Afterlife of the Party: An Exploration of Female Friendship
Netflix's Afterlife of the Party might fall into the rom-com genre, but it's much more about grief, strong female friendships, and platonic love than it is about romance.

At the age of 18, stunt cyclist Eddie Kidd had already broken world records, been a stunt double for Harrison Ford and released a couple of singles. Yet this profile piece for the COI cinemagazine series “This Week in Britain” offers glimpses that his high life had both its ups and downs. A record-breaking jump of 24 cars was to be the big attraction of a May bank holiday at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu but torrential rain scuppered plans. Kidd returned on the 4th June for a second attempt but with a shoulder injury that you see aggravated here, which prevented a planned second jump and again disappointed audiences. The person tasked with turning all these travails into a light-hearted snippet for overseas audiences was Peter Greenaway, who edited hundreds of stories like this before making arthouse feature hits such as The Draughtman’s Contract (1982).
Netflix's Afterlife of the Party might fall into the rom-com genre, but it's much more about grief, strong female friendships, and platonic love than it is about romance.
Ben Affleck leads The Way Back, a seemingly cathartic film for him after the actor’s recent bouts with alcoholism and rehab. He plays Jack, a man fighting his own battles who happens upon coaching a boys’ basketball team, the same team he once played for back in high school.
Shudder makes an incredibly atmospheric docuseries about the darker side of Hollywood mysteries.
Adapted from a 2014 novel by Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life is the feature film debut of documentary filmmaker Bing Liu. With the help of screenwriter Martyna Majok, he paints a realistic and somber portrayal of Aishe, a Uyghur immigrant, as she struggles to make a living while undocumented in the United States.
In Deaf, the Spanish director Eva Libertad explores pregnancy and motherhood from the perspective of a deaf woman. Her movie examines how the world imposes the notion of disability on her main character while she actually does not feel disabled herself.
The problem isn’t that it’s bad. It's good. But it fails to stand out from a crowd of similar films.