the sisters brothers movie review

The Sisters Brothers

Who would have thought that Jacques Audiard , the French director of slow-burn, humanistic character studies would one day take on one of the most characteristically American of genres, the Western, with his English-language debut? While worlds apart from his socially realist “ Dheepan ” and “Rust and Bone,” Audiard’s “The Sisters Brothers” sports a similarly closely watched, leaned in sensitivity with its brotherly story. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel (by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain ) and infused with sweetness, graphic body horror (that, at times, spins a childlike icky humor) and a high body count, this alcohol-soaked Frontier road trip constantly reinvents itself at every turn in fun, witty and ultimately touching ways. Call it a revisionist or an absurdist Western if you will, but Audiard’s film feels both refreshingly new (without ever going to the extreme lengths the Zellner Brothers did with “ Damsel ”) and nostalgically familiar.

The backdrop is the Gold Rush, which is said to have made a Sherriff’s job much easier: if there’s trouble, you follow the gold to get to the source of the unrest. But when we meet the central brothers Eli ( John C. Reilly , goofy, soulful and great at physical comedy as ever) and Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix , quietly enigmatic) one random dark night at the start of the film, there doesn’t seem to be any wealth to be pursued. With the playful last name “Sisters,” the pair of cold-blooded hit-men, without much thought about the consequences of their actions, murder a household of people in a tightly orchestrated set piece of nocturnal shootouts. The reason remains unknown—with this job and everything else, the ruthless duo answers to a much feared, mostly unseen mysterious crime boss called ‘The Commodore’ and habitually assassinates their way through the 1850s Oregon. Along the way, they bond and trivially bicker about life as casually as they kill.

But just when the soft-edged Eli starts contemplating his future and ongoing profession despite the unaffected heavy drinker Charlie’s shrugs, The Commodore sets them up for a new task. They will tail and kill a criminal called Hermann Kemit Warm ( Riz Ahmed , cheekily mysterious) for reasons we would slowly piece together later—for now, he is just a thieving enemy who once betrayed their boss. Enter Morris ( Jake Gyllenhaal , reuniting with Ahmed after “ Nightcrawler ”), a British-accented bounty hunter for hire, tasked with delivering Warm to the brothers. But then the prospect of immediate wealth turns tables for everyone involved—the brainy chemist Warm’s creamy invention that makes gold glaringly appear in water, redefines priorities at once. The two pairs, traced on parallel storylines for a while (that admittedly slows down the film’s previously absorbing rhythm), find themselves entangled in a ploy against each other. Along the way, local madams, kindly prostitutes, further the accidentally amusing events and some dead horses unfortunately enter the story, sharpening the film’s tone as an original yet studied homage to its genre.

A delightful tale of familial ties balanced well with a slick cat-and-mouse yarn, “The Sisters Brothers” owes much of its breezy charm to John C. Reilly, whose comic timing does wonders for the meatiest and most multifaceted character of the ensemble. Phoenix feels right at home in Charlie’s quieter shoes, while Gyllenhaal’s familiarly on-edge persona and a mischievous turn from Ahmed impress. Reilly and Phoenix demonstrate tremendous chemistry throughout—we buy both their longtime amity and occasional callousness, especially when the script drip-feeds the brothers’ back-story into the narrative. In this bittersweet tale with a sentimental heart, and among a dangerous milieu of blood, greed and spiders (one in particular that causes the film’s biggest gross-out moment), Audiard’s characteristically sensitive touch gradually lifts familial emotions, letting them linger in the air long after the credits roll. 

This review was originally filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9th.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

• Joaquin Phoenix as Charlie Sisters
• Jake Gyllenhaal as John Morris
• Carol Kane as Mrs. Sisters
• Riz Ahmed as Hermann Kermit Warm
• Rutger Hauer as Commodore
• John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters
• Alexandre Desplat

Cinematographer

• Benoît Debie
• Jacques Audiard
• Thomas Bidegain
• Juliette Welfling

Writer (based on the book by)

• Patrick Dewitt

Leave a comment

Now playing.

His Three Daughters

Rebel Ridge

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Piece by Piece

Merchant Ivory

The Deliverance

City of Dreams

Out Come the Wolves

Seeking Mavis Beacon

Latest articles

Telluride Film Festival 2024: Memoir of a Snail, Better Man, The White House Effect

Telluride Film Festival 2024: Blink, Apocalypse in the Tropics, Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid!

“The Perfect Couple” Retreads Better Shows About Bad Rich People

Sony’s “Astro Bot” is a Joyous Gaming Experience

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Fitness & Wellbeing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance Deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• UK Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Climate 100
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Wine Offers
• Betting Sites

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

The Sisters Brothers review: New western is a reassuringly old-fashioned affair

Jacques audiard’s film remains engaging thanks to its exceptional central performances from john c reilly and joaquin phoenix , article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free, thanks for signing up to the the life cinematic email.

Director Jacques Audiard, 122 mins, starring: John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Allison Tolman. Cert 15

Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers follows in a long tradition of European-made westerns. It has a primarily American cast, a French director and was shot in Spain. Its producers include everyone from its star, John C Reilly , to Belgian arthouse auteurs, the Dardenne brothers. In spite of its mongrel background, this is a reassuringly old-fashioned affair. Audiard isn’t trying to reinvent the western or to use it to make telling points about today’s society or how America has lost its way. Instead, in adapting Patrick deWitt’s Booker Prize-nominated novel for the screen, he is paying affectionate homage to a genre he clearly admires. There is plenty of humour and philosophising here but the basic ingredients aren’t that different to those found in the films of Raoul Walsh or John Ford.

Reilly’s performance as Eli Sisters, the older of the two brothers, is similar to his Oliver Hardy in the recent Stan & Ollie . He is a superb comic actor who knows just how to switch between humour and pathos. In one beautifully staged scene, we see Eli here fast asleep by the campfire as a spider crawls over his face. His mouth is wide open and so we know exactly where the spider is headed. Reilly also extracts maximum comic capital out of the scenes involving his discovery of one of the great new inventions of the modern age, namely the toothbrush.

Eli’s partner is his brother, Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), who drinks far too much and gets terrible hangovers which cause him to vomit or fall off his horse. Eli and Charlie are quite the comic double act – or would be, if it wasn’t for their line of work. They’re killers for hire.

Audiard gives the film an elegiac feel that the brothers’ clowning does nothing to dissipate. Like hired guns in most westerns, the Sisters brothers have a very fatalistic approach to life. Eli may talk about retiring and opening up a store but Charlie realises that such a notion is completely fanciful given the trail of violence the brothers have left behind them. They’ve killed so many people they half expect retribution will soon be coming their way. Every victim has a father or brother who wants vengeance. If the brothers double cross their mysterious employer, “The Commodore”, other killers will be put on their trail.

The film begins in brutal and murky fashion with a night-time shootout that takes place in the pitch dark. It is hard to make out what is going on until suddenly the landscape is illuminated by a horse covered in flames galloping across the plains. (A barn has caught fire.) Both brothers are ruthless. They have no qualms about killing men already wounded and begging for mercy.

Although the body count is very high, Audiard doesn’t trivialise the violence. When someone is shot, we’ll hear a sickening sound as the bullet knocks the victim backwards.

The film is set in the early 1850s, at the height of Gold Rush fever. The Commodore has sent Eli and Charlie in pursuit of a chemist/prospector called Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who appears to have discovered a failsafe formula for detecting gold. Warm is also being pursued by a very dapper detective, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who keeps a diary, likes to quote Thoreau and is prey to existential despair. (He feels his life is like “an empty cylinder”.) The idea is to catch Warm, torture him and get the secret of his formula from him.

Most of the characters here come from troubled families. Eli and Charlie have the “foul blood” of their violent, drunken father running through their veins. Morris is likewise tormented by memories of childhood trauma. Very few women feature in the film, and those who do appear are strictly stock types: the saloon bar madam, the sweet-natured prostitute or the kindly old mother.

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

The chemist Warm turns out to be an idealist who dreams of using his formula not to get rich himself but to finance a utopian community. We know, though, that this is only a pipe dream.

As the Sisters brothers ride for days on end in pursuit of Warm, the film turns into a shaggy dog story. Events seem increasingly haphazard. One moment a bear will turn up; another, murderous varmints wearing racoon hats will emerge from the bushes. This may reflect the inchoate and violent nature of life in the old west but it doesn’t make for smooth storytelling. Audiard is more interested in exploring the relationship between the brothers than in trying to stoke up suspense. The humour can seem incongruous when it is seen next to so much bloodshed and darkness. There is something perverse in the way the filmmakers try to make us identify with characters who are, in fact, homicidal killers.

It’s a measure of the four exceptional central performances (from Reilly, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal and Ahmed) that the film remains so engaging in spite of its narrative digressions and moments of very bleak violence. Audiard serves up just what audiences would expect in a tale from the wild frontier – wagon trains, rugged landscapes, galloping horses, decadent saloon bars and plenty of shootouts. Alongside the action, the director also shows us his characters’ inner lives. In doing so, he proves again that the western is far more durable and flexible as a genre than sceptics would have us believe.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘the sisters brothers’: film review | venice 2018.

John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed star in 'The Sisters Brothers,' French director Jacques Audiard's first English-language effort.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

The jovially titled The Sisters Brothers would have felt very much at home among the gorgeous, idiosyncratic revisionist Westerns of the early 1970s. What this will mean to audiences 45 years on is another question. This first English-language outing by the ever-adventurous French director Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet , Rust and Bone ) is a connoisseur’s delight, as it’s boisterously acted and detailed down to its last bit of shirt stitching. A sterling cast, led by John C. Reilly in the sort of starring role he’s been waiting for his whole career, will give this a certain profile in specialized release and down the line in home viewing venues.

Related Stories

Mixed 'joker: folie à deux' reviews highlight lack of excitement, underused lady gaga in sequel, 'diva futura' review: a messy but well-acted celebration of the golden age of an italian porn empire.

As are many classic Westerns, this is a tale of pursuit and patience involving a long journey and threats known and unknown. There will also be blood, of course, vast changes of fortune and the decisive matters of chance, daring and luck.

Release date: Sep 21, 2018

The Sisters Brothers possesses all of the above, in addition to the curiosity of a filmmaker who has clearly taken great relish in exploring a country that is both familiar (via countless movies) and now quite distant.

For the genre faithful, it’s almost always rewarding to see the classic form being tackled by an interested outsider. Audiard, working from the well regarded 2011 novel by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, keeps things interesting all the way by virtue of his clear desire to make everything here feel built from scratch. Much as with such 1970s Western refreshers as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Hired Hand and  Bad Company, you can feel the filmmaker’s zeal to make contact with the real Old West through the obligatory mythic passageway provided by the cinema. These films never drew a substantial public, and the same will likely be true again here, even as there are many pleasures to be had.

As with most Westerns, the story is simple: A big shot named The Commodor (Rutger Hauer) wants a foreign outsider prospector by the name of Hermann Kermit Warm ( Riz Ahmed ) to be killed for stealing. To this end he engages a brother assassin act by the unlikely name of Eli and Charlie Sisters (Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix ).

Alert to the danger, Warm takes on protection in the form of lawman/detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhal), setting off a pursuit of untold miles and time. This set-up naturally provides excuses to cover vast tracts of unspoiled land, just what any Western needs, as the tale moves from heavily wooded Oregon down along the California coast to San Francisco in high Gold Rush dudgeon.

The two parties are a study in contrasts. Warm is something seemingly new in Westerns, a Middle Eastern prospector, a dentist by profession, while Gyllenhaal’s lawman is unusually eloquent, perhaps a victim of over-education. The Sisters boys are of a notably lower status, rougher and gruffer but not without a rollicking appeal.

The film works up an only moderate sense of momentum over the first hour at least, with the greatest pleasures emanating from the variety of landscapes (Spanish and Romanian locations pass impressively as the Far West) and the feints and jabs of the four men, both in the direction of opponents and one another. Unlike many Westerns of yore, these are not men of few words; they’re idiosyncratic, even highly articulate at times, which goes hand in hand with the invigorating stores of intelligence with which the writers have endowed the four men.

It’s hard to tell how long the pursuit goes on, but at the film’s halfway point the Sisters arrive at the Pacific (reminding at one point of the unforgettable Oceanside interlude in One-Eyed Jacks ), and shortly thereafter at San Francisco, in the instant splendor and madness of its Gold Rush heyday. “This place is Babylon,” one of the brothers exclaims, as they indulge in a fancy hotel and get a load of flush toilets and gold-trimmed restaurants.

It’s during this spell by the Bay that the Sisters, and the film, take a fateful turn, as Eli proposes ditching the Commodore, thinking they can do better on their own. “We have a chance to get out,” he insists to his unconvinced brother, creating a rift that leads the tale to its inevitable rendezvous with violence. What eventually comes to pass is both unsettling and, finally, quite satisfying.

Reilly has the most expansive character here and he makes it his own, breathing deep stores of boisterous life into him. Phoenix provides a willing, if less assertive younger brother accomplice who is obliged by birth to be a second banana, while Gyllenhal and Ahmed are attractive, but rather less attention-grabbing saddlemates.

Physically, the film is a fine specimen, with production designer Michel Barthelemy and costume designer Milena Canonero providing unusually rich and detailed contributions. Alexandre Desplat’s score is icing on the cake.

Venue: Venice Film Festival

Opens: September 21 (U.S.) Annapurna

Production: Annapurna, Page 114, Why Not Productions, Michael De Luca Productions

Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal , Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer

Director: Jacques Audiard

Screenwriters: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick deWitt

Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Gregoire Sorlat, Michel Merkt, Megan Ellison, Michael De Luca, Alison Dickey, John C. Reilly

Executive producers: Chelsea Barnard, Tudor Reu, Sammy Scher

Director of photography: Benoit Debie

Production designer: Michel Barthelemy

Costume designer: Milena Canonero

Editor: Juliette Welfing

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Casting: Francine Maisler, Cristel Baras, Mathilde Snodgrass

121 minutes

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Norman spencer, david lean collaborator and ‘vanishing point’ producer, dies at 110, longtime friends will ferrell and harper steele grow even closer in ‘will & harper’ trailer, toronto hidden gem: ‘village keeper’ examines the challenges of ending cycles of abuse, the record-breaking kiss that nearly broke pee-wee herman, you can’t scare mike flanagan. can you, ‘the front room’ review: brandy norwood shines in a24’s offbeat psychological horror movie.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘The Sisters Brothers’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly Star in the Most Sensitive Western Ever Made — Venice

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

“ The Sisters Brothers ” is a sensitive western about brotherly love that just happens to revolve around stone-cold murderers. It’s a context that requires an original approach to the genre, and that’s exactly what veteran French director Jacques Audiard brings to his first English-language effort. However, in retrospect, Audiard is a natural fit: With movies like “Dheepan” and “A Prophet,” Audiard makes rich character studies about people trying to do the right thing in a world stacked against them, and nothing in American mythology provides a better template for exploring that crisis than the Wild West. However, it’s the stirring chemistry between Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as committed siblings that transforms these lively, violent circumstances into a sweet and intimate journey designed to catch acolytes of the genre off-guard.

