Stuff Worth Watching, 2024 Edition

Just in the nick of time (meaning a month late), here is my list of Stuff I Watched that Was Worth Remembering in 2024. The best stuff, the rest of the stuff, the older films, the TV and streaming shows.

At the end, as a reward for reading, I've posted David Leibowitz Perfect Scoop recipe for Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream, which is insanely simple and amazing (if you have an ice cream maker, which you absolutely should).

Everything is in alphabetical order. Happy viewing.

TOP 12

ANORA
Every Sean Davis movie is a little miracle, starting with TANGERINE and THE FLORIDA PROJECT. Mikey Madison is near-perfect here as a sex worker who falls into a whirlwind love affair with Mark Eydelshteyn, as the idiotic but oddly endearing son of a Russian oligarch. It gets at all the high-highs of their drug-fueled party-time romance, and the low-lows of what happens when the music stops. The plotting is tight, even though the whole thing feels entirely improvised.

THE BEEKEEPER
Go ahead, mock me for putting this thick-skulled Jason Statham revenge flick on the list, but no movie portrays the current state of America better. Statham is a retired spy who is out for revenge for his kindly landlady (Phylicia Rashad), who kills herself after she is scammed out of all her money by Internet scum. He starts at the bottom, living out the American dream of torching a call center full of MAGA/crypto douchebags, and works his way up the chain from there, all the way (somehow) to the Oval Office. Also features Jeremy Irons hamming it up.

INFESTED
Forget every other creature feature – this French horror flick is an instant classic. After young hustler Theo Christine buys a rare spider for his makeshift terrarium back at his Paris housing project, all hell breaks loose. The spider escapes, reproduces in all sorts of genetically freakish ways, and Theo and his friends try to survive the onslaught that kills everyone else in increasingly gruesome ways. It doesn't help that the authorities would be just as happy to trap them all inside to die to save the rest of the city. INFESTED fucking rocks, plain and simple.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING
Kristen Stewart lights it up in this 1980s-set neo-noir thriller as the manager at a gym who falls for body builder Katy O'Brien. Their love affair (with each other, and with copious amounts of steroids) sends them barreling towards a showdown with the local crime gang led by an almost unrecognizably skeevy Ed Harris as Stewart's dad. This takes a turn towards surreal hyper-violence at the end in a way that was really polarizing for some, but for me made it one of my top 5 of the year.

MENUS-PLAISIRS – LES TROISGOS
Speaking of top movies of the year, this 4-hour documentary by the legend Frederick Wiseman might be Number One. It follows a day or two in the life of a Michelin-star restaurant in France – the chef and his family shopping for ingredients, visiting cheese caves and sourcing meat and wine, dreaming up the menu, prepping for service. This is no narration or context, you just go with the flow as they perfect things, argue and mess things up and fix them, then turn out incredible food. I love movies about people just "doing work" – it is mesmerizing.

NOSFERATU
Robert Eggers' remake of the 1920s vampire classic (itself a ripoff of DRACULA) was a total blast – super-kinky, bloody, and completely over the top. What fun it must have been to be Bill Skarsgard, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Hault and the rest of the cast, constantly asking Eggers, "Is this too much? Am I going too far?" And he would just say, "Nope! Keep going!" The attention to detail when it came to Count Orlok, imagining him speaking ancient Dacian and looking like a living, rotting corpse, was just a delight. Oh, and the rats! So many rats!

NICKEL BOYS
Adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel about two boys who barely survive a Jim Crow-era youth prison camp, told strictly in first-person perspective. You see everything through the eyes of the two boys – literally. It's a technique I've only seen once before, in the 1947 noir LADY IN THE LAKE, which...did not work great. You won't see a more original movie this year, and the emotional punch of the final act only works because of the way director RaMell Ross decided to shoot it. I kinda got sick of the POV at times, but it's also the reason this movie has stuck with me more than almost any other.

THE ORDER
Based on the true story of an obsessive FBI agent's takedown of a white supremacist terror group in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s, this is a great, stripped-down, powerful thriller. I never really bought Nicholas Hoult as the neo-Nazi leader, but he wasn't terrible. Jude Law, on the other hand, was great as the agent, and his moustache was outstanding. And unlike the world we currently inhabit, in the end, in this movie justice was done against these Nazi fucks.

