Elisabeth Moss

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: The Invisible Man offers dark, intense thrills, sight unseen

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 4th March 2020

    If you stop to think about it for a minute, the very idea of an invisible person raises some questions and almost all of them are: what happens when they eat or drink or bleed or, yes, shit? At what point does something external to the person start or stop being ’also invisible’? There are a couple of different cinematic approaches to the science: Memoirs Of An Invisible Man takes a cue from H. G. Wells’ original novel and shows food filling a suddenly materialised stomach before being vomited back up again, while Hollow Man just er... never really mentions it. In a similar vein to that creepy, invisible stalker movie, this new film ignores the biological questions altogether because the title character’s vanishing act is achieved with a special suit made of... optics? Cameras? It looks like it probably works a bit like the invisible car in Die Another Day. So that’s just really clear. Good, simple logic. No questions, your honour.

  • Review: Us is an iconic horror that doppelgängs up on our innate fears

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 25th March 2019

    Of all the books I read while studying English Literature at university, there are very few that I can say really stuck with me so much that I think about them on a near-daily basis. One that did is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called William Wilson. If you’re not familiar, it’s a deeply sinister tale in which the narrator describes being tormented throughout his life by infrequent run ins with his doppelgänger, a figure that looks, acts and dresses exactly the same as him, until he is eventually driven mad. The story struck a chord mainly because my professor made a compelling case at the time for how this horror works on a psychological level, but also because he had us analyse the many thematic instances of ‘doubles’ throughout the text. This, he explained, includes William Wilson’s own alliterative initials, which are made up of two 'W's or, rather, 'double-you's. And it was at that point that I thought he was just really reaching.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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."

  • 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.

  • 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.