Based on Patrick Dewitt’s 2011 novel, “The Sisters Brothers” unfolds against the backdrop of the Gold Rush, though the historical context is secondary to the narrative it sets in motion. In the first frame, titular Sisters brothers Charlie (Phoenix) and Eli (Reilly) emerge from nighttime shadows to massacre an entire house full of targets. Employed by an enigmatic gangster known as The Commodore (Rutger Hauer, in a fleeting but welcome cameo), the brothers careen across the barren landscape juggling various missions to murder men for reasons irrelevant to their plight. It’s a subversive adventure story about the supposed bad guys, a hit-man comedy by way of Peckinpah, and remarkable for the way it makes the familiar backdrop so appealing from the start.

For the hard-drinking Charlie, this endless killing spree is a justification unto itself; the gentler Eli, however, has started to question the underlying purpose of their missions. Little by little, the focused script (credited to Audiard and Thomas Bidegan) reveals details about this odd pair and the history of their bloody career path; so long as the movie hovers in the center of this dynamic, it remains a fascinating exploration of an unusual family bond.

“The Sisters Brothers” mines so much substance out its central characters that it falters when it cuts away from them. When the brothers are hired to track down a supposed thief named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, wearing a classy mustache and an inviting grin), the story shifts to his experiences with Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), the bounty hunter who nabs Hermann under the auspices of delivering him to the killers. Sporting a peculiar British accent that makes his lopsided “Okja” character look normal, Gyllenhaal stands out as odd variable in this otherwise credible scenario, though his scenes with Hermann develop their own sense of intrigue. It turns out the alleged criminal actually has a water-based formula with the ability to make gold appear in river beds, and its financial prospects appeal to Morris enough that he decides to become his prisoner’s business partner as they plot to foil the Sisters brothers when they arrive.

But really, this scenario sets in motion more complications for the brothers to escape, as they continue to contend with the broader existential question of what they should do with their time. Enduring harsh conditions on the road between Oregon and California, the Sisters spend much of the movie saving each other from physical harm, whether it’s abrasive spider bites or drunken saloon showdowns, and it’s so endearing to watch them survive each new twist that it renders broader stakes irrelevant. There’s an Altmanesque quality to the way Audiard builds out this world, with the ever-reliable Alexandre Desplat’s jangly score and Benoit Debie’s warm, painterly visuals opening up the brothers’ journeys to the boundless possibilities of the frontier. It almost seems as though they could keep at it forever, but every messy gunfight inches them closer to the possibility that time is running out.

About those gunfights: While Audiard has never made a proper action movie, many of his credits have a brutal, physical intensity, from the grotesque prison showdowns of “A Prophet” to the street brawls of “Rust and Bone” and the Rambo-like militant finale of “Dheepan,” from which Audiard drew on “The Wild Bunch.” To that end, he excels at constructing the most intense sequences of the movie. Filled with jolting sound design and clever misdirection, the shootouts in “The Sisters Brothers” have a sustained potency and remain unpredictable until the very last moments, much like the brothers themselves.

Reilly, who also produced the movie, tends to strike a distinctive tone between goofball and gentleman, a balance that makes his character here so likable from the outset. In a standout moment at a brothel, he attempts to engage in the most kindhearted sexual role-playing in film history, and his bedroom antics are so lovable the prostitute (“Fargo” Season 1 star Allison Tolman) is led to tears; next door, of course, an inebriated Eli’s wrecking havoc on cue. The sad-funny balance of this sequence epitomizes the movie’s endearing tone.

Phoenix, buried behind his usual scrappy beard, peers out at every twist with the same wild eyes that have become his trademark. A sort of companion piece to his emo hitman in Lynn Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” earlier this year, Phoenix plays Eli as the ultimate foil to his brother’s measured world view: Whereas Charlie constantly worries about his behavior, Eli never hesitates to maintain control of a situation — in a scene that finds the brothers facing down the barrels of a few guns at once, a typically sloshed Eli stares back at their foes and confidently vomits before taking them out.

While not every turn of events remains so involving, the siblings remain a key selling point, as the title of “The Sisters Brothers” provides a template for examining one of its core themes: This most masculine of genres often takes masculinity for granted, but “The Sisters Brothers” doesn’t let its tough guys off the hook. They’re vivid, emotional beings, the products of troubled upbringings who live hand-to-mouth the only way they know how. When they finally come around to confronting a major figure from their past, it arrives as a kind of spiritual awakening, the cinematic equivalent of watching a grown man cry.

“The Sisters Brothers” premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Annapurna Pictures releases it theatrically on September 21.

Most Popular

You may also like.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 78% Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Link to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• 73% Blink Twice Link to Blink Twice
• 95% Strange Darling Link to Strange Darling

New TV Tonight

• 100% Slow Horses: Season 4
• 97% English Teacher: Season 1
• 54% The Perfect Couple: Season 1
• -- Tell Me Lies: Season 2
• -- Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist: Season 1
• -- Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos: Season 1
• -- Outlast: Season 2
• -- The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Season 1
• -- Selling Sunset: Season 8
• -- Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Season 14

Most Popular TV on RT

• 74% Kaos: Season 1
• 83% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• 88% Terminator Zero: Season 1
• 100% Dark Winds: Season 2
• 95% Only Murders in the Building: Season 4
• 92% Bad Monkey: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 97% English Teacher: Season 1 Link to English Teacher: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Venice Film Festival 2024: Movie Scorecard

Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Joker: Folie à Deux First Reviews: Joaquin Phoenix Shines Again in ‘Deranged, Exciting, and Deeply Unsettling’ Sequel

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

• Trending on RT
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• Top 10 Box Office
• Venice Film Festival
• Popular Series on Netflix

The Sisters Brothers Reviews

Fun and light-hearted, The Sisters Brothers is a film that graciously fulfils the requirements if you’re looking for a Western that’s completely content with being itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 14, 2024

…The Sisters Brothers is a violent, bleakly funny, spikey and constantly surprising movie that evokes the best of Sergio Leone, and that’s quite a high bar for any modern Western…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 29, 2024

Despite its shaky tone, some of the humor lands really well. And it’s a lot of fun watching such an eclectic cast bite into this fascinating assortment of characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 25, 2022

With memorable performances throughout this extraordinary cast, The Sisters Brothers is another Audiard film whose tonality withstands categorization. It's neither a straightforward Western nor merely revisionist.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2022

A loose, funny, thoughtful and near-surreal western.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2022

Episode 15: The West Was Red

Full Review | Original Score: 76/100 | Sep 1, 2021

Plays like a movie that yearns to say something without knowing what it would like to say

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 5, 2021

It's a buddy flick and a Western but it's also more than the sum of its parts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 1, 2021

An absorbing character study that alternates its carnage with a poignancy that borders on poetic.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 7, 2020

Daring itself to be different and welcomed by some outstanding performances from its four leads, it's not destined to change the world, but you won't regret watching it either.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 27, 2020

Audiard gives the whole movie a very bizarre feel, crafting a western that feels at once a part of the genre and something entirely different.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2020

By sprinkling a variance of ideas and emotions across a plane far and wide, [Audiard] ends up with a film of ambition and patience that works more often than it doesn't.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 25, 2020

For a movie clocking in at a shade over two hours, The Sisters Brothers drags too long before giving a reason to care about the characters' repetitive struggles.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 18, 2020

Audiard, in his first English-speaking film, runs a western that stands out, almost always, using the genre's parameters with measure. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 27, 2020

Neither a nostalgic throwback to traditional westerns nor a revisionist antiwestern, this advances a positive view of camaraderie between individualist western types while subtly critiquing the unfettered capitalist system in which they operate.

Full Review | Mar 4, 2020

An uneven tone robs the film of a bit of momentum and coherence, but the lead performances and Audiard's proven visual skill mean it never falls out of the saddle.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

A film that you want to love. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 70/100 | Dec 20, 2019

Overall, The Sisters Brothers offers great performances amid an intriguing premise. Along with its beautiful cinematography, it is a surprise of a Western.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 7, 2019

By turns intense, hilarious and casually contemplative, it draws you in on the promise of simple thrills then wins you over with a sophisticated, all-around surprising ride.

Full Review | Oct 23, 2019

If this is Audiard's first major foray into stateside filmmaking, one can only hope it won't be his last.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 17, 2019

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

The Sisters Brothers Explores Some Adventurous Territory, But Falls Back on the Familiar

The Sisters Brothers’ shootouts, including the one that opens the film, almost all take place in ultrawides, as if to suggest to get any closer to the action would not reveal anything we hadn’t already seen before a dozen times. We’re inclined to agree, especially if we know anything about the plot going in. But the idea that the well-worn Western genre has never seen the likes of this before is a stylistic and textual premise that almost has to be baked into contemporary stories. Of course, it can’t be true for all of them (or necessarily a good thing ). But credit to The Sisters Brothers : besides the cat-and-mouse chase across the frontier, the skeletal settlements and pristine wilderness, approximately half of it really does feel like a story about the American Frontier that is underreported at best.

The film follows Charlie and Eli Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix and J ohn C. Reilly, respectively), assassin brothers who are making their way across the Oregon Territory, hired to apprehend a man who they’re told has robbed their boss. That man is Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a soft-spoken eccentric type who claims to have created a chemical formula that instantly detects gold deposits. A third associate of the brothers, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), has been hired to go ahead of them to capture Hermann and hold him in custody until they arrive, but it doesn’t take long for him to take a liking to his charge, and abandon the job he was hired to do. Hermann, in addition to being an entrepreneur, has dreams of starting a utopian community — a very hot trend in the 1800s that doesn’t get nearly as much air time as its louder, more violent contemporaries — and Morris is swept up in the dream as well.

Ahmed is mesmerizing here — exuding a kind of radical kindness that’s just strange enough to keep one on one’s guard — and the friendship between his and Gyllenhaal’s characters is quiet, curious, and affectionate. Of course most, if not all, attempts at intentional living such as Warm’s failed, and there’s a kind of bittersweet longing that hangs over The Sisters Brothers, for all the idiocy of man that stands in the way of peace and prosperity.

Maybe it truly does take an outside perspective to breathe new life into a genre — the director, Jacques Audiard, is making his English-language debut with the film, based on a 2011 novel by Canadian Patrick deWitt, and there’s a pleasant enough tonal zag for every expected zig in the plot. But the central story, between Charlie and Eli, and the path of their contentious, lopsided, but ultimately loyal relationship, doesn’t feel particularly insightful, even with a warm, vulnerable performance from Reilly. (Phoenix proves once again that there’s nobody quite as good as him at playing violent idiots, though it’s not exactly a revelation this time around.) Without the Western trappings (which are realized proficiently enough but lack some kind of conviction) this would be an exceedingly simplistic sibling drama, with barely enough meat on its bones for 90 minutes, much less 121.

The film reaches a strange, horrifying climax — a series of events that feels absolutely plausible as a lost chapter of tragic human idiocy. But then it hobbles on for another 15 or so minutes, dead-set on finding some resolution for Charlie and Eli that feels absolutely unearned — a little deus ex mommy. Put up side-by-side, the redemption of killers doesn’t feel quite as urgent a narrative as the alliance of idealists, and in its final minutes The Sisters Brothers retreats back from some interesting, adventurous territory to something all too familiar.

• vulture homepage lede
• movie review
• the sisters brothers

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 163: September 5, 2024
• The Bachelorette Season-Finale Recap: It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way
• Joker: Folie à Deux Commits the Mortal Sin of Wasting Lady Gaga
• Babygirl Might Just Be The Year’s Hottest Movie
• We Read the New Twilight Book So You Don’t Have To
• Slow Horses Season-Premiere Recap: Identifying Marks
• 2024’s Comedians You Should and Will Know

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Den of Geek

The Sisters Brothers Review: An Offbeat Take on the Western

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix shine as gunslinger siblings in the unorthodox oater of The Sisters Brothers.

• Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
• Share on email (opens in a new tab)

The term “revisionist” gets thrown around a lot in film criticism, especially when it comes to genres like the Western, but in the case of The Sisters Brothers , the description certainly applies. Directed and co-written (with Thomas Bidegain) by the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard–best known for searing world cinema films like A Prophet and Dheepan — The Sisters Brothers takes the traditional Western template and then veers unexpectedly, humorously and humanely away from it, creating both a funny buddy comedy and a brutal character-driven drama within the same occasionally shaggy framework.

Based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt, there’s little pioneering spirit or old-time black-and-white morality apparent in The Sisters Brothers . Audiard’s Old West is a crude, filthy, mean and often barbaric place, a vast wilderness marked by scattered pockets of, if not civilization, at least the semblance of a society or community. It’s on a symbolic representation of this wasteland–an empty plain on which sits one lonely, tiny ranch–that we meet Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C. Reilly and future Joker Joaquin Phoenix), siblings who are also deadly hired assassins.

We first encounter them at the end of a job, which Audiard films from a distance: we never see the violence up close, but we see the bursts of gunfire that flash out from the ranch and the Sisters’ weapons like distant strokes of lightning against the dark sky. There are screams and finally a fire (including the haunting image of a running horse, flames rippling out from its body). The one immediate notion we come away with is that the Sisters are damn good at their job, although Audiard never glorifies the brothers’ considerable skills and shows the violence in all its ugliness.

What the director seems most interested in is getting into the psyches of these two men, who are vastly different in many ways but united by blood both inside and out. Eli is the more thoughtful of the two, a man who we soon realize has had enough of the Sisters’ nomadic, amoral lifestyle and wants to find a new direction in life. Charlie is not quite there yet: dissolute, often drunk, he revels in whoring, fighting and killing as if he knows that it will all eventually catch up with him one way or another.

Ad – content continues below

The bones of a narrative are put in place when the Sisters are hired by their regular employer, the Commodore (a briefly seen Rutger Hauer), to find and kill Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, soon to be seen in Venom ), an idealistic inventor who has discovered a new chemical formula through which prospectors can detect gold. A detective named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), sent by the Commodore previously to retrieve Warm, has been seduced by the man’s confidence, passion and dreams of building a Utopian society down in Texas with the riches they’ll presumably acquire from Warm’s formula. Now the Sisters are tasked with dispatching both men and bringing the formula back.

But The Sisters Brothers is not as concerned with Warm’s MacGuffin-like discovery as it is with subverting the structure that it sets up. Nominally built as a chase (and shot in epic fashion by cinematographer Benoit Debie in the film’s one deliberate nod to a genre hallmark), the movie takes a long, leisurely, meandering course on its way to the resolution of the story, focusing instead on the evolving characters of its four leads.

Reilly is impeccable and soulful as Eli, pulled by his sense of responsibility to both his brother and his job but knowing that he wants to experience a different life and perhaps even love. Phoenix is also excellent as Charlie, tamping down the heavy existential dread of some of his recent roles while subtly portraying the younger brother’s gradual transition toward Eli’s way of thinking. The series of tangents and mini-adventures the two encounter on their journey–from a bizarre accident with a spider to a confrontation with the creepy bordello owner Mayfield (Rebecca Root)–highlight the near-unbreakable bond between the two even as their goals become increasingly divergent.

further reading: The Must See Movies of 2018

Ahmed, with his large eyes and disarmingly candid way of speaking, provides a core of grace and gives a warmly open performance. Gyllenhaal’s character is perhaps the murkiest in terms of his development and saddled with a strange accent that veers toward British and then hairpins back toward a sort of upper class affectation, neither of which is quite successful. The movie spends a bit too much time with this pair–balancing their principled quest against the more prosaic and ruthless one of the Sisters–but their storyline finally finds its footing when Morris and Warm inevitably meet up with the Sisters.

