager. He leaves the car, pukes out the Maalox, and—in a brilliantly framed shot—walks into the distance while his pager flashes “911.” He sits by a gravestone marked “Wasicsko,” stressed, paranoid, and clearly at the end of his rope. Politics aside, these opening moments ensure one thing: writers David Simon and William F. Zorzi (ex-Baltimore Sun journalists and masterminds behind the greatest TV show of the century thus far, The Wire), director Paul Haggis (Crash, Third Person), and star Oscar Isaac (sizzling like a comet towards the A-list after his unforgettable turn in Inside Llewyn Davis) are going to make Show Me A Hero one of the most talked-about television events of the year through sheer artistic integrity.

That it has a timely political subject at its epicenter guarantees discussion and makes it all the more enticing. It’s the late 1980s, and we’re in Yonkers, New York. Now, depending on how much pre-hand knowledge one starts with—specifically concerning the public housing crisis that forms the molten-hot fulcrum of this story—one will either be affirmed or informed for the first couple of hours. Thanks to Simon and Zorzi’s experience in encyclopedic storytelling structure, the groundwork is laid out and easy enough to follow as long as you pay close attention. Yonkers is divided by the Saw Mill River Parkway; on the East side live the affluent, middle-to-upper class of predominantly white citizens, while the West side is made up of the housing projects populated by the predominantly non-white and poor. After federal judge Leonard Sand (Bob Balaban) issues an order to the City of Yonkers to install 200 units of low-income housing on the East side of the parkway, the middle-class community raise hell for the City’s incumbent mayor Angelo Martinelli (Jim Belushi) and his councilmen and women, among them 27-year-old Democrat Nick Wasicsko (Isaac), Republican Henry Spallone (Alfred Molina), and Council president Vinni Restiano (Winona Ryder). Hell is raised, not because of outward racism or prejudice, as one of the citizens tries to articulate, but because the property of their own houses for which they’ve worked hard to obtain and maintain will fall, while people who don’t make the kind of money they do get a federal free-pass to live in the same neighborhoods.

The first two hours of the show introduce us to the principal characters from both sides of the Parkway, and the personal and political struggles they carry. Martinelli is facing an election year and has grown increasingly unpopular with voters because he refused to appeal Sand’s housing mandate, while Wasicsko becomes convinced he’s got a shot to become the country’s youngest mayor, because he has, crucially, voted for the appeal. Meanwhile, his private life is imbued with an adorable romantic subplot as he courts and wins over a councilman’s new secretary, Nay Noe (Carla Quevedo). In Sand’s chambers, the NAACP are represented by a passionate and cynical Michael Sussman (Jon Bernthal) who pleads with the judge to make good on his promise and force the housing on the city, even if he doesn’t have the council’s approval. While housing expert Oscar Newman (Peter Riegart), who has canvassed the layout of Yonkers, believes the 200 units can and should be spread out over eight or more sites, in order to avoid further contempt and division within the community.

As the political soup brews on both local and federal levels, we get glimpses into some of the lives on the west side of the Parkway. There’s 47-year-old Norma (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) whose eyesight is deteriorating by the minute due to diabetes. We follow Carmen (Ilfenesh Hadera) and her three children as they struggle in New York and are forced to move back to the Dominican Republic. And we’re introduced to Doreen (Natalie Paul) who lives in the suburbs but visits the projects where she meets, falls in love, and moves in with a well-meaning, asthmatic, drug-dealer Skip (J. Mallory McCree). Keeping with the non-political level, in Part II we become acquainted with a couple of East Yonkers citizens, Mary (Catherine Keener) and Buddy Dorman (Brian Altman). When Nick becomes mayor-elect, and the housing appeal is denied, it forces Nick and his council to comply with Sand’s mandate or face hefty fines and contempt of court, while Mary joins the growing ranks of the angry rabble who refuse to give in to the idea of low-income housing in their community.

