Based on Bernard Cornwell’s THE SAXON STORIES series of novels, the Netflix series THE LAST KINGDOM is just plain fun. I just finished the first season and found it engaging for its history but mostly for its engaging characters and solid storytelling.

The story follows the life of Uhtred, who is taken and raised by invading Danes until treachery forces him onto the road to seek his fortune in the Kingdom of Wessex, the last major kingdom in England that has not yet been conquered. There, he forms an uneasy relationship with King Alfred and constantly finds himself pulled between the culture and people of his upbringing and the kingdom that shares his ancestry and can restore his family title and lands. Along the way, there are tons of adventures that culminate in an impressive showdown between the English and the Danes.

The story is well told. Uhtred is a great warrior but runs more than fights. There’s no Conan-like killing here, fighting is brutal and best avoided unless necessary. This is just one of the ways the story is grounded in reality. Historically, it seems accurate enough for what I know of the period. Culturally, there’s a fantastic contrast between the pragmatic and warlike Danes and the God-fearing, terrified English. Uhtred is a great protagonist, cunning and smart and capable, and he makes a great pair with the pious and equally smart and cunning Alfred.

The show is not overly ambitious, setting its sights on a simple story well told, with solid action and engaging characters, and in that it succeeded for me.

Amazon Prime’s new series HUNTERS turns Nazi hunters in 1970s New York City into comic book heroes, resulting in a series that has oddly compelling qualities, not least of which is the great Al Pacino chewing the scenery, but is also strangely exploitative and misses out on the true evil of the Third Reich.

The story starts with Jonah, a Jew who stumbles upon a Nazi war criminal living in New York. When this goes sour, he gets help from a secretive group of Nazi hunters and joins them. The Nazis are living among us, it turns out, and they are ruthlessly bent on turning America into the Fourth Reich.

I’m three episodes into this–I’m not entirely sure what this is–and shelved it in favor of more promising TV shows like BABYLON BERLIN and the next season of KINGDOM. What a strange bag HUNTERS is. It’s like Quentin Tarantino had a fever and made a mashup of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, schlocky 70s exploitation films, and comic-book superheroes and supervillains. It’s super violent, nasty, emotional, and of course, as I mentioned, it has Al Pacino at his Al Pacino best.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite working for me. The Hunters are supposed to be ultra cool but aren’t, the comic relief isn’t comical, and the protagonist comes across as whiny, resulting in titillation but not a lot of empathy. The empathy engine is the Holocaust, where we’re shown atrocities that never happened and get every emotional string yanked hard, resulting in the show feeling exploitative, a bad taste in the mouth that goes along with the fresh tortures in the present.

Another major flaw is the Nazis are presented as monsters (though sadly actually kind of boringly two-dimensional). The thing is, the Nazis were monsters, but they weren’t inherently evil. What was truly, truly terrifying about the Nazis, and what this show entirely misses, is how average and, well, dumb many of them were, how they committed evil acts because these acts had become normalized in their country. This was what Hannah Arendt discovered during the trial of Eichmann, how bland and boring and pedantic he was, leading her to coin the term the “banality of evil.” In other words, the potential for evil is in all of us, the nice neighbor next door who loves dogs, anybody, once evil becomes normalized.

So overall, HUNTERS is engaging, like I said oddly compelling for many of its constituent qualities, but overall the final product comes across as exploitative of a horrifying tragedy, and while I love seeing Nazis get theirs as much as the next guy, it would have been far more powerful if the Nazis weren’t comic-book, two-dimensional villains. I have to wonder what this show would have been like if it had left the attempts at comedy, the schlock, and the comics at home, and played it straight as a Nazi hunter series that rolled out like MUNICH.

Directed and co-written by Bong Joon-ho, PARASITE (2019) is a South Korean dark comedy about a poor family who worm their way into the employ of a rich family by posing as unrelated, highly skilled people. The film has received numerous awards, including Best Picture Award by the Academy. I thought it was great across a range of strong notes, though it didn’t make as big an impression on me as it did others, maybe due to the high expectations I had going into it.

The film starts with the Kim family, who are unemployed except for odd jobs and live in a moldy basement apartment in a South Korean city. Despite their problems, they’re a tight-knit family who make the best of things, and they’re all likeable. When a friend suggests the son pose as a tutor and arranges an introduction with a rich family, he lands a cushy gig, and then schemes with his family to gets them all hired. It all comes to a head with a very dark ending that nails the film’s themes of class snobbery and resentment.

Class conflict is at the heart of the film, from the upstairs/downstairs imagery to the resentment that explodes in the climax to the very dark ending. Big themes include how the rich don’t see the poor as real people, how the poor fight each other for scraps from the rich man’s table, how a person’s perceived goodness is tied to wealth, and how the poor are very skilled but only need opportunity.

The result works on a lot of levels. The poor family is instantly likeable, as is the rich family, each in their own bubble of understanding of who they are and how the world works. The comedy is spot on, and the second act includes plenty of cringe as their plan comes under threat, all leading to a violent climax that is surprising and dovetails into its terrific final moments.

So overall, yeah, I loved this one, and for me it joins a lot of other very good films coming out of South Korea. Its success is as much a sign of the times we live in–what the director calls “late capitalism”–as the quality of the story and direction.