That meeting doesn’t go quite as one might expect, and neither does just about all of the last third of The Sisters Brothers . The kind of plot developments one might expect from a standard Western never quite materialize, and in some cases are actively turned on their heads. But ultimately, all four men are changed forever by the strange manner in which they are brought together, and the film reveals that what Audiard is most interested in–as with much of his earlier work–is the ways in which damaged, hardened or cynical men can at least be introduced the possibility of change. The epilogue provides a final, eloquent coda to this most unusual and fascinating of Westerns.

The Sisters Brothers is out in theaters today.

Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

Don Kaye is a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist and associate editor of Den of Geek. Other current and past outlets include Syfy, United Stations Radio Networks, Fandango, MSN, RollingStone.com and many more. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @donkaye

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

The sisters brothers.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 2 Reviews
• Kids Say 3 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Heavy violence, camaraderie in revisionist Western.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Sisters Brothers is an incredibly violent Western based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt. Many characters are shot and killed -- death doesn't seem to carry much weight here -- and there's plenty of gore and blood. Animals are killed, characters get nasty chemical burns, a character…

Why Age 17+?

Lots of killing, guns, shooting. Many characters die, and death isn't given much

Brief images of men having sex with prostitutes. Men flirt with prostitutes in a

Several uses of "f--k," plus "bulls--t," "a--hole," "damn fool," "ass," "son of

A main character abuses alcohol, getting extremely drunk in more than one scene.

Any Positive Content?

Acknowledges the pitfalls of violence -- i.e., that violence begets more violenc

Characters are likable but aren't worth emulating. They're violent, greedy, self

Violence & Scariness

Lots of killing, guns, shooting. Many characters die, and death isn't given much weight. Bloody wounds, gore, pools of blood. Animals (horses, a bear, fish, beavers, etc.) are killed; horses are trapped in a burning barn (one is shown running, on fire). Characters get nasty chemical burns. Characters get sick and nearly die. Man's arm amputated with a saw. Brief, violent nightmare shows a man chopping bodies to pieces. Character dies by suicide. Hitting and punching. Characters handcuffed, tied up.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief images of men having sex with prostitutes. Men flirt with prostitutes in a bar. Sexual innuendo. Kissing. Suggestion of a man masturbating under a blanket.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," plus "bulls--t," "a--hole," "damn fool," "ass," "son of a bitch," "goddamn," plus "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A main character abuses alcohol, getting extremely drunk in more than one scene. Violent hangovers with vomiting. Lots of social drinking, mainly whiskey. Cigarette and cigar smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Acknowledges the pitfalls of violence -- i.e., that violence begets more violence -- but there never seems to be anything in the way of consequences other than death itself. Greed is also rampant. For a brief time, four characters work together, but it's short-lived due to vice and greed.

Positive Role Models

Characters are likable but aren't worth emulating. They're violent, greedy, selfish, sometimes disloyal.

Parents need to know that The Sisters Brothers is an incredibly violent Western based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt. Many characters are shot and killed -- death doesn't seem to carry much weight here -- and there's plenty of gore and blood. Animals are killed, characters get nasty chemical burns, a character dies by suicide, and limbs are severed. Language is also very strong, with multiple uses of "f--k" and more. A main character abuses alcohol, gets heavily drunk in more than one scene, and suffers terrible hangovers (including vomiting and passing out). Social drinking and cigar/cigarette smoking are also shown. Expect to see brief images of sex with saloon prostitutes, as well as kissing, flirting, and the suggestion of a man masturbating under a blanket. This movie -- which stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix -- has some fine acting and picturesque scenery, and mature Western fans are likely to enjoy it, but it may be a little off-putting to genre newcomers. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 2 parent reviews

The Sisters Brothers is a must-see hidden gem from 2018

Just like the rest of the junk out ther, what's the story.

In THE SISTERS BROTHERS, it's 1851, and cool-headed Eli ( John C. Reilly ) and reckless Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix ) Sisters are hired killers who generally work in Oregon for a powerful man called the Commodore. Their latest job involves a man named Hermann Warm ( Riz Ahmed ). Another of the Commodore's agents -- the elegant, educated John Morris ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) -- has been charged with finding and befriending Warm; then the Sisters Brothers will meet them to do the dirty work. But Morris discovers what it is that the Commodore really wants: a special chemical formula for finding gold. So Morris decides to abandon the Commodore and join Warm in business, but they make many enemies in the process. The Sisters Brothers save the pair from attackers, and the four become friends. But the chemical gold mining has its drawbacks, and more tragedy awaits.

Is It Any Good?

This enjoyable revisionist Western based on Patrick DeWitt's novel focuses on male relationships. But it's also somewhat tonally uneven, swinging from scenes of brutal violence to scenes that could be described as "cuddly." French director Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet , Rust and Bone , Dheepan ) makes his English-language debut with an assured touch; the movie's lyrical dialogue flows like music. Audiard seems to specialize in stories about the way violence wriggles its way into relationships, and The Sisters Brothers fits that mold perfectly. Reilly and Phoenix's characters have a simple but genuine history and an appealing conversational shorthand. Their performances are terrific.

The same goes for Ahmed and Gyllenhaal (who previously worked well together in Nightcrawler ), playing educated men who prize simple courtesies and kindnesses. (Gyllenhaal in particular speaks with a studied elocution that sounds poetic.) When the four characters are all together, hanging around camp and waiting for a chance to look for gold, they have a genuine, delightful camaraderie. Audiard uses the film's Western landscapes effectively, but the movie's violence can seem detached, and the killings don't mean much (except for the untimely death of a horse, which is more gruesome than it had to be). And if not for the ingenious casting of the loopy, lovable Carol Kane (who has about five minutes of screen time), the ending wouldn't have worked quite so well.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Sisters Brothers ' violence . How intense is it? Does it seem designed to shock or to thrill? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How is drinking depicted? Is it glamorized? Where does social drinking cross the line into abuse in this movie? What are the consequences ?

How are women portrayed in the movie? Are any shown in positions of power? Why do you think prostitutes are so prominent in stories of the Old West?

What is the appeal of the Western genre? How does it speak to us today? What is a "revisionist" Western? Does this one qualify?

How are the brothers affected by an abusive childhood? Do they overcome it? How do their choices differ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 21, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : February 5, 2019
• Cast : Jake Gyllenhaal , Joaquin Phoenix , John C. Reilly
• Director : Jacques Audiard
• Studio : Annapurna Pictures
• Genre : Western
• Topics : Book Characters , Brothers and Sisters
• Run time : 121 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content
• Last updated : September 15, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

The Ballad of Lefty Brown

In a Valley of Violence

Westerns for kids and teens, best action movies for kids, related topics.

• Book Characters
• Brothers and Sisters

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

The Sisters Brothers Review

01 Apr 2019

The Sisters Brothers

Step aside, The Man With No Name, for here come The Men With Silly Names. At first glance the Sisters Brothers, aka Eli ( John C. Reilly ) and Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix ), are tough, fleabitten prairie assassins, as fearsome as Clint Eastwood ’s iconic, laconic anti-hero. But the more time you spend with them, the more you realise that this pair of firearm-packing fortysomethings are actually childish, bickering improvisers who rarely know what they’re doing, nor why they’re doing it. Undercutting established Western tropes, they’re a hoot to spend time with. And the same is true of the film in which they appear. Sometimes violent, often hilarious, and always unpredictable, Jacques Audiard ’s dark Western is a terrific yarn about two uncivilised men grappling with the onset of civilisation.

Working for a shadowy figure known only as the Commodore ( Rutger Hauer ), the pair are hot on the trail of a man named Hermann Kermit Warm ( Riz Ahmed ), who is carrying an invention he claims is capable of locating gold. But this is the loosest of thrillers, unhurriedly tossing the shambling brothers into one colourful scenario after another. One situation ends with Eli puking up baby spiders; another with one of them watching as a flaming horse gallops past. This West is wild, no doubt about it, and brutal, and surreal, but Audiard paints it with an amused eye, constantly puncturing the puffed-up posturings of the tough guys who inhabit it. Often restlessly moving his cameras, rather than employing grand, locked-off, John Fordian compositions, Audiard (the French director of such dark, spiky dramas as Rust And Bone and A Prophet ) keeps things feeling vital and authentically grubby. It’s anti-mythmaking, of which John Wayne would surely disapprove.

Gives a fresh jolt of electricity to the Old American West.

Wry as the whole thing may be, the two titular characters slowly win your heart. As the sensitive, prickly, blabbery Eli, Reilly (who was the main force in getting Patrick deWitt’s source novel turned into a film) is tremendous, bringing to life a sweet soul who pines for the girl he left behind (“It’s a shawl!” Eli scowls when his brother refers to the fragranced item he carries everywhere as a “silly red scarf”). Watching him get to grips with a toothbrush, a miraculous new invention in mid-19th century America, is like watching Homo erectus sizing up fire. Phoenix, meanwhile, has a rare twinkle in his eye as hard-drinking, slightly mad Charlie. Other than the times when the character is blearily napping atop his moving horse, Phoenix hasn’t been this spry on film for years. And their interplay is delightfully pugnacious, making it all the more remarkable that this is Audiard’s very first English-language film.

As it trundles along, and the bodycount inexorably rises, it develops into a four-hander. Ahmed is fascinating as the movie’s smartest character, a man who dreams of a utopian society and thinks he knows how to achieve it. And Jake Gyllenhaal (who, let us not forget, began his acting career with a less intense Western, City Slickers ) provides a different vibe, as an intense prospector with his own ties to the Commodore, who’s also on the trail of Warm.

But if you think events are heading towards a traditional main-street shoot-’em-up between the oddball quartet, think again. The third act is full of wonderful weirdness and strange diversions. Much like last year’s The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (which featured its own gold-mad prospector, in the craggy form of Tom Waits), The Sisters Brothers gives a fresh jolt of electricity to the Old American West. Not bad for a film based on a Canadian book, shot by a French director, in Spain.

Related Articles

Movies | 24 07 2019

Movies | 05 04 2019

Find anything you save across the site in your account

“The Sisters Brothers” Is Not Your Average Western

What is it with Jacques Audiard and amputation? The heroine of “ Rust and Bone ” (2012) spent much of the movie without her legs, having been lunched on by a killer whale. Now we have “ The Sisters Brothers ,” in which an important character mislays an arm—a manageable loss, except that the film is a Western, and the limb used to come in handy whenever a gun needed slinging. Who’s afraid of a one-armed cowboy?

The story, based on Patrick deWitt’s novel of the same name, begins in 1851, at the fulcrum of the nineteenth century. The action sets off in Oregon and heads south, often at a canter, sometimes at a more leisurely pace, even pausing for a gawk at San Francisco. The principal riders are Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) and his brother Eli (John C. Reilly). Charlie is a hothead and a brute—the stronger partner, you’d say, were he not ravened by a weakness for booze. So heavy is one hangover that he falls off his horse. Eli is the lumbering half of the duo, less cocksure and more tempted by the thought of a well-earned retirement. The boys could not be less alike, but they can’t do without each other, and what binds them together is their job. They are paid to murder.

Their employer is known as the Commodore, whom we see only fleetingly and who is never heard to speak. This is a shame, since he’s played by Rutger Hauer. (Was the role originally meatier, perhaps, before being pared to near-nothing?) For their latest mission, Charlie and Eli must find a fellow named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who is not, as you might imagine, a Muppet but a law-abiding chemist. He is said to have “no friends, no baggage, no money,” but also to have invented a process for increasing the yield of treasure from gold-bearing rivers. The brothers are to mine the knowledge out of him, by any means necessary, and then shut him down.

First, however, the poor sap needs to be located, and so a scout, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), is sent ahead, the idea being that he will befriend the chemist, detain him, and wait. Morris is the most singular figure onscreen, and a graceful addition to Gyllenhaal’s gallery of loners, compiled in films like “ Enemy ” (2013), “ Nightcrawler ” (2014), and “ Demolition ” (2015). As an actor, he seems to be keeping something back, or clutching it tight, and such tacit withholding draws us instinctively toward him; it’s an especially good fit for this movie, which glitters with half-revealed secrets. The gold rush may have been crowded, but it was not a collective effort. As Chaplin realized, it swarmed with solitaries, all of them dreaming, like dragons, of a private hoard.

Hence the touching encounter between Morris and Warm, who turns out to be a kindred spirit, shy and unalloyed in his ideals, impossible to target or to hate. Morris decides to join him in his quest rather than set him up for slaughter, and, at this pivotal point, the loyalties in the tale begin to shift. Soon other characters follow suit, going against the grain of their own rough natures. Why do we keep faith with these fickle souls? Partly because transmutation is Audiard’s stock-in-trade. He is French, and “The Sisters Brothers” is his first film in English, but Charlie, Eli, Morris, and Warm are of a piece with the protagonist of “ A Self-Made Hero ” (1997), who pretends to have been a member of the French Resistance, and with the Tamil fighter in “ Dheepan ” (2016), who flees the civil war in Sri Lanka and ends up as a caretaker in Paris. All these people feel compelled to become other than what they were. The journey is not always a success.

But there’s another reason for the lure of “The Sisters Brothers.” If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux. We listen to a letter written by Morris, in voice-over. “I have travelled through places that didn’t exist three months ago,” he says, before listing the signs of activity. “First tents, then houses, then shops, with women fiercely discussing the price of flour.” There’s a thrill to that specificity, but it isn’t just the floury detail of the dialogue that makes the movie rise. Look at Eli buying his first-ever toothbrush, devoutly studying the instructions, and being startled, one morning, by the sight of somebody else cleaning his teeth, in the open air. Brushfight at the O.K. Corral!

The cinematic brawl between the wild and the supposedly civilized is hardly a novel theme. When the frame of a house is lofted into position, in Audiard’s film, we are reminded of other hoistings and half-built habitations, like the skeletal church tower in “ My Darling Clementine ” (1946), which lacks both a preacher and a name. So what has changed between John Ford’s classic, all about Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers, and Audiard’s approach? Well, for one thing, courtesy has shaded into comedy. Whereas Fonda, in his gentlest tones, asks a hotel clerk for buckets of hot water so that a lady can take a bath, John C. Reilly, as Eli, lets out a simple yip of delight on confronting a flush toilet. Lavatorologists will quibble (the earliest such contraptions, displayed in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851, had not yet arrived in America), but the joke holds firm, and Eli has seen a more commodious future. He pulls the chain like somebody launching a ship.