PERFECT DAYS
I can't recall who recommended this to me, but what a lovely movie by Wim Wenders. Basically the story of a quiet, soulful Japanese man (Kōji Yakusho) who spends his days cleaning public toilets around Tokyo, and gets involved in some gentle and heartfelt side quests along the way. By the end, it is just an expression of the pure joy and contentment of being alive. It's got major Ozu vibes.

REBEL RIDGE
Damn, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier cannot miss. Shot out of a cannon right from the start, this movie opens with Marine veteran Aaron Pierre on his way to bail his younger brother out of prison when he is hassled by racist cops who steal his money. Then their boss Don Johnson uses arcane civil forfeiture rules to make sure he never gets it back. The consequences of that act lead to a one man wave of righteous, avenging violence. Just as Saunier did with 2015's GREEN ROOM, he propels the action along at an almost impossible clip. Another Top 5 of the year.

THE SHADOW STRAYS
From first to last one of the most inventively violent action movies I've ever seen. No surprise since it is from the legend Timo Tjahjanto (WHEN THE NIGHT COMES FOR US). Aurora Ribero is a nameless female assassin who turns against her mysterious organization (the Shadows) to save a young boy she encounters on one of her missions. Her quest escalates to a level of almost cartoonish violence that is like Takashi Miike turned up to 11. And then it goes for the biggest shocker of them all – a genuine tearjerker of a finale.

THE SUBSTANCE
Director Coralie Fargeat rethinks THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY as a gross-out Cronenberg body horror. Demi Moore's aging TV star will do anything to stay on top and keep disgusting network boss Dennis Quaid from firing her. That includes agreeing to take the title Substance, which transforms her into gorgeous young Margaret Qualley and will solve all of her problems, so long as she follows the rules. Problems ensue, and the third act is completely batshit. The amount of blood they must have used is immeasurable. Fargeat already made one of my favorite movies of the last 10 years, the ultra-violent REVENGE. I still love that one more, but she sure as hell went for it with this one.

THE BEST OF THE REST

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
Nothing super-fancy here, just a solid music biopic about Bob Dylan's first years in Greenwich Village, his up and down relationships with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), and the moment he went electric. Barbaro and Norton are standouts, and Timothee Chalomet nails Dylan. Usually these kinds of movies have the lead overcoming addiction or something to show their growth. But Chalomet gets that Dylan was just....kind of an inscrutable dick. The movie doesn't try to explain why he is how he is, which is refreshing.

CONCLAVE
My wife yelled "boring!" at the screen when we saw this trailer for the movie starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rosselinni as scheming Cardinals (and nuns) trying to elect a new Pope, and she wasn't entirely wrong! But sometimes boring is...good? No big surprises, just very well-crafted drama. We used to get movies like this all the time, but now they are rare birds.

EILEEN
Wow I did not predict where this neo-noir was going, so I don’t want to spoil it.  But what starts as a slightly seedier, darker version of the lesbian drama CAROL, starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, takes some amazing, brutal, and awesome twists by the end. Once the shocks start piling up, figuring out who exactly is the femme fatale seducing whom is a great puzzle

FIERCE COP
Sometimes simple is best, and this Chinese action movie proves it. Comically evil human traffickers kidnap the son of a, yes, fierce and violent cop, played by Richie Jen. Together with an ex-prostitute of dubious loyalty, he fights his way back to his son. Amidst the great fight set pieces there is some legit Sirk-inspired melodrama, and one hell of an ending.

THE FIRST OMEN
There is no reason this prequel/reboot to the OMEN series about the birth of the Antichrist should have gone so hard, but damn. Nell Tiger Free stars as an aspiring American nun who travels to Italy in the 1970s to take the veil, and encounters a Church harboring horrific secrets. Full of classic scares and gruesome images, with righteous rage at the Catholic Church and how it treats women in its ranks.

HERETIC
Two Mormon missionaries going door-to-door spreading the good word sure knock on the wrong door when they meet skeptic Hugh Grant. What starts as a theological debate turns into a series of torture challenges right out of a SAW movie. Can't say it all worked, but Hugh Grant gave one of the best performances I saw all year, twisting his self-effacing rom-com charms into pure evil.

