It’s hard to believe it’s been a full decade and three presidential administrations since the summer of 2008, the movie season that bestowed upon us The Dark Knight. Honestly, the memories one can have of this time—both for fanboys and the uninitiated—still feel so fresh. Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film was accumulating massive amounts of…
Ari Aster’s debut film, Hereditary, is a horror film in more than one sense of the word. Yes, it is a genre piece with visceral scenes of carnage, a storyline tinged with the supernatural, and the possible involvement of a cult. But aside from these basic building blocks of horror, Hereditary is a horror movie…
Going into Hotel Artemis, one might be inclined to admire it just on premise alone. A pulpy crime thriller with a cyberpunk setting is not too commonly done in cinema, and in a world where box-office draws consist mainly of remakes, reboots, sequels, and superhero redundancies, Hotel Artemis is even more commendable for the fact…
HBO’s new series Barry might very well be a shoe-in for best new show of the year. The breezy and enjoyable first season offered viewers eight high-quality episodes with big laughs and consistently surprising scripts. Furthermore, fans of hardboiled narratives will find a rather idiosyncratic take on pulp here, as while Barry is a comedy,…
Unsane is a movie about a woman being held against her will in a mental institution. That’s pretty much it—the best way to describe it. It’s not an arthouse release, a high-brow picture, or even considerably experimental (at least in terms of narrative arc). It’s an occasionally schlocky thriller with a screenplay that feels like…
In the months after the #MeToo movement—the social media campaign that outed a small legion of powerful men across the world of politics and media—the sense of shock is still lingering, but there’s also a gestation of thought that’s arisen: how will entertainment itself commentate on these accusations? There have already been high-profile announcements, including…
Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller Annihilation—an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel—may have seemed like a good sell for a big studio a few years ago. The first novel in his Southern Reach Trilogy, Annihilation has been a niche-bookstore favorite for the last few years, with the paperbacks frequenting the bookshelves of both sci-fi fans and otherwise.…
*Spoilers Follow* It’s hard to believe it’s been a full decade since we were first introduced to Breaking Bad’s tighty-whities-wearing protagonist Walter White. The series, which found Mr. White taking on the unlikely position of a crystal-meth manufacturer after discovering he has stage-three lung cancer, initially presented him as a milquetoast high school chemistry teacher…
It doesn’t take long to ascertain what the British series The End of the F***ing World (readily available to stream through Netflix) is aspiring to be. Just from its NSFW (albeit censored) title, one can judge that the show already has a bit of a punk gene to it. From the opening scene where protagonist…
**Spoilers Ahead** Search Party has the dubious distinction of being a series that’s true colors don’t show right away. In fact, it really isn’t until the second season that the series shows its true ethos, primarily because it performs the impossible feat of turning the debut season’s idea on its head while still retaining its…
