The Netflix fantasy adventure film Damsel puts a modern feminist spin on some of the most traditionally sexist tropes of the fairy tale genre. That really shouldn’t be too controversial a thing to do, but because our real world is such a dumpster fire right now, probably will be. Some members of the viewing audience… Read More Distress Signals | Damsel (2024) on Netflix
The Netflix series House of Ninjas is a fun throwback to the ninja-sploitation craze of the video rental era, when most Blockbuster and Hollywood Video stores had an entire section devoted to sword-wielding, kung-fu assassins who skulk around at night wearing footie pajamas and masks. Thankfully, in doing so, the show maintains a generally light… Read More Our Whole Family Is Normal | House of Ninjas Season 1 (2024) on Netflix
Nearly twenty-three years after their seminal HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and thirteen since its follow-up The Pacific, producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks return once more to the battlegrounds of World War II to deliver the (presumed) finale to what turns out to be a very prolonged trilogy. Produced this time for Apple TV+… Read More Rack ’em Up and Knock ’em Down | Masters of the Air (2024) Apple TV+ Series Premiere
Looking at it clinically, the Amazon Prime film Role Play is essentially another made-for-TV knockoff of James Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster True Lies – as if we hadn’t already seen enough of those over the past year, both official and unofficial. Thankfully, this one has just enough of its own twists to be an enjoyable and… Read More Couple Goals | Role Play (2024) on Amazon Prime Video
Denied the opportunity to make an official Star Wars movie, director Zack Snyder tossed together his own knockoff space epic, complete with a remarkably similar story about a farmboyfarmgirl from a distant world who joins a rebel alliance to take down an evil galactic empire. In addition to other direct plot lifts and familiar recycled… Read More Seven Space Samurai | Rebel Moon: Part One (2023) on Netflix
How long does a chicken live, anyway? According to Google, five to ten years. Yet here we are more than two decades since Aardman Animations released Chicken Run to theaters in 2000 and along comes a belated direct-to-Netflix sequel featuring almost all the original characters, if not all the original cast. Does this old bird… Read More A Happy Chicken Is a Tasty Chicken | Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) on Netflix
The new Netflix film Leave the World Behind presents a vision of the apocalypse perhaps a little more disturbingly plausible than most. It has no zombies, alien invasions, giant monsters, asteroid collisions, or coordinated global fungal pandemics. Instead, the movie shows how rapidly modern civilization will crumble when… shudder to even consider the possibility… the… Read More No Going Back to Normal | Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix
Released on Max streaming over the past month with little fanfare and I’m sure little attention paid, the animated science fiction survival adventure drama Scavengers Reign is one of the most fascinating, creative, at times frustrating, and very often downright baffling new television series to come along in ages. After watching the first few episodes,… Read More This Place, It’s Like a Puzzle | Scavengers Reign Season 1 (2023) on Max
The corporate zeal to turn every piece of remotely valuable I.P. into a shared cinematic universe will eventually have to hit a tipping point where the gambit simply no longer works anymore. I’m not sure that we’ve gotten there yet, but I think we’re close. The latest in the cycle comes with the premiere of… Read More Godzilla without Much Godzilla | Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) Apple TV+ Series Premiere
Following a brief and frankly uneventful theatrical release a few weeks ago, the latest feature from acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher arrives at what was always intended to be its true home on Netflix. Based on a French graphic novel series from 1998 that the director had been circling for adaptation at least as far back… Read More Stick to the Plan | The Killer (2023) on Netflix
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