JERICHO RIDGE
A deputy nursing a broken ankle finds herself alone on watch at her backwoods sheriff's station when the minions of a local meth dealer launch an all-out siege. Super clever filmmaking from writer-director Will Gilbey, in the style of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, with great performances by heroic Nikki Anika-Bird and a rare “non-asshole” performance from SLOW HORSES heavy Chris Reilly.

KNEECAP
This origin story of the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap, who only rap in Gaelic and wear balaclavas to hide from the cops, is a total slipshod mess and also a hell of a great time – part sex-drugs-and-violence party movie, part earnest political statement. I have no idea how much was true, but the music is great, and there are enough fun performances and hilarious scenes in it to ride over the rough patches.

MAYHEM!
Hyper-violent French action spectacle that sure earned that exclamation point - so gory I'd almost classify it as horror. Tough-luck ex-con and badass kickboxer Nassim Lyes is just trying to lay low in Thailand, but trouble finds him and forces him to set things right in a series of bananas fights scenes. At first, you think you know what you are dealing with here. And then all the sudden the movie goes off the rails and never comes back. What this man does to his enemies (and his own body in the process) is bananas-level insane.

MONKEY MAN
Dev Patel makes a stylish blood-soaked revenge story and it works!  It's like he took the good-hearted boy from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and turned him into a desperate killer, who realizes the only way to rise in his caste society is violence. A little messy in the structure and the messaging, but what a fucking banger of a last act, particular when Patel and his gang of gender fluid assassins wreak havoc. 

MY OLD ASS
A lot to love in writer/director Megan Park's story of 18 year old Elliot (Maisy Stella), about to leave her idyllic cranberry farm home to go off to college, who trips balls on psychedelic mushrooms one night and meets her decades-older self, played by Aubrey Plaza. Even after Elliot sobers up, her older self still calls and texts, offering advice and trying to help her avoid some bad choices. Of course, Plaza can't change her past, and Stella has to figure out her own future. Really nicely done.

OUT OF DARKNESS
This was a fun one. Set 45,000 years ago, it's the story of a band of hunter-gatherers starting over in a new land who are being hunted and killed one-by-one by something terrible just out of sight in the dark beyond their campfire. The writer/director Andrew Cumming invented an entirely new "ancient" language for them to speak, and it works great. Really dark, grimy and violent, with a cool score.

RED ROOMS
Beautiful model/internet poker player Juliette Gariepy becomes obsessed with attending the trial of Montreal's most notorious serial killer, and goes down a career-destroying spiral she can't pull out of. All of the violence here is off-screen, which makes it somehow worse. This one stuck with me, and it is saying a lot about our disconnection from each other in the digital age, and our acceptance of casual violence.

SEPTEMBER 5
A near real-time recounting of the ABC Sports crew covering the deadly Black September attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the German police fuck-ups that followed, starring John Magaro as an in-over-his-head live producer, and Peter Sarsgaard playing boss Roone Arledge as a titanic asshole. Just like the Wiseman movie I recommended above, this movie is about people doing work, and that laser-like attention to detail is what makes it cool. We see them confront the birth of modern made-for-TV terrorism in real-time, and their own morally dubious role in co-authoring it.

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT
Director Johan Grimonprez's documentary finds a new way to explain the flourishing of independence in 1950s-60s Africa, and the CIA's role in crushing it. It's hard to describe the structure, as it weaves together contemporary interviews, performances from jazz legends who were sent as cultural ambassadors to Africa at the time, and jaw-dropping archival footage. The CIA-assisted assassination of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba is the throughline that helps explain how this moment, when it seemed like anything was possible, was lost.

STRANGE DARLING
Told in elliptical chapters, this twisty horror flick upends the serial killer slasher genre in ways I can't get into without giving anything away. Suffice it to say, neither "The Lady" (Willa Fitzgerald) nor "The Demon" (Kyle Gallner) are at all what they seem. Once the twists are revealed, it runs out of gas real fast. But still, the visuals and cinematography from DP Giovanni Ribisi(!!!) are top-notch, paying beautiful homage to grimy slashers of yore like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

THE ROUND-UP: NO WAY OUT & THE ROUND-UP: PUNISHMENT
In these two sequels to 2022's THE ROUNDUP, Don Lee is back as the slyly funny, concrete-fisted Korean Dirty Harry. In NO WAY OUT he is hunting down a complicated mix of designer drug dealers, crooked cops and Yakuza. In PUNISHMENT he plays out his own version of THE BEEKEEPER, tracking down murderous internet crypto sleazebags. The plots are clever, but does it really matter? You are here to watch Don Lee lay motherfuckers out with one giant punch. Or even sometimes a single meaty slap. Can you tell how much I love Don Lee? He’s the best.