This first third of Show Me A Hero beckons you to immediately re-watch both parts depending on how well versed you are in political jargon, just to make sure all the appeals, elections, NAACP grievances, and court decisions make sense. Then again, people tuning into a new HBO miniseries from David Simon and William Zarzi should expect nothing less then to have their attentive faculties massaged to full capacity. All credit goes to Simon and Zarzi’s expert writing, which displays an incredible economy in character and story development. In two hours, we get the sense of an entire community and all its various shades, from slums to council meetings. Haggis’ direction, and some masterful editing from Jo Francis and Kate Sanford, delicately weave together all the pieces of the puzzle, allowing the virtuoso performances to shine through and keep eyes glued to the screen. Literally all of the players, spearheaded by Isaac all the way down to the secretary who comically refuses Wasicsko access to the copy machine, excel in their roles. As outlined in the opening minutes, Show Me A Hero is an intricate, controlled, and smoothly seismic piece of television. And we’re just talking about the first two hours here.

This kind of subject matter and story doesn’t just invite political discussion, it incites it. Based on Lisa Belkin’s nonfiction book of the same name, Show Me A Hero (the title, FYI, is taken from the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy,” so wherever this is heading, it won’t be pretty) makes little qualms about which side its own. Molina’s Spallone chews on his toothpick with the menace of a Bond villain, the angry white mob of East Yonkers spew anti-Semitic slurs about Sand and Sussman, and the tenderization of the West-side characters is more mechanical than braising. Norma’s eyesight, for example, gets stretched to the point of heavy-handed manipulation: she can’t see the button she marked on her intercom to buzz herself in, and instead of trying any other apartment, she frets and tugs at our heart strings. On the other hand, there is a sense of level-headed balance. Spallone’s “I watched the Bronx die” argument has its roots in historical accuracy (depending on who you talk to), and the first proper sequence we see on the West side involves a drug-deal; the foremost concern for the East side of Yonkers. While most of the white citizens’ objections drown in a cacophonous sea of introverted racism, one can’t help but sympathize with someone like Mary Dorman (played with surgical subtlety by Keener), who is genuinely worried about how her way of life will be impacted by this change. The show makes a point to separate her from the rest of the bigots, and Part II’s conclusion—an unlikely phone conversation—foreshadows the kind of evolution both Mary and Nick are about to go through.

That it’s a liberal-minded show is obvious, and the creators have every right to slant whichever way they feel is just. Many critics, who are much more in-tune with American politics than I am, have already noted the relevance of its themes and subjects on today’s geopolitical landscape in the U.S., with on-going racism and corrupt political systems dominating news headlines. Depending on where one’s personal standing is on the issue of low-income housing, Show Me A Hero is either going to enrage or enlighten, but there are a couple of key things to keep in mind, regardless. Firstly, all of this actually happened, and history blinds personal opinion, or at least, it should. Secondly, knowing that this show comes from the creators of The Wire should silence the skeptics and remind them that all sides of the issue will be handled accordingly. Thirdly, the core issue of disolving segregation is one that everyone should be able to firmly stand behind, regardless of their political leanings. And finally, especially for those neutral on politics, this is television operating at its artistic zenith. Simon and Zarzi make a city’s housing crisis more compelling than one could possibly imagine, punctuating their story with wit (the lookout’s “5-0 on you, Skip” is classic Wire humor) and artistic intelligence (the minute-long background phone ring that concludes Part I is nothing if not genius).

While I’m never one for transparent political endorsement, regardless of whether it’s left or right-leaning, Show Me A Hero has more than enough in its history, characterizations, and bravura storytelling to make me wish that it’s next Sunday already.

RATING: 8.5/10

The name Stanley Milgram might not ring a bell for a lot of people, but his work as a social psychologist might. Milgram had a hand in creating some of the most fascinating social experiments in the 20th century (one of his experiments helped introduce the concept of “six degrees of separation), with his most famous study being the obedience experiments he conducted at Yale in the 1960s. His obedience experiments revealed a disturbing truth about society and people’s willingness to obey authority figures even if they don’t want to. Milgram helped expose a fundamental flaw in humanity’s own construction of itself, and even today some people turn a blind eye towards Milgram’s findings. Taking a cue from Milgram’s work, writer/director Michael Almereyda has crafted a brilliant biopic of Milgram with Experimenter, one that’s playful, enlightening and subversive from beginning to end.