Not that the film eases up on savage behavior. “Hey, this is the Sisters Brothers!” is the first thing we hear. Echoes of “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees!,” you might think, except that Charlie and Eli aren’t just trying to be friendly. Out on the prairie, shrouded by darkness, they kill a shackful of men. From a burning barn, nearby, gallops a horse on fire. Civilized society, whatever that may be, is many leagues away, and some of the images that follow, in the next two hours, tack between the nasty and the tragic—between the sleeping Eli being bitten by a spider inside his mouth, for instance, and a night sky so deeply bruised and empurpled that we could be staring at a Rothko.

Nevertheless, even as the Commodore dispatches a fresh batch of assailants, we get an extraordinary sense, welling up in the main characters, that being felled by unnatural causes might not be the only way to die. “My life is an empty cylinder,” Morris declares, and he means to fill it. Warm, for his part, talks of a utopian community that will concentrate on true democracy and “spiritual development.” (The plan is to base it in Dallas. Hmm.) These are bewildering prospects, to say the least, for anyone appearing in—or watching—a Western. Violence should be met with violence, whether in a street gang or beside a secluded stream: that is the lesson bequeathed to generations of moviegoers, and maybe it takes a foreign director, now and then, to suggest otherwise. Ford, I suspect, would have scoffed at the ending of “The Sisters Brothers,” and so would Anthony Mann, who, at the climax of his gold-rush drama, “ The Far Country ” (1955), makes sure that the hero (James Stewart), having been shot in the arm, removes his sling for the purge of the final showdown. No such return to the fray for Audiard’s amputee; he lifts his arm to aim, but it just ain’t there. As for the film’s conclusion, I will say only that it stirred me even more than it surprised me. Once the possibilities of mayhem have been exhausted, it’s time to give peace a chance.

What is hard to work out, in regard to “Bel Canto,” is who should really have made it. Buñuel? Mel Brooks? Or would it have suited the Marx Brothers, as a coda to “A Night at the Opera”? How about a role for Steven Seagal?

The actual director is Paul Weitz, who, together with Anthony Weintraub, adapted the script from Ann Patchett’s prize-winning novel. We are in a nameless but volatile Latin-American land, at the home of the Vice-President, who is hosting the most rarefied of soirées. Many nationalities are represented, and the company includes a visiting Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) and the French Ambassador (Christopher Lambert). The guest of honor is Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore), a famed American soprano, who has kindly consented to perform, for a sizable fee. Mid-aria, however, she is interrupted by a squad of gun-waving guerrillas. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

I was afraid that the terrorists, who are without mercy, might force Roxane to sing something by Andrew Lloyd Webber, so it comes as a relief when they merely demand the release of all political prisoners. Later, however, the diva stands on a balcony and, spurning the offer of a megaphone, serenades the watching world with a tremulous burst of Puccini. “When they hear the beauty of your voice, these government criminals, perhaps they will find a solution to our situation,” the rebel leader says. Ah, yes, cultural diplomacy; think of all the hijackings that have been brought to a bloodless end by a snatch of “La Bohème.” Meanwhile, the narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough. ♦

Screen Rant

The sisters brothers.

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Your Rating

Jacques Audiard

Reviews (0)

Have You Watched It?

Be the first to leave your review.

Jake Gyllenhaal

Rutger hauer, joaquin phoenix, rebecca root, seasons (4).

Season 1 (2016)

Season 2 (2018), season 3 (2022), season 4 (2026), users reviews (125).

We want to hear from you! Share your opinions in the review below and remember to keep it respectful.

Your comment has not been saved

Latest Stories

Every jake gyllenhaal movie, ranked from worst to best, every jake gyllenhaal crime movie, ranked from worst to best (including the guilty), the sisters brothers trailer teases wild comedic western, related titles.

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

BABY REINDEER

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

watch later

not interested / hide

Play Trailer

subscription

Read our dedicated guide on how to watch The Sisters Brothers (2018)

10 Best Western Movies to Watch Right Now

The 50 Best Indie Comedy Movies

15 Cheapest Live TV Streaming Services for Cord-cutting

10 Best Live TV Services That Offer Free Trial

How To Cancel Your YouTube TV Subscription in 2024

Amazon Prime Video Review 2024

Bilal Zouheir

What it's about, sujanthereaper.

This is like a cat and mouse chase movie but turns into something else later. Totally unexpected ending. Must watch if you love western thrillers.

Bill Klimko

Watch this movie! It’s quirky, funny, and hopelessly non-genre Western fare. Oh there’s cowboys, horses, tarantulas, gun fights, betrayal, and a loving Mom. It is pure nuts … enjoy. John C. Reilly steals the show by the way.

Thank you for your reply. I do find the reviews a bit over the top. No constructive criticism. They can’t all be suberb and outstanding. Give us some balance

I hated this movie. Slow-moving, really predictable, resorting to “gee-whiz-golly” immaturity in the main characters. This is a classic cowboy Mayberry story with a crazy element added so that violence cna be introduced. But there’s no repercussions, no character development. Suck,

Add a comment

More like this in, a-list actors.

Wind River (2017)

Sicario's screenwriter directs this story of murder in an Indigenous reserve

Cold War (2018)

A quiet Polish masterpiece with ravishing music and dazzling visuals

Wild Tales (2014)

Co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar, this tumultuous Argentine anthology film tests the limits of human sanity when pushed to the extremes – and will also test yours.

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Shyamalan meets Black Mirror in this hugely entertaining, visually inventive apocalyptic thriller with a killer ending

The Farewell (2019)

Awkwafina shines in this complex culture clash comedy.

Booksmart (2019)

Two academic overachievers from high school set out to prove that they're a smart and fun for one last time.

Thelma (2024)

A lovely and bad-ass tribute to the fierceness of old age

Sound of Metal (2020)

Riz Ahmed excels in this piercing drama about a musician losing his hearing.

Captain Fantastic (2016)

Viggo Mortensen is fantastic in this plot-twisting drama about a survivalist American family

Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)

A darkly hilarious portrait of the inevitability of death

Curated by humans, not algorithms.

© 2024 agoodmovietowatch, all rights reserved.

• Become a Critical Movie Critic
• Movie Review Archives

Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers (2018)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> September 24, 2018

“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” — John Howard Payne

The Smothers Brothers they are not. Brothers Eli (John C. Reilly, “ Kong: Skull Island ”) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix, “ You Were Never Really Here ”) Sisters, known to all as the Sisters Brothers, are deadly serious. Hired assassins who prowl the Old West looking for their prey, they operate at the behest of a mysterious figure known only as “The Commodore” (Rutger Hauer, “ The Mill and the Cross ”) and go about their tasks with keen precision. Winner of the Silver Lion award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, Jacques Audiard’s (“ Dheepan ”) first English-language film The Sisters Brothers is a Western that has more on its mind than Cowboys and Indians. Though it has its share of violence, there is nothing of John Wayne in the film and, may I add, probably very little of the real West.

Written by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain (“ Rust and Bone ”), the film is set in the Oregon Territory in 1851 during Gold Rush days. Based on Patrick DeWitt’s novel of the same name, the film features the love/hate relationship between two siblings, the volatile and alcoholic Charlie and his more responsible brother Eli, also a killer but with a soft(er) side. While Phoenix does his usual workman like job, Reilly is the real standout in his first lead role, showing a gritty determination with a side of humor and a touch of melancholy.

The film opens with a barrage of gunfire as the two men raid a farm in the middle of the night. Their target is one man but there are six dead bodies at the end, prompting Eli to tell Charlie that we messed that one up pretty good (though he did not use that precise terminology). Always ready to stick it to his brother, Charlie declares that he will be the “lead man” on their next assignment. The brothers are far from incompetent, however, and have a reputation for being a two-pronged killing machine whose interests lie no farther than getting the job done. In their next assignment, the brothers are dispatched to track down, torture, and kill Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, “ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ”), a chemist and prospector whose invention of a device that is alleged to make gold sparkle and rise to the surface of a lake or river is coveted by the Commodore.

Enhanced by a delightful score by Alexandre Desplat (“ Isle of Dogs ”), the brothers ride their horses over gorgeous Western vistas shot by cinematographer Benoît Debie, (“ Spring Breakers ”), though it was actually filmed in Spain and Romania. Capturing Warm, however, has been left to John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal, “ Stronger ”), an incongruously elegant detective who proceeds to strike up a friendship with the articulate prospector that saves him from torture and death at the hands of the Sisters. Although their friendship may be primarily about a business partnership, Warm entrances Morris with his talk of a utopian community in Texas where everyone is equal, there is no crime or violence and presumably, like in the Norwegian folk song Oleanna, “the cows all like to milk themselves and the hens lay eggs ten times a day.”

Bickering most of the time and leaving a few dead bodies along the way, the Sisters find their way to California and eventually San Francisco where Eli becomes enamored with such modern inventions as flush toilets and toothbrushes, perhaps a signal that their way of life is coming to an end. Eventually meeting up with Morris and Warm, they try their luck at prospecting until greed, as it often does, gets in the way. Eli talks of quitting the life and returning to domesticity, perhaps opening a store with Charlie, but he will have none of it, saying that he has never known any other way of life and wants to keep doing what he’s doing.

The Sisters Brothers takes place in a Western atmosphere we are unfamiliar with. The two men are not one-dimensional gunslingers and opportunists but real people who exhibit a degree of self-reflection. As the film progresses, a transformation occurs that lifts the film to another level. After a poisonous spider finds its way into Eli’s mouth, Charlie is forced to care for him and the brothers bond in a gentler, more caring way. Though The Sisters Brothers attempts to attain a balance between action/adventure and dark comedy, its message of human connection and the longing for a more just society strikes a responsive chord in an age overflowing with cynicism.

Tagged: assassin , brothers , friendship , novel adaptation , violence

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

Movie Review: Hit the Road (2021) Movie Review: Happening (2021) Movie Review: Playground (2021) Movie Review: The Power of the Dog (2021) Movie Review: After Yang (2021) Movie Review: The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) Movie Review: The Worst Person in the World (2021)

'Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers (2018)' has no comments

Privacy Policy | About Us

 |  Log in

The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet.

Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers, Annapurna Pictures, 121 minutes, 2018, R

The Sisters brothers, the pair of antiheroes at the center of this film, couldn’t be more different. The elder, Eli (John C. Reilly), is thoughtful, kind and vulnerable, while the younger, Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), is hotheaded, belligerent and obscene. Together they are awfully good at what they do—killing people.

The Commodore—the man for whom the Sisters kill and who appears only from afar—is an allegorical baron of sorts who seems to have amassed both a great fortune and a great many enemies. The brothers’ latest “mission,” as Charlie passionately describes it, is to track down chemist Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who is traveling to California with a secret formula that promises to easily extract gold from rivers. They are to kill the chemist and return with the formula.

One of the Commodore’s spies, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), has already pinpointed Warm and is keeping tabs on him until the Sister brothers arrive. But Morris, whose Latinate diction often befuddles the brothers in telegrams, finds what he considers an intellectual equal in Warm. They become friends, then business partners and together try to pull a fast one on the two killers on their tail.

The scenes with Warm and Morris, who engage in scholarly, often idealistic discussions, play nicely against the cruder poetics of the Sisters brothers. Warm proposes to build a post-capitalist, post-crime utopia…in Dallas, of all places. To do it, of course, he needs gold. All four lead actors are magnificent, and when they come together, the film soars into its own briefly sustained utopia. At times The Sisters Brothers feels like different buddy movies screening simultaneously, and it all works.

The characters—gunfighters and prospectors, wanderers and adventurers—may hold the same occupations, motivations and dreams as many a movie character before them, but they’re so richly plumbed by both script and performance that the archetypes feel born anew. The same can be said about the world that director Jacques Audiard has crafted. Despite the high prospect of death, this California, at the height of the Gold Rush in 1851, is exhilarating. Morris describes its fast-paced development in his journal: “First tents, then houses, then women fiercely discussing the price of flour…[in] places that didn’t exist three months ago.” When the Sisters brothers arrive in the bright new metropolis of San Francisco for the first time, they beam with excitement. So do we.

The Sisters Brothers is not declaratively subversive, nor is it a simple exercise in Western tropes. It tends to hop along its own trail at its own pace, often conflating commonly seen subject matter (a gunfighter challenged by another in a stable, for instance) with more unusual ones (e.g., a gunfighter challenged by the dread of using a toothbrush for the first time). The bizarre isn’t there to throw commentary onto the commonplace, nor is the commonplace meant to alleviate the audience from the bizarre; it all just seems perfectly suited to the experience of the Sisters brothers—a welcome addition to a long line of luminary Western duos.

—Louis Lalire

Related stories

Portfolio: Images of War as Landscape

Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, […]

Jerrie Mock: Record-Breaking American Female Pilot

In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.

This Patient Rider Spent Months Retracing the Pony Express on Horseback

In 2019 Will Grant embarked on a 142-day, 2,000-mile horseback journey from the Pony Express stables in St. Joseph, Mo., to trail’s end in Sacramento, Calif.

10 Pivotal Events in the Life of Buffalo Bill

William Frederick Cody (1846-1917) led a signal life, from his youthful exploits with the Pony Express and in service as a U.S. Army scout to his globetrotting days as a showman and international icon Buffalo Bill.

Michelle Yeoh Is Cutthroat and Commanding in Netflix’s Enchanting Action Dramedy ‘The Brothers Sun’: TV Review

By Aramide Tinubu

Aramide Tinubu

• Nicole Kidman’s Netflix Mystery ‘The Perfect Couple’ Is Profoundly Unserious in All the Best Ways: TV Review 4 hours ago
• Jeff Goldblum’s ‘Kaos’ Is a Meandering Mythological Bore: TV Review 1 week ago
• Kamala Harris’ Speech Was Powerful and Heartfelt, but Trump’s Legacy Has Stilted My Joy 2 weeks ago

Many people have complex family lives. Private affairs are tucked in the corners of attics, shoved in closets or kept under wraps by elders– shocking the younger generations when these hidden histories are finally revealed. For the Suns, whose family ties stretch from Los Angeles to Taiwan, secrets are only the tip of the iceberg. Created by Brad Falchuk and Byron Wu, “ The Brothers Sun ” is a thrilling, brilliant dramedy about familial obligations, buried skeletons and the bonds that can never be broken. 

Related Stories

How Much Should AI Giants Pay Hollywood? What Insiders Say Has Stalled Any Licensing Deals

Haugesund’s Next Nordic Generation Slate Packed with Strong Emotions: ‘There is No Shortage of Nordic Talent’

Popular on variety.

Endlessly entertaining, the series has a cultural specificity unveiling communities rarely seen in depictions of L.A., including the group of Chinese aunties who gossip at mahjong games to the Korean Spa, where a pow-wow between the Suns and another powerful triad goes dreadfully awry. The show shows how vital these hubs are to their communities, and how they are so easily overlooked by a general public that is often intent on othering and ignoring them.

As Bruce attempts to untangle the family secrets, Charles considers a quieter life away from his father’s influence. He even reconnects with an alluring old friend, Alexis (Highdee Kuan), who has her own motives for getting close to him. While the series centers on the tenuous bond between the brothers, “The Brothers Sun” is also about Eileen, the real brains behind the Jade Dragons. Yeoh is fierce and cutthroat in the role, alternately motherly and vicious from one turn to the next. She even has intricate fighting sequences, showcasing her knife skills so the boys don’t have all the fun. 

