John Slattery

News, Reviews & Features

Spotlight

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 19th January 2016

Spotlight appears to tick all the boxes as far as the true-life awards-season investigation drama goes. All-star, mainly male, ensemble cast to demonstrate serious dramatic heft; weighty subject matter in dealing with the cover-up of institutional child abuse. It makes a few choices you aren't expecting, though, and I can't figure out whether or not this elevates it.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 14 recap: "Person to Person"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 21st May 2015

As I've said more than once before, and will repeat endlessly until someone tells me how clever I am, Mad Men has chronicled the decade in which ideas first became commodities. Its ending demonstrates how the sixties were an age in which everyone had ideas all the time – Let's open a gallery in this old shed! Let's move to San Francisco and paint wooden eggs! – and how people gradually filtered out all this noise and made sense of it all.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 13 recap: "The Milk and Honey Route"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 17th May 2015

Betty Francis took a lot of shit down the years, from her husbands, from her daughter and from Mad Men viewers insistent on judging her by contemporary standards of parenting and womanhood. Maybe she's due a reappraisal.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 12 recap: "Lost Horizon"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 10th May 2015

Sometimes Mad Men makes me doubt my own intellect, something that usually happens only when I wake up and survey the remnants of a wholly unnecessary Dallas Chicken meal bought drunkenly the night before. But there lives an intellectual joust within the self on watching high-quality, subtext-laden TV. Am I getting it "right"? If I type my interpretations into Google, will I find others think the same, thereby validating me? Or if I announce them in public will I be scorned by my peers for missing the allegory? Well, this time I'm going for broke. "Lost Horizon" is all about God.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 11 recap: "Time & Life"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 30th April 2015

Having confidently predicted last week that we were heading for a non-committal ending, inevitably I've mugged myself. Here, three episodes out, is the planet-killer. Don tells us this is the beginning of something, not the end, but the last time he told the truth was in about 1967 and it was only to tell Roger he couldn't pull off a kaftan.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 10 recap: "The Forecast"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 23rd April 2015

"This place reeks of failure," says the realtor trying to sell Don's empty penthouse apartment. Finally, a way in which Don Draper and I share a similarity: I'd live happily enough in a flat with only garden furniture and a TV too. I'd use only paper plates and just throw them over the balcony when I'd finished eating.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 9 recap: "New Business"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 16th April 2015

Megan's diary entry: "Got a million dollars off Don. Didn't have to have sex with Harry Crane. Best day of life so far by some stretch. Megan pour la victoire."

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 8 recap: "Severance"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 9th April 2015

The sixties are over, man. It's April 1970 and the Beatles are officially splitting up. Nixon is directing US troops to invade Cambodia. At the Kennedy Space Center the ground crew of the Apollo 13 are attempting to bring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton safely back from space. Oh, and Don Draper's banging a diner waitress in an alley.

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I have DEFINITELY found meaning in the Mad Men season six cast pics

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 23rd January 2013

Awash is the internet with articles called 'Here's what these new cast pictures tell us about Mad Men season six'. Awash. Most of these ignore the fact that they in reality tell us nothing at all about Mad Men season six. This one does not. Ignore it, that is.

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The Adjustment Bureau

Movie Review | Ali | 3rd March 2011

The January to March release window is a graveyard for movies: you can guarantee that any high-profile movie scheduled for a Q1 release will either be a film that has low expectations (usually because it's crap) or a film that'll sail right over the heads of the summer blockbuster crowd. I'm happy to report that The Adjustment Bureau falls firmly in the latter camp: it's an artful sci-fi thriller that doesn't feel the need to lob fistfights or car chases at you in order to entertain. Unfortunately, it's out on the same day as Liam Neeson's stolen-identity action romp Unknown, so you can expect it to get thoroughly trounced anyway. Schedulers, you've done it again!

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