Alison Brie

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Horse Girl opts for style over substance, but it's a close-run race

    Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 12th February 2020

    If making lots of one thing is an objective measure of goodness, then Netflix are really good at these thrillers where the protagonist is having a tough time clinging on to reality. Yes I know sometimes they just buy the distribution righ- ...hang on, this is my intro to Earthquake Bird. Ok, well as broadly similar as Horse Girl is to all those other films, there are a few things setting it apart worth talking about. So let's saddle up pardner and giddy on up to the re-he-view! *yeehaws on chair in Costa, falls off, breaks pensioner's hip*

  • Review: The Lego Movie 2 plays nicely but has no new surprises

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 10th February 2019

    My nephews were younger when the first Lego Movie came out. I mean, everyone was. But in 2014 they were five years younger; a lifetime when you're under ten. The elder one loved it; the younger probably not quite at the age where he could be relied on to sit through anything for more than ten minutes without chewing his shoes. They'll love this too, because they're still under ten and they're idiots, despite the older one being quite capable of comprehensively schooling me about dinosaurs. Me, I think maybe the magic has faded a bit.

  • Sleeping With Other People

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 4th December 2015

    A brilliant thing happened while I was watching Sleeping With Other People. It's not something that occurred onscreen, of course - this film is a lazy, offensively written sex comedy produced by people who think that two characters candidly talking about "fingering" is funny enough to build a movie around it. No, the brilliant thing that happened is this: about halfway through the film, the guy sat directly in front of me stood up, loudly declared to everyone that "This is the worst film I have ever seen in my entire life" and just walked out.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • BoJack Horseman: season one

    TV Review | Ed Williamson | 2nd September 2014

    It's a cartoon about a drunk horse, but I still think it has something interesting to say about contemporary celebrity. I will not let this Media Studies degree go to waste.

  • Community: The Complete Third Season DVD

    TV Review | Rob Young | 26th September 2013

    Much like Ed did a year ago in his review of Community season two, I find it a tricky, almost daunting prospect to review an entire season of something, even more so when I haven't had time to watch all 22 episodes. Look, I've just been super busy lately (catching up with Breaking Bad). But if the rest of the third season of Community is as sharp, original, and self-knowing as what I've already seen, then hell, my job's already half done.

  • Community renewed for fifth season, negating pun I thought of

    TV News | Ed Williamson | 11th May 2013

    Community landed a 13-episode fifth season at NBC yesterday. This is splendid news, but it does mean I have no reason to use the headline 'Troy and Abed in the mourning' that I thought of a couple of weeks ago when I was pretty sure it'd be cancelled. Remind me when it happens and I'll throw it in somewhere.

  • Community: actually back for real this time

    TV Video | Ed Williamson | 4th February 2013



    On Thursday. Probably. Unless Chevy Chase takes out a last-minute injunction, or they bump it for a half-hour Days of Our Lives special or whatever.