SNACK SHACK
Nostalgic, raunchy throwback to CADDYSHACK or DAZED AND CONFUSED, as high school best friends Conor Sherry and Gabriel LaBelle take over management of the snack shack at the town pool during the summer of 1991, discover booze and weed and girls, and learn some good, bad, and hilarious lessons along the way. They also learn that if you spell out "fuck" on hot dogs in ketchup for the little kids at the pool, you can charge a nearly 100% markup on it. Fuck Dogs ftw.

OLDER MOVIES AND REWATCHES

CAFE EXPRESS (1980)
In one night on an Italian overnight express train, single father Nino Manfredi tries to save up money for his son's medical care working as an illegal coffee peddler, selling espresso to thirsty customers while eluding the conductors and cops in what becomes a more and more slapstick, antic romp with every passing stop. This one is a real delight, with slapstick gags right out of the Marx Brothers.

CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)
After the election, I had a burning desire to re-watch this sci-fi thriller, perhaps to mentally prepare myself for what was to come. Set about 20 years after a mysterious plague has rendered all women infertile, in an England ruled by an iron-fisted dictatorship that "disappears" immigrants in secret camps, we follow cynical Clive Owen as he is drawn back into the rebel underground fighting the government by ex-wife Julianne Moore. This is Alfonso Cuaron's best movie, full of unequaled moments, like the climactic, long, single-shot war scenes in the refugee camp, or an amazing Michael Caine as an aging pothead rebel.

DINNER IN AMERICA (2020)
Punk rocker, drug dealer and all-around chaos monkey Kyle Gallner hooks up with neuro-divergent recluse Emily Skeggs, and the two of them end up in an unlikely romance. For some reason this movie was on everyone's lips this year. I thought it was pretty uneven, but damn, Skeggs performing a punk rock song she writes for Gallman, "Watermelon," coming out of her shell while he watches her and is clearly falling hard for her – it might be one of the best scenes I saw all year.

EIGHT DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER (1986)
In an opening king-fu battle scene, a father and all of his sons but a few are wiped out by a rival clan. One of the surviving sons (Alexander Fu) returns home driven completely insane, sure his mother and sisters are his enemies, attacking everyone. The other son (Gordon Liu), bullies his way in to a Buddhist monastery, where the monks hilariously want nothing to do with him. The closing fight scene when Liu and family get their revenge is a classic. This one has a tragic backstory, as Fu died during production, and the movie had to be entirely rewritten on the fly. 

THE FRESHMAN (1990)
The Film Forum had a big centennial Brando retrospective in 2024, and what is the only movie I got to catch on the big screen, out of all those classics? This extended goof aimed squarely at the heart of THE GODFATHER. Brando is playing an exact caricature of Vito Corleone, pulling innocent NYU film student Matthew Broderick into a web of crime involving rare animal smuggling. Legit hilarious performances include BD Wong, Maximilian Schell, Frank Whaley, Paul Benedict as the world's most annoying film professor, and Bert Parks as a sleazy lounge singer who serenades a Komodo dragon in one surreal spit-take of a scene.

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (1951)
WENT THE DAY WELL (1942)
WHISKY GALORE! (1949)
When that same Film Forum announced an Ealing Studios retrospective the month after the election, I took it as my own form of self-care and camped out. THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT is a classic Alec Guinness Ealing comedy about an inventor who upends the entire textile industry, and WENT THE DAY WELL was a WW2 propaganda film about fighting Nazis that turned into a brutal action movie with some DNA from STRAW DOGS in it. WHISKY GALORE was a new one for me, about a whisky-starved Scottish island during WW2. When a ship wrecks off the coast carrying crates of – you guessed it – whisky, it becomes a hilarious cat-and-mouse game for the women and men of the island to hide it all away.