With a narrative that spans only a few weeks, the audience is along for the ride as Bruce tries to come to grips with legacy and tradition and how emotion and obligation play into both. While Charles is trying to decide if he should live for himself or the family, Eileen and Big Sun are considering the promises they’ve made each other and how their lies and ambitions have ultimately wounded their children. 

“The Brothers Sun” has the perfect mix of comedy and drama. It’s a narrative about what’s expected, what can be endured and how much we are willing to give up so others can live out their dreams. Though it provides Yeoh a showcase that she’s more than earned, the series also introduces Chien and Li as two mega talents who will undoubtedly continue to grace our screens. 

“The Brothers Sun” premieres on  Netflix  Jan. 4.

More from Variety

Matthew Rhys Joins Claire Danes in Netflix Limited Series ‘Beast in Me’

Can Today’s Tech Touchstones Solve Hollywood’s Loneliness Epidemic?

Joey Chestnut Beats Takeru Kobayashi in Netflix’s ‘Unfinished Beef’ Hot Dog-Eating Contest

Netflix Sets Long-Term Regional Goals for Chinese-Language Content, Unveils Teaser for Busan-Bound ‘Born for the Spotlight’

‘Star Wars Outlaws’: Disney Tests Gamers’ Appetite for Hollywood IP

Ted Danson Goes Undercover in First Look at Mike Schur’s Netflix Comedy Series ‘A Man on the Inside’

More from our brands, how doechii made a mixtape that could be the best rap album of the year.

BMW’s First Hydrogen-Powered Car Is Coming in 2028

Commanders Fire VP Over Goodell, Jerry Jones, Fan Comments

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Get Peacock for Just $4.99/Month With a Special Promo Code to Stream Live NFL Games and More

• Action/Adventure
• Children's/Family
• Documentary/Reality
• Amazon Prime Video

More From Decider

'The Bachelorette' Bombshell: Jenn Tran Reveals Devin Strader Called Off...

Fall TV Preview 2024: 'Yellowstone,' 'Outlander,' and So Much More

11 Best New Movies on Netflix: September 2024's Freshest Films to Watch

Joey Chestnut Addresses Longstanding Takeru Kobayashi Rivalry Ahead Of...

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: 'The Deliverance' on Netflix...

'Unfinished Beef': Netflix Reveals Hosts For Labor Day Hot Dog Showdown...

11 Best New Shows on Netflix: September 2024's Top Upcoming Series to Watch

Andy Cohen Asks Brandi Glanville To Watch Him And Kate Chastain Have Sex...

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to copy URL

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘(Un)lucky Sisters’ on Netflix, A Featherweight Siblings-Bonding Comedy from Argentina

Where to stream:.

• (Un)lucky Sisters
• Stream It Or Skip It

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Outlast’ Season 2 On Netflix, Where Outdoors-Oriented People Must Work In Teams In The Alaskan Wilderness

Stream it or skip it: ‘snack shack’ on amazon prime video, a gen x nostalgia comedy about teens coming of age, stream it or skip it: ‘tell me lies’ season 2 on hulu, where every student at baird college is majoring in manipulation and human sexuality, stream it or skip it: ‘slow horses’ season 4 on apple tv+, where a terrorist bomber flusters mi5 and lamb sorts things out with the cartwrights.

(Un)lucky Sisters (now on Netflix) is the story of two estranged half-siblings brought together by the passing of their not-much-of-a-father. The Argentinian comedy from director Fabiana Tiscornia is breezy and a bit silly and features two leads who show some potential to inspire laughs and a bit of pathos, but for some strange reason, the movie jams on the brakes just when it’s about to get truly compelling. Why it does this, I don’t know. I hereby present my mildly flummoxed reaction to this movie that seems destined to be swallowed by the ever-ravenous Netflix content menus (burp), never to be seen again.

(UN)LUCKY SISTERS : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jesica (Sofia Morandi) and Angela (Leticia Siciliani) scamper down a sidewalk and hide behind a large potted plant. Sirens echo in the distance. In voiceover, they explain that they’re fugitives. Cops are chasing them and mobsters are chasing them and this suitcase they’re rolling around is why. Could the movie get any more exciting than this? It sure could, but it’s my duty to tell you that it won’t. Then it flashes back a few days, to the boring stuff that isn’t as funny or insightful as it could be, and now you know why the movie begins with the on-the-lam-with-a-suitcase-fulla-whatever stuff.

Angela works as a teaching assistant in a kindergarten, complete with the dorky little smock she has to wear and the hurricane of hyperactive children and the no money to fix the roof or pay anyone a decent living. She goes home to her security guard boyfriend who’s more interested in watching deadly dull security cams on his phone than listening to her. She worriedly takes a pregnancy test and breathes a deep sigh of relief when it’s negative. He wants to have kids and Angela – well, if she has a head on her shoulders at all, she may be looking at him as a less than ideal representative of the gene pool. 

Jesica works at a greasepit fast-food burger joint. Stupid little hat, condescending boss, slob-ass customers. Miserable, just miserable. She goes home to an apartment where she lives with her broke mother (Lorena Vega) who stuffs the place with pregnant yoga ladies (she’s apparently the world’s least in-touch-with-her-chakras instructor) and far too many other people who might be her siblings or cousins or something, that’s never really explained. She can’t even get a moment of peace in the toilet without heavy-breathing preggos piling in for reasons that theoretically should be totally hilarious, but kinda aren’t.

Both of these early-20something women get some news: Their father is dead. They’re half-sisters, rather disaffected. Have they met before? Maybe, maybe not; the screenplay is weirdly sketchy about this type of detail. They’re chilly and prickly and occasionally hostile with each other. Angela is upset that her dad is kaput, even though it’s been many years since she last saw him. Jesica never met the guy, so she’s like is there an inheritance? when she could stand to be a little more sensitive among the bereaved. He seemed to be of some prominence here in Buenos Aires, with connections to important people on either side of the legal divide, and there’s talk of “the Osterfil case,” where he was defending himself against bribery charges. Hmm. His personal secretary tells Angela and Jesica that all he has is an apartment so they check it out and it’s a fancy palatial place in a high rise with an iPad that controls everything – including a secret panel in a wall that’s hiding stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of cash. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a plot!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: (Un)lucky Sisters is like a washed-out, laughless Step Brothers .

Performance Worth Watching: There are multiple moments where Morandi and Siciliani teeter on the cusp of being truly funny or offering insight into their characters, but the screenplay – seemingly terrified of being substantive – just. Won’t. Let them. 

Memorable Dialogue: This movie’s prime example of “witty banter”: 

Angela: We’re not gonna be friends on Facebook or in life or anywhere. Jesica: What about Instagram? Do you have Instagram?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The primary conflict in (Un)lucky Sisters is the personality clash between siblings: Angela is prudent. Jesica is impulsive. Will they EVER get along? And is there any more substance to them as characters? Answers: Hopefully and barely, in that order. I guess you could say that one shows one’s true self when confronted with a pile of money that might be dirty and might not be missed if you took it, and you won’t be surprised to learn that Angela wants to leave it right there and avoid any potential for trouble, and Jesica wants to R-U-N-N-O-F-T with it, and never the twain shall meet. 

Well, until the screenplay decides it needs one of those wearingly shopworn montage sequences in which these hard-luck women take just a few bills and hit the mall for a shopping spree. Uh oh – are they bonding? Like actual sisters might? Could they find some common ground and get to know each other or something totally outta control like that? No spoilers, but don’t forget that two plus two is always and forever going to be four. 

This is all fine, just fine fodder for a light comedy, but (Un)lucky Sisters is so featherweight, a flea fart could launch it to Uranus. At first Jesica and Angela are each other’s antagonist, until they realize that the world itself antagonizes them, so they should probably join forces and become a two-headed protagonist. And even then, this description implies more substance than the film actually has – there’s a scene in which they each share a secret so they can get to know each other, and that’s the long and short and deep and shallow of these characters, emphasis on shallow. Which would be OK if they were given something clever to do or say; the minimal-stakes plot finds them engaging in forgettable dialogue while aimlessly meandering the high-end avenues of Buenos Aires with a suitcase full of cash, then finding themselves trapped in an anticlimax so underwhelming, it feels like it never really happened. 

Our Call: SKIP IT. Not every movie needs to be an award-worthy character study plumbing the depths of the human condition, but (Un)lucky Sisters is just too flimsy to be truly engaging.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

Is 'Power Book II: Ghost' On Starz Tonight? Season 4, Episode 6 Premiere Date

'The Deliverance' True Story: What to Know About Latoya Ammons and the 200 Demons House

'Today's Jenna Bush Hager "Broke Out In Tears" When Dad George W. Bush Said He Would Run For President: "You're Gonna Lose"

Whoopi Goldberg Calls Out 'The View' Producers For Season 28 Premiere "Shocker"

Donald Trump's Nephew Shocks 'The View' By Revealing Trump's Cruel Reaction To His Disabled Son: "Let Him Die"

Gary Coleman's Sudden Tragic Death Haunts His Friends Years Later: "Too Many Questions With No Answers"

Advertisement

Supported by

An Overdose Forces a Hard Look at a Family History of Addiction

In Coco Mellors’s second novel, “Blue Sisters,” three adult siblings reunite on the first anniversary of their sister’s death.

• Share full article

By Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Melissa Lozada-Oliva has published several books of poetry and a novel, “Candelaria.”

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million
• Bookshop.org

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

BLUE SISTERS , by Coco Mellors

“A sister is not a friend.” So begins Coco Mellors’s sophomore novel, “Blue Sisters,” whose three adult protagonists are in a constant fight — with one another, with their various addictions, with their own worst selves. For Mellors, it’s these fights that define sisterhood, as “tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential” as an umbilical cord: “You’re part of each other, right from the start.”

In lush, cozy prose, Mellors guides us into the lives of Avery, Bonnie and Lucky Blue, reuniting to clean out their childhood apartment in New York City on the first anniversary of their sister Nicky’s death. Between the ages of 26 and 33, all three lead extreme lives that sometimes feel out of step with a domestic novel that otherwise seems to celebrate the beauty of the mundane. Avery, the oldest, lives with her wife in London, where she became a successful corporate lawyer after quitting heroin. The second sister, Bonnie, is a champion boxer turned bouncer in Los Angeles whose “drugs of choice are sweat and violence.” The youngest, Lucky, has been a model since she was 15, and lives in Paris. “She has said the words I need a drink 132 times so far this year.”

Nicky’s life was comparatively quiet: The sensitive sister with “a carnival of feelings she never tried to hide,” she lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she taught high school English “10 blocks from where she grew up,” and longed to become a mother. As the sisters reckon with losing her — to an overdose of the painkillers she took in secret, for the chronic pain caused by her endometriosis — they must also come to terms with their own relationships to addiction, which “whirred through all of them like electricity through a circuit.”

Avery’s “boring,” perfectly constructed, sober life starts to crack under the weight of her grief when she cheats on her wife, Chiti — a 40-year-old therapist who pressures her to have a child — with Charlie, a poet she meets in Alcoholics Anonymous. Lucky’s 20-something, fashion-party debauchery — doing drugs in bathrooms, hooking up with strangers, living “in the moment and just a few seconds ahead” — only leaves her feeling more alone, wanting “to feel nothing — to be nothing.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

The thing that has always distinguished TV storytelling from its big-screen counterpart is the existence of individual episodes. We consume our series — even the ones that we binge — in distinct chunks, and the medium is at its best when it embraces this. The joy of watching an ongoing series comes as much from the separate steps on the journey as it does from the destination, if not more. Few pop-culture experiences are more satisfying than when your favorite show knocks it out of the park with a single chapter, whether it’s an episode that wildly deviates from the series’ norm, or just an incredibly well-executed version of the familiar formula.  

Still, that episodic nature makes TV fundamentally inconsistent. The greatest drama ever made , The Sopranos , was occasionally capable of duds like the Columbus Day episode. And even mediocre shows can churn out a single episode at the level of much stronger overall series.   For this Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time, we looked at both the peak installments of classic series, as well as examples of lesser shows that managed to briefly punch way above their weight class. We have episodes from the Fifties all the way through this year. We stuck with narrative dramas and comedies only — so, no news, no reality TV, no sketch comedy, talk shows, etc. In a few cases, there are two-part episodes, but we mostly picked solo entries. And while it’s largely made up of American shows (as watched by our American staff), a handful of international entries made the final cut.

Fargo, “Bisquik” (Season 5, Episode 10)

Our list of classic episodes starts with its most recent entry, from a January 2024 installment of the great FX anthology drama inspired by the work of the Coen brothers. Fargo Season Five dealt with the growing sense of polarization in America, and the debts — both literal and figurative — that everyone feels they’re owed from everyone else. It all culminates in a long, surprising, utterly gorgeous scene where our firecracker of a heroine, Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) finds herself face-to-face with immortal sin-eater Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), who has come for a rematch of their clash in the season premiere. With her husband and daughter in the house with her, Dot declines to fight this terrifying man, and instead explains, patiently and with palpable kindness, that perhaps Ole Munch might prefer a world focused less on resentment and more on love. — Alan Sepinwall

The Cosby Show, “Theo’s Holiday” (Season 2, Episode 22)

There’s a temptation with these lists to immediately disqualify anything associated with the true monsters like Bill Cosby. But his crimes shouldn’t erase from the history books the wonderful work of everyone else involved in “Theo’s Holiday,” in which the Huxtables get together for an elaborate role-playing exercise to teach Theo (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) a lesson about the economics of life in, as he puts it, “the real world.” All the actors throws themselves into these larger-than-life characters, like Clair (Phylicia Rashad) as a cheery restaurant owner as well as a fast-talking furniture saleslady, or little Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam) as a powerful businesswoman. The idea of the whole clan teaming up to both mock Theo and help him out is so intoxicating that even his best friend Cockroach (Carl Anthony Payne II) admits, “I wish they did this kind of stuff at my house!” — A.S.  

South Park, “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (Season 5, Episode 4)

A show that features an anthropomorphized turd in a Christmas hat and at least one projectile vomit scene per episode, South Park has never been known as highbrow. Yet there are elements of “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” a Season Five episode focused on Cartman’s elaborate revenge plot against a high schooler who scammed him by selling his pubes, that are nothing less than virtuosic. There’s the plot itself, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which culminates (spoiler alert, I guess) with the protagonist forcing a woman to unwittingly eat her own children. There’s the exquisite cameo appearance by Radiohead, the culmination of Scott Tenorman’s debasement. And there’s Cartman’s classic taunt, “Charade you are, Scott Tenorman,” a reference to an obscure track of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have often referred to “Scott Tenorman Must Die” as the apex of Cartman’s villainy, marking the character’s transition from obnoxious troll to next-level sociopath. But really, the episode marks another transition entirely: that of Stone and Parker from poop joke purveyors to dark-comedy masters. — Ej Dickson

You’re the Worst, “There Is Not Currently a Problem” (Season 2, Episode 7)

Here’s an odd but welcome trend: FX not only has an excellent track record with extremely niche half-hour comedies (some of which you’ll find higher on this list), but many of them manage to weave thoughtful, even dramatic, material about mental health issues into their usual humor. The hip-hop comedy Dave did it with a terrific episode where we learn that Lil Dicky’s hype man GaTa struggles with bipolar disorder. The final Reservation Dogs season revolved around a character who’d spent much of his life institutionalized. And You’re the Worst — a romantic comedy about two selfish, immature people who would be horrified to learn they were the main characters in a romantic comedy — found a new level with an episode revealing that Gretchen (Aya Cash) suffers from clinical depression. Much of “There Is Not Currently a Problem” is fairly comedic: a bottle episode where the gang is stuck together with Gretchen and Jimmy (Chris Geere) because a local marathon has caused a traffic jam in their neighborhood. But this forced closeness comes while Gretchen is trapped in her latest depressive episode, with no choice but to finally reveal her condition to Jimmy — and to admit that she’s less worried that he’ll reject her for it than that he’ll become the latest man convinced he can “fix” her. Cash conveys every bit of the pain and fear Gretchen is experiencing, in a way that enriches the laughter rather than undercutting it. — A.S.  

