Are you ready for "Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale"?

by Nathaniel R

"What are you doing here?"

When I first heard the news that there would be a third Downton Abbey film I thought,' that's crazy, you've killed off the most quotable character in the previous film!' As you'll recall the Dowager Countess played by the late great Dame Maggie Smith passed away in the last film Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022). But then I reconsidered my incredulity about another film because the franchise has so many good characters...

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Drag Race RuCap: “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve & Talent Monologues”

For a second there, it looked like Detox was back on the Drag Race stage.

NICK TAYLOR: As with last season’s top six challenge, we get a pairs main challenge which relies heavily on the queen’s ingenuity to spin gold from straw. Comparing this episode to "Bathroom Hunties" immediately makes me grateful for how much "Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve & Talent Monologues" allows the queens shake their shit without a safety net rather than making them literally sell something. The interpretive dance/monologue combo is still a very strange prompt, but as the best duet showed, it’s a fun platform for the queen’s creativity, trust, and improvisational skills to shine through. That’s a very generous spin on a challenge the queens and the audience absolutely should not have sat through, but even so, we got a very deserving winner and one of season 17’s stronger lip syncs. But then the lip sync winner was eliminated, and that’s not fun. How about you, did you have a good time this week? 

CLÁUDIO ALVES: Mama, this is garbage…

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Drag Race RuCap: “Ross Matthews vs The Ducks”

Jewels wasn't the only one yawning through this acting challenge.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: After last week’s shitshow of an episode, the follow-up would necessarily feel like something of a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a fine hour of reality TV, but not especially exciting in terms of drama, nor spectacular as far as the queen’s performances are concerned. It culminated in some dubious judging and a tragic elimination, fair as it might have been. Oh well, not every episode can be a winner. Overall, I’m still liking this season, in no small part, because of the contestants. It’s been a while since we had such dynamic characters on Drag Race, messy and rough around the edges, not untalented but generally unpolished. Well, most of them. If you call Samantha Star unpolished, she might just kill you.

NICK TAYLOR: It’s a genuinely great cast, and you can tell because they bring real personal stakes to such a mediocre acting challenge. And the elimination order is still surprising enough I don’t feel totally comfortable predicting a top four. We haven’t had a shocker of a frontrunner going home like Plasma last year, but neither has anyone been as generously over-protected despite some patent limitations as Q was. No one feels like they’ve snuck through the competition to make it this far, and give or take some bold judging, the track records for our seven queens (now six) feel fair to me...

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Drag Race RuCap: “Villains Roast”

Villains look good in red, don't you think?

NICK TAYLOR: What a maddening episode of television this was. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with the Villains Roast. This cast continues to surprise me, for better and worse, and season 17 continues to give us sheer entertainment at a delicious pace. But the cast’s harkening to the shady charisma of OG Drag Race has now manifested some of the most unprompted fits of delusional sabotage we’ve seen in years. Arrietty and Lexi spin out hard over absolutely nothing, falling victim to their inner saboteurs at the earliest possible second, and tearing down Jewels with a petty nastiness that kept bringing me back to Phi Phi O’Hara. They overwhelm the underdog victories of Lana and Lydia, who finally and deservedly get their first stellar critiques of the season. It’s sour enough that I’m really reconsidering Lexi’s long-assumed placement in the final four. How do you feel?

CLÁUDIO ALVES: Oh honey, I have OPINIONS on these bitches…

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"Flow" and the Year of the Cat

by Cláudio Alves

FLOW | © Janus Films / Sideshow

As Nathaniel mentioned in his rundown of new Oscar trivia, records, and similar stats, Flow was the first film about a cat to win the Best Animated Feature Academy Award. This victory for cat people everywhere couldn't have happened to a better movie or to a more fitting cinematic year. After all, 2024 was positively full of felines on the big screen, and even some on the small. They ranged from heroic protagonists to supporting scene stealers, animated to live-action, Hollywood stars to world cinema revelations, from cute to cuter to cutest. There was even a robot kitty for those who love sci-fi. Let's look back on a year of cats…

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