POSSESSION (1981)
I've been hearing about this banana-pants horror movie from Polish director Andrzej Żuławski for years, but nothing could have prepared me. International spy Sam Neill comes home to his young son and his wife Isabelle Adjani, to find she is having a torrid affair. He loses it in an alcoholic rage, gets beaten up by Adjani's new lover, gets into escalating fights with her, has her tailed by a private eye, watches her go insane, and somehow none of that matters once you get halfway in. That's when the REALLY crazy shit starts, the creature and gore effects get to work, and the title of the movie finally makes sense.

THE STRAIGHT STORY (1998)
RIP David Lynch. I knew what I had to watch as soon as I heard. This Disney flick about Richard Farnsworth trekking from Iowa to Wisconsin on a John Deere mower to see his dying estranged brother Harry Dean Stanton is somehow both the least and most Lynchian movie you will find. The world's slowest road movie, it's funny, it's weird, it's got some amazing set pieces, and it is nakedly emotional and heartfelt. The final scene (among many others) is a guaranteed tear jerker.

TENET (2020)
Watching this again in a sold-out, ear-deafening IMAX re-release was such a blast. John David Washington is recruited into an organization fighting groups from the future trying to destroy us, and he's partnered up with a fantastic Robert Pattinson to stop them before...something something something...nothing really makes sense, who cares. Huge action, scenery-chewing acting, mind-boggling effects, in what is a buddy movie version of a James Bond film with Washington and Pattinson. It's big, loud and awesome, and it's my favorite Nolan.

THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953)
Four desperate men with nothing to lose (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck, Folco Lulli), stuck in a backwater South American town, agree to risk their lives driving two trucks full of nitroglycerine through treacherous jungle roads up to a remote oil field to help put out a raging fire. A friend of mine and I dragged our kids to this when it hit the big screen again briefly, and they loved it. This movie is so tense you'll be grinding your teeth, as every bump in the road, every bridge to be crossed, every twisty switchback, could mean certain death.

TV & STREAMING SHOWS

ARCANE Season 2 (Netflix)
The final season of this animated show set in the world of the video game LEAGUE OF LEGENDS was just as good if not better than the first. Estranged sisters fighting on opposite sides of a civil war between surface-dwelling aristocrats and tunnel-dwelling lowlifes, steampunk weapons, magical goo – it all looks so damn cool. I have heard that it was the most expensive animated show ever made, and I believe it.

BAD MONKEY (Apple TV+)
I'm as surprised as you are this Carl Hiassen-based sunlit noir was as good as it was. A haggard but charming Vince Vaughn stars as a washed-up ex-cop in Key West trying to get his old life back, juggle his ex-girlfriend and his new girlfriend, and solve the mystery of the severed arm he has hidden in his freezer. Meanwhile, Ronald Peet and his pet monkey in the Bahamas are battling evil developer Rob Delaney (who steals the show). There's also juicy side roles for Jodie Turner-Smith and Meredith Hagner along the way.

DAY OF THE JACKAL (Peacock)
The original book and film are such classics, I was highly skeptical of this new adaptation, starring Eddie Redmayne as a cold, chameleonic hit man out to kill a tech billionaire threatening to upend the global financial system, and Lashana Lynch as the obsessed MI5 agent tracking him down. But the acting was top-notch, the action was stellar, and the plotting kept the bones of the original but added some shocking, updated twists that really worked.

THE GENTLEMEN (Netflix)
Guy Ritchie adapts one of his British crime comedies into a series that was a pure joy. Theo James is an unflappable aristocrat who learns his recently deceased dad was secretly housing a giant weed operation on their family estate, and the warring crime families behind it have no intention of letting go. Funny, violent, charming, full of Brits and Americans doing bad things (Kaya Scodelario, Joely Richardson, Ray Winstone, Vinnie Jones, Freddie Fox, Giancarlo Esposito, Edward Fox) – what more could you ask for?

THE GOLD (Paramount+)
Based on the true story of the 1983 Brinks-Mat heist, where a group of burglars ended up stealing 26 million pounds worth of gold bars (eat your heart out, Bob Menendez). It's really more about the aftermath, as police inspector Hugh Bonneville tries to pin down the culprits, and thief Jack Lowden (River Cartwright on SLOW HORSES!) and fence Dominic Cooper try to find ways to unload the stolen goods. A great cat-and-mouse thriller series.