In Treatment, “Alex: Week Eight” (Season 1, Episode 37)

Most episodes of this drama were presented as real-time therapy sessions between Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and one of his patients, or Paul visiting his own shrink. Occasionally, though, outsiders found their way into Paul’s office, like Alex Prince, Sr. (Glynn Turman), the father of one of Paul’s patients, seeking answers as to why his son committed suicide. Alex Jr. had spent most of his sessions to that point painting his dad as such a monster, it should have been impossible for any actor to both live up to those stories and not seem like a cartoon. Turman, in one of the best dramatic performances you will ever see on television, somehow did it, channeling both the bogeyman and the grieving father, in a riveting two-hander with Byrne. — A.S.   

Bob’s Burgers, “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” (Season 3, Episode 7)

Bob’s Burgers loves puns, but “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” is a groaner of a title even for them. No matter, because the episode so expertly combines many of the series’ hallmarks into one tight, funny, awkward package. Once again, a well-meaning parenting gesture by Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) goes awry, when he lets Tina (Dan Mintz) drive the family station wagon in a nearly empty parking lot, and she somehow crashes into the only other car there. Once again, the Belchers find themselves on the verge of financial calamity, when the other car turns out to belong to Bob’s ruthless rival, Jimmy Pesto (Jay Johnston). Once again, the family gets mixed up in the plans of a lunatic, when insurance adjuster Chase (Bob Odenkirk) forces them to aid him in an insurance fraud scheme in order to get out of the mess with Jimmy. And, once again, Bob’s lovable but terrible children somehow prove surprisingly useful, when Tina uses her brother’s Casio keyboard to get incriminating evidence that frees them from Chase’s clutches. All’s well that ends… not necessarily well, but at least not substantially worse than usual. — A.S.

Enlightened, “Consider Helen” (Season 1, Episode 9)

Today, it seems almost obligatory for cable and streaming shows to devote one or two episodes a season to presenting the POV of a minor character. When future White Lotus creator Mike White did it with his first HBO series, Enlightened , it was still relatively rare. And in this case, the shifts in perspective came as a welcome, even necessary, relief from all the time spent in the head of the show’s fascinating but maddening main character, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a toxically narcissistic former executive trying to rebuild her life after a nervous breakdown. With “Consider Helen,” White moved the focus to Amy’s mother Helen (played by Dern’s real-life mom, the great Diane Ladd), to present a day in her life, to show what a chore it is to have to deal with such a pathologically needy child, and to make clear that Enlightened itself understood exactly how its audience would respond to Amy. — A.S.

Maude, “Maude’s Dilemma” (Season 1, Episodes 9 & 10)

This two-parter, in which Maude (Bea Arthur) is shocked to discover that she’s pregnant again at 47, and has to decide whether she wants to get an abortion, was so ahead of its time, even the original Supreme Court verdict on Roe v. Wade was two months away. Well after Maude decided to end her pregnancy, the rest of television shied away from the subject, often having pregnant characters suffer conveniently-timed miscarriages before they could make up their minds and potentially alienate viewers and sponsors. But “Maude’s Dilemma,” with a teleplay by future Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, ran toward the thorny subject, and handled it with both humor and grace. — A.S.

Scrubs, “My Screw Up” (Season 3, Episode 14)

There are plenty of shows we call dramedies, even though they’re really just half-hour dramas, as well as lots of alleged comedies that aren’t particularly interested in making the audience laugh. The hospital show Scrubs , though, was remarkably comfortable at balancing silliness and sadness throughout its run, especially in “My Screw Up.” Brendan Fraser reprises his role as Ben, wisecracking brother-in-law to John C. McGinley’s bitterly sarcastic Dr. Cox. Ben’s leukemia appeared to be in remission when last we saw him, so there’s room for him to relentlessly tease J.D. (Zach Braff) about having made out with both of Ben’s sisters, as well as a lighthearted subplot where Turk (Donald Faison) tries to convince Carla (Judy Reyes) to take his name when they’re married, in exchange for having a mole she hates removed. But things also get plausibly serious, even before we get to the Sixth Sense -style twist: Ben was the patient whose death earlier in the episode caused a rift between Cox and J.D., and Cox has been in denial about it ever since. Even the revelation that Cox has been imagining conversations with his dead friend is reflective of the show’s juggling of comedy and drama — it’s the dark mirror of how Scrubs generates so much humor from taking us inside the highly-distractible mind of J.D. — A.S.    

Watchmen, “This Extraordinary Being” (Episode 6)

Even for a series as sophisticated and layered as Watchmen , this episode is an acrobatic feat. In the most dramatic departure from the show’s source material, the 1980s comic of the same name, “This Extraordinary Being” tells the origin story of one of this world’s seminal vigilante superheroes, Hooded Justice (a man lionized in a modern-day TV show-within-the-show that kicks off the episode). Told almost entirely in black and white, it sees our current-day heroine Angela Abar (Regina King) — herself a vigilante who goes by Sister Night, when she’s not working her day job as a cop — sucked into the memories of her grandfather, Will Reeves, after swallowing a bottle of his “nostalgia pills.” Transported to 1930s New York, we watch Will (played as a young man by Jovan Adepo), and sometimes Angela-as-Will, join the NYPD, where he encounters racism so virulent, his fellow cops stage a near-lynching, covering him with a hood and briefly hanging him from a tree as a warning to stand down. The message he takes away, though, is that there is plenty of evil to fight in the world, even in his own precinct. He just has to do it undercover — appropriating for his costume the very hood and noose that had been used to terrorize him. With balletic camerawork, a period soundtrack of big band standards, and visceral performances from King and Adepo, the episode is a sweeping achievement that inverts a fundamental truth of the series’ world — this revered hero that everyone assumed was white is Black — and underscores one about ours: Justice often comes at a steep price. — Maria Fontoura

The Golden Girls, “Mrs. George Devereaux” (Season 6, Episode 9)

The Golden Girls experienced so many adventures together, as Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and Sophia (Estelle Getty) lived together as pals and confidantes. But “Mrs. George Devereaux” is a truly touching treatment of grief and loss. Blanche, the most frivolous of the Girls (and the funniest), opens the door and beholds a strange sight: her late husband George, telling her that he faked his death and now wants her back. The episode explores how all the characters live with their different kinds of grief — and how that grief is what brought them here together in the first place. It has the most emotional resonance of any Golden Girls episode, but it’s also the funniest in terms of pure farcical comedy, as Dorothy gets swept up in a bizarre love triangle with two 1970s heartthrobs, guest stars Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner. As usual, Blanche gets the best line, when she confronts Cher’s ex-husband with the command, “Sonny Bono, get off my lanai!” — Rob Sheffield

SpongeBob SquarePants, “Pizza Delivery” (Season 1, Episode 5)

The absurdist humor that made SpongeBob SquarePants beloved across multiple generations is already at full strength in this early episode. At the end of another shift at the Krusty Krab, a customer calls in to order a pizza to be delivered to his home. Never mind that the restaurant doesn’t make pizzas: Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) sees a few bucks to be earned, and somehow turns a Krabby Patty burger into a pizza, complete with box, then orders SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) to take it to its destination. Instead, SpongeBob’s usual difficulty with driving strands the odd couple far from Bikini Bottom, trying various bizarre methods to get home — all of them borrowed from the “pioneers,” like the idea of riding on giant rocks. In the end, we get one last, great punchline: The customer lives right next door to the Krusty Krab, and they could have just walked the pizza over to him. — A.S.

Roseanne, “War and Peace” (Season 5, Episode 14)

Both in its Nineties heyday and its modern reinvention as The Conners , Roseanne had a real knack for blending domestic comedy with candid material about poverty, addiction, sexuality, and more. In this terrific conclusion of a two-part story, Dan (John Goodman) gets hauled off to jail after beating up Fisher, the abusive boyfriend of Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), while Roseanne tends to her sister, and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) gets to briefly relish the sight of her disciplinarian father behind bars. “War and Peace” doesn’t hide from the horror of Jackie’s experience, but even its dark moments are flavored with sass, like when Roseanne warns Fisher, “If you ever come near her again, you’re gonna have to deal with me, and I am way more dangerous than Dan. I got a loose-meat restaurant. I know what to do with the body!”  — A.S.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Never Bathe on Saturday” (Season 4, Episode 27)

Somehow, the best showcase for Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as one of TV’s all-time couples is in an episode where Moore is frequently off-camera. A romantic getaway for Rob and Laura goes horribly awry when Laura’s big toe gets stuck in a hotel bathtub faucet, the bathroom door gets locked, and Rob makes the ill-timed decision to draw a fake mustache on his upper lip that he can’t wipe off — leading every hotel worker who arrives to help assuming he’s up to no good. Written by Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, this installment keeps finding new and amusing ways to escalate the sticky situation, and to push the outer edge of the envelope of censorship circa 1965, with a story about the risk of other people seeing Laura naked. By this point in the series’ run, Reiner knew exactly how to use his leading man’s fluency with physical comedy, and how his leading lady’s voice on the other side of that locked door was all that was needed to sell Laura’s dismay at being trapped in such an embarrassing position. — A.S.

Black Mirror, “San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)

What would your ideal afterlife look like? Black Mirror — the British dystopian anthology series with a nihilistic approach to rapidly-developing technology — is known for being a show that doesn’t only answer questions about the future but depicts the worst possible alternative you’ve never even considered. Maybe that’s why, when fans were introduced to the couple at the heart of “San Junipero,” and found the answer of the ideal afterlife to be an Eighties beach town party that never ends, they responded so fondly. Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet on a night out and quickly fall into a romantic entanglement. But what begins as a love story about two lesbians finding each other in a heaven on earth is quickly revealed to be a virtual reality — one where the elderly and those who have died can be uploaded and then live on forever as their younger selves. The two — both dying in real life — must deal with whether or not the love they’ve found in pixels is enough for both of their forevers. It’s a touching love story that embodies Black Mirror at its very best. — CT Jones

Sex and the City, “My Motherboard, My Self” (Season 4, Episode 8)

Family is, arguably, everywhere in Sex and the City — from those the core four start with their partners to the ones they marry into (have there ever been more terrifying mothers-in-law than Frances Sternhagen or Anne Meara?) and the one they build just among themselves. But when it comes to the blood relations of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the show is surprisingly thin, which is what makes “My Motherboard, My Self” stand out so much. It’s not that the other subplots aren’t memorable — the endless physical comedy of Samantha losing her orgasm; Carrie’s Macintosh meltdown and trip to Manhattan 1990s mainstay Tekserve (R.I.P.), where technician Dmitri (a brilliantly dry Aasif Mandvi) rags on her for not “backing up” — but Miranda’s turn here feels different. As she attends her mother’s funeral in Philadelphia (where she is, apparently, from, and where she has, apparently, multiple siblings), we see a more human side of a character who until this point has largely maintained her station as “the analytical one.” (Though it’s notable that the most intimate moment she has in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t with a direct relation, but the fitting room attendant trying to sell her a bra.) While the show has been criticized for celebrating solipsistic behavior, this episode is a prime example of the four women grappling with their ability to be vulnerable. — Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Broad City, “Knockoffs” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Both stories in the stoner comedy’s most laugh-out-loud installment involve imitation products. In one, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and her mother Bobbi (Susie Essman) travel into the sewers of Manhattan to obtain counterfeit designer purses. In the other, Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) is shocked when her boyfriend Jeremy (Stephen Schneider) asks her to peg him with a strap-on — a development that so thrills Ilana, she does an upside-down twerk on her friend’s behalf — then has to scramble to find a reasonable facsimile after her dishwasher melts Jeremy’s custom-made dildo. In the end, the replacements prove shoddier than the real thing, but “Knockoffs” is so perfectly constructed, and so memorable, that when the friends met Hillary Clinton in a later episode later, among the first things a flustered Abbi can think to tell her is, “I pegged!” — A.S.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” (Season 4, Episode 24)

When The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air went on the air in 1990, Will Smith was such an inexperienced actor that he literally mouthed the lines of his co-stars while they spoke. But it didn’t take long for Smith to learn his craft and land roles in dramatic movies like Six Degrees of Separation . That’s why the creative team behind this series knew he was ready for a Season Four episode where Will reunites with his father (played by Ben Vereen) 14 years after he walked out on the family, only to see him leave once again after they reconciled. “I’ll be a better father than he ever was, and I sure as hell don’t need him for that, ’cause ain’t a damn thing he could ever teach me about how to love my kids!” Smith roars, before breaking down in the arms of Uncle Phil. “How come he don’t want me, man?” For anyone who grew up without a father, the moment cut deep. “I shed a tear til this day every time I see this episode,” LeBron James wrote on Instagram in 2015. “This hit home for me growing up and I couldn’t hold my tears in. Til this day they still coming out when this episode come on.” — Andy Greene

Doctor Who, “Blink” (Season 3, Episode 10)

The scariest, cleverest episode of the British sci-fi institution Doctor Who features monsters who are elegant in their simplicity: the Weeping Angels, predatory aliens who resemble stone statues of angels, and who can only move when you’re not looking at them. Writer Steven Moffat places these disturbing creatures in service of a story that barely features the Doctor (David Tennant) and his then-companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), instead focusing on a young Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow, a woman who keeps running afoul of the Weeping Angels. Her only hope of surviving the ordeal comes in the form of a DVD Easter Egg that creates the illusion of the Doctor having a conversation with her, and even the Time Lord himself struggles to adequately explain all the seeming paradoxes contained within Moffat’s tale. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he tells Sally, “but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Yet it all makes exciting sense by the end. — A.S.

