Here Comes a 'Spirited' Christmas
Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.

What can the ancient world's vision of the planet, such as the legend of powerful Greek Goddess Gaia, teach us? Acclaimed historian Bettany Hughes explores our relationship with Mother Earth in this fascinating documentary on BBC Select. Now, more than ever, our use and misuse of the planet is under scrutiny. Can the past hold the answers to how we can possibly have a future on the Earth?
Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.
"WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE?!!!!" "EVERYTHING!!!!!" This is but one of a multitude of highly emphatic questions, and subsequent answers, being asked in the newest feature film from one of the current masters of horror, Jordan Peele ("Get Out", "Us" and "Nope"). I must give Peele credit in that he continues to push the boundaries of specific genres and their associated tropes in order to provide what ends up amounting to subtly then jarringly intense, yet still character and story-driven, cinema that speaks more to indie stylings than mainstream.
The Bluff unravels its mystery slowly, opening on the capture of a ship captain named Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and the swift execution of his entire crew. Then, viewers are treated to a tranquil British settlement in the Cayman Islands in the 1850s, where a mother bakes a coconut birthday cake for her son in a house suspiciously rigged with makeshift tripwires and burglar alarms. As it turns out, that mother is Priyanka Chopra’s quick witted and resourceful ex-pirate Mrs. Ercell Bodden, and her husband’s captors are on the way to the island to hunt her down for abandoning them and stealing their loot. The pirates of the Libertas land on the beaches of Cayman Brac, and the scenes that follow show a Viking-esque slaughter of half the island.
Eternals is an interesting concept and unique visuals, but slow pacing and rushed character development suggests it should have been a mini-series.
But what many do not know is that in 2019, a Wonder Woman film was released that had all of the positive qualities of WW84, and remedied many of the negative ones. Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, a direct-to-video animated movie in the DC Animated Movie Universe, perfectly balances the campiness and seriousness of the character.
Although the budget was a dollar and a dream, Netflix's 'First Kill' managed to gain over 90 million viewing hours and a small cult following. So why was it canceled? Given the trends in series cancellations, it may have been because of the Black and queer protagonists.