MR. AND MRS. SMITH (Amazon Prime)
I couldn't figure out why Donald Glover and Maya Erskine wanted to remake the empty, but glamorous Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie movie about married spies who secretly have hits out on each other. But what they do with the show – keeping all the spying and the action and the comedy, but stripping away all the glamour and making it a hilariously down-to-earth relationship drama between all the killing – it's kind of a masterpiece.

THE PENGUIN (Max)
I have really no idea why Max, Colin Farrell and THE BATMAN director/producer Matt Reeves thought doing a gritty standalone crime series with Farrell stuck in an enormous fat suit the entire time would be a good project. But it was pretty great, somehow. Dark and extremely brutal, with a lot of the credit for its success going to Farrell and co-star Cristin Milioti going for the jugular with every scene.

REFORM! (YouTube)
Jon Bois and the crew behind the YouTube channel Secret Base have done it again. Their 9-part series on the Minnesota Vikings was a standout last year, but this four-part series on Ross Perot's Reform Party and its descent into chaos and madness was even better. Highly recommend it if you want to make some sense of the current political moment. As a bonus, check out their 30-minute deep dive into the History of People Slipping on Banana Peels in America.

SAY NOTHING (Hulu)
An adaptation of an amazing book that actually broke news and implicated architect of Irish peace Gerry Adams himself in some very dirty business during The Troubles in Ireland in the 1970s. It's also a complicated story, following the story of IRA soldier sisters Dolours and Marian Price as they become world-famous revolutionaries, as well as the unsolved disappearance of an innocent housewife in the middle of the mayhem. But the writers manage to do the impossible and streamline the story, and the acting is top-notch.

SHOGUN (FX)
A nearly perfect adaptation of the James Clavell novel about a shipwrecked British sailor played by Cosmo Jarvis, who becomes a pawn in the great power games in feudal Japan, where a lord played by a majestic Hiroyuki Sanada is several moves ahead of everyone else. Anna Sawai is just as amazing as the translator with a tragic backstory caught up in the wars. Epic action, great drama, all of it almost entirely in Japanese, which required paying close attention at all times. No folding laundry or doing dishes during this one – fuck off Netflix.

THE SYMPATHIZER (Max)
A half-French, half-Vietnamese double (or maybe triple?) agent plays all sides against each other in the closing days of the Vietnam War, and then carries on his mission in post-Vietnam America afterwards. Violent, very funny, and surreal, with incredibly charming Hoa Xuande in the lead and producer Robert Downey, Jr. playing multiple roles in a variety of makeup, wig and voice getups, Alec Guiness-style.

TASKMASTER Season 18 (YouTube)
Hosts/evil geniuses Greg Davies and Alex Horne provided perhaps the best season of this comedy competition show since Season 7 with James Acaster. Part of that was their panel of comedian victims/contestants, who were hilarious across all challenges thrown at them, particularly foul-mouthed Rosie Jones. It's hard to describe how dumb the challenges are, and how awesome, so you just need to watch a few episodes and you'll be hooked.

THE TRAITORS UK & THE TRAITORS AUSTRALIA (Peacock)
My hot take is that the American version of THE TRAITORS is trash. Casting it with washed-up reality TV stars ruins what is great about the game – watching regular people scheme and connive against each other, revealing how devious they can really be. In the original UK and Australia seasons, shocking twists include a pair of contestants who are secretly mother and son, and a contestant hiding the fact that he was a war correspondent who was held hostage in Somalia for over a year, which helps inform his amazing gamesmanship.

TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY (Max)
In an Alaska of unending darkness, super-bitter police chief Jodie Foster and her former protege Kali Reis try to solve the disappearance of 8 men from a remote research station, uncovering scandals, political intrigue and possibly the supernatural along the way. Showrunner Issa Lopez killed it on this one, from the dialogue to the action to the casting (including John Hawkes, Chris Eccleston and Fiona Shaw), to the mood and the music. Lopez said she was inspired by THE THING, and you can feel it. Great stuff.

THIS WEEK'S RECIPE

Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream

INGREDIENTS

600g sweetened condensed milk (about a can and a half)
1/2 cup half & half
1 1/2 cups (600 grams) strong coffee
pinch salt
pinch of fine coffee or espresso grounds

THE PROCESS

1. In a large bowl, whisk together all of the ingredients.
2. Chill the mixture in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours.
3. Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker, and freeze according to the manufacturer’s directions.
4. That's it! So fucking easy. So good.