Alias, “Truth Be Told” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Throughout his career, J.J. Abrams has struggled with endings, as anyone who sat through The Rise of Skywalker can tell you. Few, though, are better at beginnings, and the pilot episode of his spy drama Alias is so fantastic that it bought years of goodwill from viewers, no matter how nonsensical the plots grew as the show went along. While undercover agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is in Taiwan being interrogated by a torture expert, we flash back through the events that led her here, starting with her double life as a grad student by day, CIA agent by night. This turns out to be a triple life when Sydney discovers that she’s been tricked into working for a terrorist organization called SD-6, and that her father, Jack (Victor Garber), is secretly her co-worker. Oh, and Sydney’s fiancé gets murdered on the order of SD-6 boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), plus a half-dozen other characters have to be introduced, Sydney has to try on multiple hair colors and accents, and more. Between the fractured timeline and the multiple lies Sydney has to live at once, “Truth Be Told” should be absolute gibberish. But Abrams, in one of his earliest efforts as director as well as writer, keeps everything coherent and thrilling in an episode that made him into a star just as much as it did Jennifer Garner. — A.S.  

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Most of the time, the Paddy’s Pub gang aim to screw over other people but really just end up screwing themselves, and that’s just what happens in this crude, tangled adventure. When Frank (Danny DeVito) promotes Charlie (Charlie Day) from a sleazy janitor to manager of the bar, he sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events that puts each character’s Achilles’ heels on full display: Mac’s (Rob McElhenny) sensitivity, Frank’s lost youth, Dennis’ (Glenn Howerton) pride, Charlie’s unrequited love, and Dee’s (Kaitlin Olson) conniving impulses. In order to get out of the grunt work Charlie left behind, Dennis goes on a mission to sleep with the unnamed character the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), but ends up setting his sights on Mac’s mom (and later Charlie’s) when he finds out Mac banged his mom (and Frank’s ex-wife). Meanwhile, Charlie draws up a plan to finally bang the Waitress; Dennis’ sister Dee isn’t looking for sex, just power, as she plays the henchman to Charlie’s mastermind; and Frank just wants to bang any “young broad” who will give him the time of day. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mac says to Charlie after encouraging Mac to sleep with Dennis’ mom. Charlie’s response pretty much sums up the entire FX sitcom: “It doesn’t have to.” — Maya Georgi

Grey’s Anatomy, “It’s the End of the World/As We Know It” (Season 2, Episodes 16 & 17)

Hearing main character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) refuse to get out of bed for fear that she’ll die at work should have been a clue that it wouldn’t be a good week. But viewers were still terrified when the series seemingly tried its hardest to make every main character (plus guest stars Christina Ricci and Kyle Chandler) have near-death experiences in this two-parter, which began airing after Super Bowl XL. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is in labor at the hospital waiting for her husband, who won’t answer his phone. Derek (Patrick Dempsey) can’t concentrate on saving his patient’s life while the man’s cell keeps going off (put two and two together here). And when a newbie paramedic shoves her hands into the chest cavity of a patient who’s bleeding out, it’s Meredith who learns that what’s currently killing him is unexploded ammunition that could go off at any minute, taking her and the entire O.R. with it. The bomb squad evacuates the floor, but if Derek leaves, Bailey’s husband dies. Meredith steps in for the paramedic, who’s had a panic attack, so now, if Meredith moves, she and Derek and Bailey’s husband die. Richard (James Pickens, Jr.) has a heart attack from the stress of the evacuation. Izzy (Katherine Heigl) and Alex (Justin Chambers) are off hooking up in a closet, which is also life-threatening if you consider Alex’s numerous confirmed STDs. And if Bailey, who is refusing to push without her husband being present, doesn’t give birth, she and the baby will die. It’s an all-in, melodramatic pivot for a series that has since become known for putting its main characters in life-threatening situations. And yet, in the midst of these increasingly heightened stakes, the standout scene remains George’s (T.J. Knight) gentle cajoling that finally convinces Bailey to push — and to name her son after him. “You’re Doctor Bailey,” he says, in a scene that remains one of the most tender of the entire series. “You don’t hide from a fight.”  — CTJ

Girls, “American Bitch” (Season 6, Episode 3)

If ever Hannah Horvath was a voice of a generation, this was it. Airing just a few months before the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, this quiet cri de coeur — in which famous author Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys, nimble as ever) confronts Hannah (Lena Dunham) about a blog post she wrote slamming his alleged misconduct with several college girls — taps into every conversation we’re still having about power and consent. Chuck summons Hannah to his stately apartment, where she attempts to explain why taking advantage of his literary stature to hook up with young women is predatory, while he hurls every trick in the Bad Men Handbook at her: flattery (“You’re very bright”); faux honesty (“I’m a horny motherfucker with the impulse control of a toddler”); defensiveness (“These girls throw themselves at me!”); casual intimacy (“You’re more to me than just a pretty face”). With astonishing precision and economy, Dunham turns the tables such that by the end of the episode — that is, by the time Chuck and Hannah are lying clothed atop his bed, and he takes out his dick and flops it onto her thigh — Hannah has fallen prey to the very manipulations she was calling out. A hallmark moment in a show that will only age better with time. — M.F.

Everybody Loves Raymond, “Baggage” (Season 7, Episode 22)

Like Carl Reiner once did with The Dick Van Dyke Show , Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal liked to come up with stories by asking his writers what they’d been up to with their families lately. More often than not, there was a conflict that mapped pretty easily onto the Barone family, like an argument that writer Tucker Cawley had with his wife about who would put away the last suitcase left over from a recent vacation. The fictionalized version of it becomes a cold war of sorts between Ray (Ray Romano) and Debra (Patricia Heaton), even as Marie (Doris Roberts) compares the stalemate to a fight that once almost wrecked her marriage to Frank (Peter Boyle). (This leads to one of the great sitcom lines that makes zero sense out of context and seems absolutely logical in context: “Don’t let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.”) The whole thing culminates in a slapstick battle between the spouses, demonstrating the impressive physical-comedy chops that Romano and Heaton developed over the series’ run. — A.S.  

King of the Hill, “Bobby Goes Nuts” (Season 6, Episode 1)

Some episodes made this list because they do innovative things with episodic structure, or because they have something deep to say about the human condition. This one’s here because Bobby Hill (Pamela Adlon) kicks a bunch of guys in the groin. Well, no. This one’s here because he learns to do this from taking a women’s self-defense class at the Y — at the unwitting urging of Hank (Mike Judge), who just wants his son to learn how to stand up to bullies — and incorporates not only the crotch attacks, but a high-pitched screech of, “THAT’S MY PURSE! I DON’T KNOW YOU!” every time he does it, just like he and his middle-aged, female classmates were taught. Sometimes, you just have to cherish the little things, you know? — A.S.  

Insecure, “High-Like” (Season 3, Episode 5)

The struggling women of Insecure can’t even catch a break when they head to Coachella to see Beyoncé headline. Newly unemployed Issa (Rae) needs everything to go perfectly for the group’s last hurrah before Tiffany (Amanda Seales) gives birth, while Molly (Yvonne Orji) is preoccupied with work, and Keli (Natasha Rothwell) just wants to have a good time. The girls (minus Tiffany, or so we thought…) take edibles and pop so much MDMA they are forced to miss Bey, instead finding themselves in a drug-fueled frenzy that makes the chaos and humor feel like they’re seeping through the screen. Keli takes “Beyoncé or bust” too far and pisses herself after getting Tasered by festival security. Tiffany cries in a closet and tells her husband, “It’s our weed, baby” after admitting to “one bite” of a pot brownie. Molly bugs out and types nonsense on her work laptop, while Issa insists the mess of the night is all her fault. For an episode that starts with a silly Thug Yoda appearance and ends with the abrupt, emotionally-charged return of Issa’s ex-boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), it packs in one hell of a trip. — M.G.

Game of Thrones, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”  (Season 8, Episode 2)

Because Game of Thrones presented spectacle on a scale never before seen on television, it’s easy to forget that the series first became beloved when its budget was much smaller and it couldn’t afford to depict massive battles, dragon attacks, or ice zombie hordes. That stuff, when it came with frequency, was icing on the cake that was the deep roster of memorable characters George R.R. Martin had created, who the GoT writers brought to such vivid life. Even in its later, more epic seasons, the show was still most potent when it placed people first and carnage second. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place the evening before a coalition of heroes from across Westeros will face the Night King and his undead army. It’s almost all talking, as the characters have the kinds of conversations you’d expect when they don’t believe they’ll survive the next day. The most powerful of these is the moment that provides the episode with its title, as Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) realizes that, by the laws of Westeros, he can fulfill the dreams of his old friend Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) and grant her the knighthood she spent her whole life believing her gender disqualified her from achieving. The actual battle with the Night King winds up being the most visually underwhelming episode of the series, but writer Bryan Cogman’s love letter to these characters still resonates years later.  — A.S.

The Good Place, “Michael’s Gambit” (Season 1, Episode 13)

TV has a mixed track record with twist endings. For every Twilight Zone , it seems there are a half-dozen disasters like the Dexter season where Edward James Olmos was a ghost, or the Westworld season where Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson were playing the same character — both ideas that fans sniffed out long before those series’ producers expected them to. But then there is the marvelous conclusion to the first season of the metaphysical comedy The Good Place . For the previous 12 episodes, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and her friends had struggled to figure out why the seemingly perfect afterlife in which they found themselves had so many obvious flaws. In the end, it’s dum-dum Eleanor who’s the only one smart enough to see through the genial exterior of their host, Michael (Ted Danson), and recognize that, for all their worry of ending up in the Bad Place, “ This is the Bad Place!” In hindsight, the idea was clearly seeded; some viewers did guess it in advance, but not so many that it ruined the surprise for everyone else. Rather than undercut everything that happened before, the twist is in keeping with the show’s basic premise about heaven being not all it’s cracked up to be. And it set the series off in new, increasingly wild directions, rather than repeating the same jokes about fro-yo for years on end. — A.S.

Star Trek, “City on the Edge of Forever” (Season 1, Episode 28)

This episode, written by author Harlan Ellison, offers one time-travel tragedy to rule them all. When a deliriously ill Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) staggers through a time portal on a mysterious planet, he somehow alters history enough that the Enterprise is no longer in orbit above the away team. It’s up to Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to follow their friend, winding up in Depression-era New York, where interplanetary lothario Jim Kirk finds himself falling hard for do-gooder Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). Unfortunately, Spock figures out that Edith is a pivot point for the future of humanity, where her life will ironically lead to centuries of pain and misery, while her death will lead to the timeline our heroes know well. Torn between his duty to the galaxy and the desires of his own heart, Kirk allows Edith to be fatally struck by a car, in a tearjerker ending that wound up echoing throughout the future of TV science fiction. — A.S.

My So-Called Life, ”Pilot” (Episode 1)

Meet Angela Chase, a high school sophomore who offers us a look into her life in a mundane suburb of Pittsburgh. She has a major crush on Jordan Catalano (“I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great”) and is quite possibly the only person in history to be jealous of Anne Frank (“She was stuck in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked”). My So-Called Life premiered 30 years ago, giving teens a much more realistic portrayal of what it’s like to endure the “battlefield” that is high school over primetime soap operas like 90210. And the pilot lays that groundwork perfectly, with Angela (Claire Danes) narrating as she navigates her strained relationship with her mom, outgrows her best friend and abandons her for two cool, kindred spirits, and, yes, watches Jordan (Jared Leto) excel at leaning. A battlefield indeed. — Angie Martoccio

Master of None, “Thanksgiving” (Season 2, Episode 8)

Though Aziz Ansari was star, frequent writer, and occasional director of his series about an actor named Dev trying to find meaning in his life, he periodically turned over episodes from the first two seasons to other characters, demonstrating that their stories had just as much richness as Dev’s, if not more. “Thanksgiving” tracks many years of the holiday, as Dev’s best friend Denise (Lena Waithe, who co-wrote the episode with Ansari) gradually comes out to her family, slowly but surely wearing down the resistance of her mother (Angela Bassett), aunt (Kym Whitley), and grandmother (Venida Evans). Partly inspired by Waithe’s own coming-out story, the warm and knowing episode was such a creative success that when the series finally returned for a third season four years later, it was built entirely around Denise’s marriage, with Dev now a minor figure in what was once his own show. — A.S.

For All Mankind, “The Grey” (Season 2, Episode 10)

The second season of this sci-fi drama, set in an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat America to the moon, triggering a never-ending space race, is the platonic ideal of the intensely serialized, “10-hour Movie” approach so much of dramatic television has taken in the years since The Wire , and that so few shows actually do well. Everything that happens throughout Season Two, even the parts that seem slow and pointless when you first watch them, have thrilling payoffs in the finale , where Earth seems on the verge of nuclear Armageddon, while American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts wage war on and around the moon. All the earlier subplots matter, like Gordo (Michael Dorman) putting his new devotion to jogging to good use when he and ex-wife Tracy (Sarah Jones) have to run across the lunar surface, clad only in spacesuits jury-rigged out of duct tape, to prevent a nuclear meltdown. — A.S.

St. Elsewhere, “Time Heals” (Season 4, Episodes 17 & 18)  

This innovative hospital drama pushed the boundaries of its format throughout its run. One episode was set largely in the afterlife. Another told a quartet of stories about the stages of life from birth through death. The most audacious, and satisfying, of these, is the two-part “Time Heals,” which aired over consecutive nights. As St. Eligius prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, we get glimpses of the hospital across the decades, and see how Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), Dr. Craig (William Daniels), and the other senior members of the staff each came to work there. Beyond all the backstory — including a great guest turn by Edward Hermann as Father McCabe, the priest who founded the hospital and helped raise the orphaned Westphall — “Time Heals” impresses because each vignette from the past is presented in the style of movies (or, in some cases, television) of that period: Scenes in the 1930s are in black and white, ones in the Sixties are much more brightly lit, and so on. — A.S.

Larry Sanders, “Flip” (Season 6, Episode 12)

“You could sense there would never be another show like that again,” The Larry Sanders  Show actress Ileana Douglas said of the show’s final scene. “And there hasn’t been.” As Rip Torn, Jeffrey Tambor, and show creator Garry Shandling group-hug in an empty studio, a poignant sadness infuses the acerbic wit that Shandling’s revolutionary series displayed for six seasons. Set around Larry’s final show, the Peabody Award-winning episode features gags that remain timeless: Jim Carrey serenading Larry on-air while excoriating him off-air, Tom Petty telling Clint Black to “quiet down, cowpoke” before getting into a fistfight with Greg Kinnear, and Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres catching Larry in a lie that destroys both the show-within-the-show itself and Larry’s glass-fragile ego. It’s a brilliant ending that balances pathos (“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do without you,” Larry says to his audience before choking up. “God bless you. You may now flip”) with the series’ trademark send-up of Hollywood phoniness (Torn instinctively telling a bumped Bruno Kirby on the last show that “we’ll have you on another time.”) The show that invented the modern sitcom and stuck the landing perfectly. — Jason Newman

Orange Is the New Black, “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again” (Season 4, Episode 13) 

The Netflix prison series is the only show in Emmy history to be reclassified from the comedy categories to the drama ones, in part because its tone was so elusive, even to the people making it. But when Orange wanted to get totally serious, it was incredible, like in this episode set in the aftermath of the shocking death of beloved inmate Poussey at the hands of a guard. As Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and the other women grieve the loss of Poussey, then fume at the realization that the guard will go unpunished while most of them are stuck behind bars for much lesser crimes, their pain and rage boils over into a prison riot that will take up the entire following season. — A.S.