Taking advantage of the fact that his subject spent a living experimenting with confronting societal norms, Almereyda continually messes around with the norms and structures of biopics and filmmaking in general. Milgram narrates and addresses the camera directly, frequently breaking the fourth wall and discussing his life with an omniscient tone, while the film frequently embraces artifice in its form: rear projection, theatrical sets, blending in documentary footage, asides detailing other social experiments from Milgram’s colleagues, and at one point making the term “elephant in the room” more literal than metaphorical. Almereyda’s direction is nothing short of brilliant here in the way it channels the spirit of Milgram into its own conception.

Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram, and even he seems aware that this is his best role in years, relishing in his character’s charm and playfulness. Winona Ryder also does a great job playing Milgram’s wife Sasha, turning what could have easily been a thankless role into one that carries the film’s emotional weight. Both actors are part of a strong, eclectic ensemble (including John Leguizamo, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning and Anton Yelchin), but this is really Almereyda and Sarsgaard’s show. It will be hard to imagine any other biopic topping Experimenter this year.

You’ve heard of The Wire, haven’t you? It’s only the greatest television show of all–time. Its creator David Simon is a smart guy and has done some other pretty cool stuff for HBO, too (Generation Kill, Treme), but none of that stuff starred Oscar Isaac.

You remember Oscar Isaac, don’t you? The Coen Brothers’ Llewyn Davis whose role in A Most Violent Year> was basically the best Al Pacino performance since Pacino dipped into self-parody. Isaac has already wowed audiences once this year in Ex Machina and is about to become your nephew’s favorite X-wing pilot when Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrives later this year.

In the mean time Isaac is set to play Nicholas Wasicsko, who was only 28 years old when elected the youngest mayor in Yonkers, New York’s history. Show Me A Hero is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Lisa Belkin, and deals largely with tensions stemming from federally ordered desegregation of public housing in the late ’80s. The 6-part mini-series will debut on August 16th with Catherine Keener, Winona Ryder, LaTanya Richardson-Jackson, Bob Balaban and Jim Belushi (really!) in supporting roles.

Love & Mercy

Brian Wilson wrote some of the most beautifully complex pieces of music in history throughout his decades-long career with the Beach Boys and beyond. But as a person, he’s more beautifully complex than anything anyone could ever write. Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy explores Wilson’s psyche from two angles, focusing on the biggest artistic and personal turning points in his life. Paul Dano plays a Wilson as a young man in the Beach Boys’ heyday, in the midst of writing what would become one of the greatest albums of all time, Pet Sounds. Making up the other half of the movie is a more recent, frightening period in Wilson’s life (he’s played here by John Cusack), when he was under the (highly medicated) spell of unethical therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), his only protection from whom being his beach blonde soul mate, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks).

Alternating between the two Brians is a welcome break from the typical biopic schematic. Dano’s resemblance is scary uncanny, and while Cusack’s isn’t so spot-on (I didn’t see it, to be honest), their commitment as actors is about level. Beach Boys fans will suffer uncontrollable geek-outs during the Pet Sounds studio session reenactments, but the real value of the film lies in the respectfully unkempt and fraught depiction of Wilson’s legacy as both a musician and a man.

Experimenter

Slipping between several planes of reality with the nimbleness of a jazz ensemble, Michael Almereyda‘s Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as late social psychologist Stanley Milgram, is more of a delectable treat than the dark subject matter might lead you to believe. It centers on Milgram’s famed contributions to the world of social experimentation, most notably his controversial experiment on obedience conducted in the ’60s. We see the Holocaust-inspired experiment—involving test subjects led to believe they’re remotely causing harm to a man in an adjacent room (played by Jim Gaffigan)—reenacted by a litany of strong players, including Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Anthony Edwards, and others.

The film sees Sarsgaard’s Milgram periodically address us, the audience, in cleverly worded monologues that highlight the actor’s natural wit and intellect. It’s fun to see Sarsgaard given so much breathing room; he has a lot of fun with the role, and so we do as well. Almereyda lets loose too, with neat touches like utilizing rear-projection backdrops and employing a real-life elephant to stalk behind Sarsgaard down a hall as a fun metaphor. Winona Ryder stars as Milgram’s wife, Sasha, and gives the film an emotional oomph whose importance is clearest by film’s end.

