Apple Juice (2023)

April, a professional dancer, reluctantly trains a group of girls at a dance school for the dance competition.

I didn’t love Expecting Amy, the mini-series following Amy Schumer’s pregnancy, but it brought up a lot of great unspoken side-effects of working and growing a human in America.

“I’m always interested in exploring female fantasy, and the sexy witch is a loaded archetype that is simultaneously about men’s fears and fantasies about women, and women’s feelings of empowerment and agency. So whereas we are used to seeing the sexy witch or the femme fatale from the outside, I wanted to explore her from the inside.” - Anna Biller, on why she made The Love Witch

In Stowaway, director Joe Penna narrates the story of a starship crew (Anna Kendrick as Zoe Levenson; Toni Collette as Marina Barnett; and Daniel Dae Kim as David Kim) struggling with serious technical problems on a two-year mission to Mars. During the trip, they discover aboard the presence of Michael (Shamier Anderson), a stowaway who jeopardizes everyone’s life on board.

We can criticize depictions from old media, but they weren’t simply “good for their time”. They were fighting and struggling in a world we can’t imagine.

If you enjoy the bizarre, silly and entertaining world of the horror B-movies and want a break from the nuanced and poignant big budget horror releases, I have a list of gore-fests from the last ten years to enjoy this October.