The Andy Griffith Show, “Opie the Birdman” (Season 4, Episode 1)

The Andy Griffith Show set the template for broad, light, homespun small-town humor, but the best episode of the long-running 1960s show is as raw as a modern prestige TV feelings-fest. Gifted a slingshot by Don Knots’ iconically bumbling deputy Barney Fife, a young Opie Taylor (played by a nine-year-old Ron Howard) accidentally kills a bird, orphaning its three young offspring. “You gonna give me a whippin’?” Opie asks his father, Sheriff Andy Taylor, played by the show’s star, Andy Griffith. Not this time. Instead, TV’s all-time cool-headed dad simply opens Opie’s window so his boy can listen to the newly motherless baby birds in the tree outside, filling the Mayberry night with their desolate emo chirps. Howard later said the tears he cried in the scene where he kills the bird were real, because he was thinking of his recently deceased dog. The episode doesn’t have any big laughs, a bold move considering it was a season-opener. But by breaking with formula, they made a heartbreaking classic. — Jon Dolan

Good Times, “The I.Q. Test” (Season 2, Episode 7)

As the Seventies sitcom’s iconic gospel theme song noted, there was a lot of scratchin’ and survivin’ to do for the Evans family in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. And the Maude spinoff was so smart in illustrating the many ways the deck was stacked against Florida (Esther Rolle), James (John Amos), and their kids. In “The I.Q. Test,” everyone is shocked when gifted youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) flunks a school standardized test, until Michael explains that he refused to finish after recognizing that the test is racially biased, with questions geared towards the experience of reasonably well-off white children. The episode nimbly addresses systemic problems in a way that few shows were even thinking about at the time, much less willing to incorporate into their scripts. And it does it while still having some fun with the situation, through the obliviousness of the white test proctor. — A.S.

Moonlighting, “Atomic Shakespeare” (Season 3, Episode 7)

At the point “Atomic Shakespeare” rolled around in the third season of Moonlighting , the private detective comedy had already established two things: 1) that the onscreen chemistry of co-stars Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was as scorching as any couple — even an unconsummated one like this — ever put on television; and 2) that the show’s writers didn’t feel in any way bound by the conventions of genre or era, as they had already done a black-and-white film noir tribute, as well as put Willis’ David into a musical number helmed by Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen. So it felt wholly natural to translate the familiar David and Maddie dynamic back to Shakespearean times, with a postmodern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew , with Willis and Shepherd playing David and Maddie-flavored versions of Petrucchio and Kate, and that at various points features ninjas, a horse wearing sunglasses, and wannabe blues singer Willis wailing on the classic rock hit “Good Lovin’.” The episode even gets away with rewriting the Bard: Instead of Kate submitting to Petrucchio’s insistence that the sun is in fact the moon, as a way of humoring her new husband, she instead stands her ground and gets him to admit that, “My wife hath called it: ’Tis the sun, and not the moon at all!” — A.S.

Severance, “The We We Are” (Season 1, Episode 9)

By the time we reach the Season One finale of the satirical workplace thriller Severance , the employees of the macrodata refinement department of Lumon Industries have reached their boiling point. Part of a cohort who volunteered for a surgical procedure that separates their work selves, called “Innies,” from their personal selves, called “Outies,” they all live bifurcated lives, where one half has no clue what the other half does. But now, the Innies, sure they’re getting the short end of the deal, are fed up. With the help of Dylan (Zach Cherry), who hacks into a control room, Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), and Irving (John Turturro) find a way to inhabit their Outie personas — and, as a result, learn all kinds of things about themselves that they aren’t fully prepared to know. Mark faces his wife’s death in a car accident. Irving tries to reignite his workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken), who retired his Innie self. And Helly is shocked to discover she’s descended from the family that championed Lumon’s severance procedure. A master class in building and maintaining tension, the episode reaches a heart-racing crescendo before an abrupt, cliffhanger ending. Premiering two years after the pandemic, as many employees returned to the office with shifted priorities and revamped notions of “work-life balance,” the Dan Erickson-created, Ben Stiller -directed series captures something essential about our modern malaise. But as the mirror maze of this episode shows, completely severing work and home may not be the fix we think it would. — Kalia Richardson

Review With Forrest MacNeil, “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes” (Season 1, Episode 3)

In this cult comedy, Andy Daly plays Forrest MacNeil, a pompous fool who has committed himself to the self-destructive task of undergoing and reviewing whatever life experiences his viewers ask him to. Installments prior to this one saw Forrest becoming addicted to cocaine, acting racist, and trying to make a sex tape. But the true folly of the exercise doesn’t hit until the third episode, where two different binge-eating assignments are wrapped around Forrest having to divorce his wife, without even being allowed to explain to her why he’s doing it. It’s a classic case of a joke building and building, until we get a traumatized Forrest declaring to his awful audience, “Perhaps I simply understood, from the darkest corner of my soul, that these pancakes couldn’t kill me, because I was already dead.” — A.S.

Homeland, “Q&A” (Season 2, Episode 5)

When this spy thriller about domestic terrorism ended its first season without brainwashed double agent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) going through with a planned suicide bombing, it felt like a failure of nerve from the creators of a show that would have been best served as a one-and-done. But the first half of Season Two, featuring an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Brody and CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), was excellent, and led to the series’ single-best episode, where Brody gets arrested and Carrie is given a limited window to interrogate him in the hopes of turning him into an asset. Danes and Lewis put on a mesmerizing acting duet, so potent it’s easy to ignore a silly subplot about Brody’s daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) and her boyfriend Finn (a young Timothée Chalamet) getting into a hit-and-run incident. It was largely downhill for Homeland from here, at least until the producers were finally willing to kill off Brody for real, but that takes nothing from “Q&A.” — A.S.

China Beach, “Hello Goodbye” (Season 4, Episode 16)

Long before cable and streaming dramas began to experiment with fractured timelines, there was the final season of this wildly underrated series about the staff of a U.S. Army hospital base during the Vietnam War. Episodes bounced back and forth between events at various points in the war and in the lives of nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) and her surviving colleagues throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Much of the series finale takes place in 1988, as recovering alcoholic McMurphy warily attends a China Beach reunion event, then joins her pals in an impromptu (and incredibly poignant) visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But “Hello Goodbye” also takes us back to China Beach one last time, to show us McMurphy caring for a dying soldier she knows she can’t save, as a closing reminder of the costs of war, whether or not you fight in them. — A.S.  

The Jeffersons, “Sorry, Wrong Meeting” (Season 7, Episode 14)

All in the Family , the parent show of The Jeffersons , had already done a story about the Ku Klux Klan four years prior to the KKK-themed “Sorry, Wrong Meeting.” But the very nature of the spinoff and its leading man made the latter episode feel anything like a rehash. A racist neighbor decides that he can’t tolerate the presence of Black tenants like George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and hosts a Klan rally to drive this undesirable element out of the building. But he invites the supremely WASPy Tom Willis (Franklin Cover), not realizing that Tom is best friends with George. Tom mistakenly assumes that the meeting will be about a recent spate of break-ins, and later suggests George attend with him. It’s a perfect set-up for both comedy and drama, as an oblivious George enters and cheers on what he thinks is rhetoric aimed solely at low-class criminals, rather than an upstanding businessman like himself, while the meeting’s vile host is shocked by his presence. But then some earlier business about CPR training leads to a great, dramatic climax: This spectacle agitates the Klan leader into a heart attack, and George turns out to be the only one in the room capable of saving the life of someone who thinks of him as less than human. — A.S.

What We Do in the Shadows, “On the Run” (Season 2, Episode 6)

For a show that specializes in absurdist, nonsensical humor, creator Jemaine Clement and company take it next-level with “On the Run.” The episode plucks pompous vampire Laszlo ( Matt Berry , who in July finally got an Emmy nomination for his work on this show) out of Staten Island, where he lives with four roommates — his undead wife Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Prosch), 760-year-old Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Nandor’s familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — and relocates him to small-town Pennsylvania, where he’s hoping to escape an old friend (Mark Hamill) who’s come to collect on a nearly two-century-old debt of unpaid rent. A stranger in a strange land, Laszlo goes undercover as a “regular human bartender” named Jackie Daytona and, naturally, becomes an avid supporter of the local girls’ volleyball team. His disguise of dark-wash jeans and a toothpick is enough to fool his pursuer… until a mirror (and the removal of the toothpick from his mouth) exposes his true identity. Fully withdrawn from the show’s usual despondent setting, “On the Run” humorously plays Laszlo’s macabre nature against his desire to help 14-year-old girls make it to their state championship. What more could you want from a small-town, salt-of-the-earth bloodsucker? — CTJ

Friday Night Lights, “Mud Bowl” (Season 1, Episode 20)

When a train derailment near the school forces the relocation of a crucial playoff game, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), seeking a neutral battleground, opts for the most retro possible site: a cow pasture that turns into a swampy mess after a downpour starts during the contest. While everyone else thinks the coach has lost his mind by eschewing a modern facility, he sees it as a back-to-basics location that will allow himself, his players, and the Dillon High School fans to reconnect with the pure essence of the sport, rather than all of the usual cynical distractions. In the same way, “Mud Bowl” provides the most concentrated blast of emotions that this most heart-tugging of all dramas ever provided: the joy of seeing the Panthers have fun and play well despite the weather conditions, and the horror of Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) barely fighting off a rapist while skipping the game to study. — A.S.

Better Things, “Batceañera” (Season 4, Episode 9)

Pamela Adlon’s stunning, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about Sam Fox, a single mom-slash-actress raising three daughters, is packed with installments that feel worthy of being called the best, but “Batceñera” brilliantly captures what makes this underrated gem of a show so special. It opens with a surprise: Frankie (Hannah Alligood), Sam’s headstrong middle daughter, perfectly reenacting a Jerry Lewis bit from Who’s Minding the Store? set to composer Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter.” The heart of the episode is the blending of a bat mitzvah and a quinceañera for 15-year-old Frankie and her friend Reinita, respectively. The episode has everything: carnitas and knishes, a replica of Frida Kahlo’s suit, an all-female mariachi band, great needle-drops, poignant mother-daughter exchanges with each girl, Sam’s ex finally feeling a bit of proper shame for not being there for his kids, and much, much more. It’s a batceañera you never want to end. — Lisa Tozzi

The Honeymooners, “The Man From Space” (Episode 14)

For fans of The Honeymooners , it’s impossible to choose an all-time favorite episode, but like Jackie Gleason himself, “The Man From Space” is one of the greats. Originally airing on New Year’s Eve 1955, it pit Gleason’s blustering Ralph Kramden against his dimwitted pal o’ mine Ed Norton (Art Carney) in the Raccoon Lodge costume contest. Norton rents his outfit — a foppish French getup that’s supposed to evoke the engineer who built the sewers of Paris — while Ralph aims to prove he can do better by making a costume out of everyday items: a flashlight, the ice-box door, a kitchen pot as a helmet. His vision is “the man from space,” but neither his long-suffering wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) nor Norton take it that way. When the live audience finally sees Ralph emerge in all his resplendent glory, their reaction is unhinged, even as pieces of his spacesuit unexpectedly fall to the floor, teeing up a classic Gleason ad lib: “Let me have that,” he barks at Alice, “that’s my denaturizer.” The final scene at the costume party, with Norton barging in from his shift in the sewer in a gas mask, is one for the ages. — Joseph Hudak

Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting” (Season 5, Episode 12)

Alan Ball’s HBO drama usually kicked off its episodes with a grisly and/or highly ironic death. For the series finale, however, the showrunner opted for something a little different: He’d begin the last chapter of the Fisher family and their associates not with a life being snuffed out, but with a birth — and then he’d end the show not with one death, but a dozen. Having spent the bulk of its swan song tying up all of its loose narrative ends, Six Feet Under then shows us how every one of its surviving main characters would eventually shuffle off this mortal coil: Matriarch Ruth Fisher will die of old age with her family around her; Federico has a heart attack on a cruise ship; David’s security-guard husband Keith is murdered during a robbery, etc. Set to the Sia song “Breathe,” this justly praised montage doubles as a full-frontal assault on your tear ducts. It saves Claire’s passing for last, and before she takes her last breath at age 102, we see evidence of friends, loved ones, professional accolades, and personal memories all around her. For a series so devoted to sudden death, it goes out with a tribute to a long life well-lived. — David Fear

Columbo, “Etude in Black” (Season 2, Episode 1)

As rumpled homicide detective Lt. Columbo, Peter Falk was so superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob. But the iconic mystery series was at its best whenever Falk had a strong foil. This episode, with the dogged cop trying to prove a famous orchestra conductor murdered his mistress, has a home-field advantage in this regard, as the bad guy is played by Falk’s close friend and frequent collaborator John Cassavetes. Beyond the actors’ ease around one another, the dynamic crackles because the Columbo formula depends on the killers being too arrogant to assume this mumbling schnook could possibly outsmart them — and Cassavetes had a gift for playing smug and irritated. — A.S.

Friends, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” (Season 5, Episode 14)

The best Friends moments come from full-ensemble episodes (Season Three’s “ The One Where No One’s Ready ,” Season Seven’s “ The One With Monica’s Thunder ”) where all six buds join forces and create a killing floor of comedy. The result is always a propulsive 22 minutes that doesn’t have a single dull moment, and “ The One Where Everybody Finds Out ” is this dynamic at its best. Secret’s out: Everyone has found out about Monica and Chandler’s relationship (OK, maybe Ross is a little late), and the gang play a game of chicken, one-upping each other to see who cracks first. Phoebe’s line, “They don’t know that we know they know we know!” embodies everything great about this episode, and the wit and wordplay that make the series a classic. No surprise it was nominated for three Emmys. — A.M.

Alec Baldwin's 'Rust' Prosecutor Wants a Second Chance

• Courts and Crime
• By Kory Grow

How 'Strange Darling' Became the Demented Little Thriller That Could

• a killer cause
• By Brenna Ehrlich

Disney Pauses Adaptation of 'The Graveyard Book' Amid Neil Gaiman Allegations

• Ramifications
• By Emily Zemler

Lee Daniels Reflects on Making 'Empire': 'Absolutely the Worst Experience'

• Bad Memories

'Rust' Armorer Receives Probation Sentence After Pleading Guilty to Bringing Gun to Bar

• Additional Sentence
• By Larisha Paul

Most Popular

Brad pitt and george clooney dance to 4-minute standing ovation for ‘wolfs’ during chaotic venice premiere, richard gere jokes he had "no chemistry" with julia roberts in 'pretty woman', demi moore fuels speculation that she doesn't approve of channing tatum's plans to remake ghost, jackie winsor, artist whose labor-intensive sculptures inspire mystery and awe, dies at 82, you might also like, colombian rock star juanes makes film debut in prime video drama ‘pimpinero: blood and oil’; trailer bows ahead of toronto world premiere (exclusive), taraji p. henson debuts orange hair and shimmers in plunging retrofête minidress, chloe bailey does delicate dressing in sergio hudson and more at ‘fight night: the million dollar heist’ premiere, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, ‘april’ review: gripping abortion drama confirms dea kulumbegashvili as one of the world’s most visceral filmmakers, commanders fire vp over goodell, jerry jones, fan comments.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.