7 Chinese Brothers

Jason Schwartzman is ridiculously funny in Bob Byington‘s 7 Chinese Brothers, a film created in the Wild West indie landscape that panders to no one (mainstream audiences will likely balk at the quaint, offbeat humor), but will please crackpot-comedy weirdos (like yours truly) to no end. Larry (Schwartzman) is a small-town schlub who drinks his way into and out of menial jobs he can’t stand. He’s got his romantically savvy friend, Major Norwood (TVOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe), his silvery grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), and his impossibly drowsy dog (Schwartzman’s real dog, Arrow) to keep him company most days. When he finds himself gravitated to his new boss, Lupe (Eleanore Pienta), he’s shocked to discover that, for once, he actually looks forward to going to work.

A lot of the funniest stuff in 7 Chinese Brothers involves Schwartzman almost having a contest with himself, trying to come up with the most bizarre behaviors he can think of and making them as out-there as possible. It’s the little, absurdist stuff that makes you laugh, like Schwartzman throwing garbage into a garbage can, and then throwing said garbage can into a dumpster. Byington’s written a great script, too, each line of dialogue going in a different direction than you expected. Keep this one in mind.

Darren Aronofsky does it again. If you thought a film about ballet could not possibly be entertaining, think again. Black Swan overcomes the hype that surrounds it, a difficult and rare feat. It is a seductively sophisticated film with many layers that transforms from innocent to darkness.

Black Swan is about a ballerina named Nina (Natalie Portman) who works for a New York City ballet company. She is completely devoted to ballet and strives for absolute perfection, qualities that are well suited for ballerinas.

The director Thomas Leroy of the ballet company announces that a new rendition of the classic Swan Lake is the next production. He selects Nina for the lead, the Swan Queen. When the director announces that he is changing up the production of Swan Lake, he announces that the Swan Queen would play both the White and the Black Swan, we see the director’s body doubled in the mirror. Undoubtedly showing the contrast of personalities between good and evil.

Because Nina needs everything to be perfect in her eyes, it poses a problem when trying to get the Black Swan part down. She has a very fitting personality for the White Swan but The Black Swan is not supposed to be perfect, rather completely opposite. The Black Swan is also supposed to trick and seduce, which is exactly what the film does to us.

As she struggles with the demanding role, she gains added pressure as a new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis) threatens to steal the lead role. This new dancer is Nina’s competition and rival as Leroy takes notice of her Black Swan playing ability.

Yet the two dancers find themselves in a twisted friendship. Nina sees it as a chance to get into touch with her dark, Black Swan side. Lily sees it as a chance to get closer with the enemy. But in the end only one can succeed and play the lead role and both will go as far as they need to accomplish this.

Duality is showing throughout, sometimes even overwhelmingly. The film is about the contrast between black and white and good and evil. Nearly everything in the film, especially the clothing, is in black and white, giving us subtle clues of what is right and wrong. The amount of mirror shots are constant reminders of self reflection.

You can even see it in Portman’s character when she transforms from innocence to darkness. Which is why I think Natalie Portman deserves (and will win) an Oscar for the Best Female Lead. Portman is phenomenal and does it like no one else could. You can tell that she trained for 10 months for the role. She did most of her own dancing in the film.

What I found most interesting was how the production of Swan Lake was in a lot of ways what the film Black Swan is about. That adds layers in the theme of seduction and deception. Aronofsky brilliantly transforms a story about Swan Lake into itself.

Cinematography in the film is much like ballet; it was close, tight and perfect. The shots effectively showed the art behind ballet and not so subtle hints of contrasts of color. The visuals can be most effective with a well done score. Thankfully, Black Swan has that covered as well. Although, one cannot help but wonder why Thom Yorke’s Black Swan was not featured in this film. It would have been a near perfect fit for the film.

Black Swan is a wonderfully captivating film from beginning to end. It constantly tries to blur the black and white line between what is real and what is not. Much like Nina’s character, the film itself transforms from an innocence one to a dark and terrifying one. Although, I would not call it a masterpiece, it contains many elements of one. Easily one of the best films of the year.