Gambling with Minds 

Is Parasite a Horror Movie? Bong Joon-ho, one of South Korea’s parasite horror movies and most prolific filmmakers, decided to grace the world with one of the bizarre and fascinating movies of 2019.

Films about casinos have long been a favorite of Hollywood. This is unsurprising, as they're often tied to magnetic characters whose lives revolve around luxury, spectacle, and even danger.

What seems like such a simple story of survival is so much more than that—it’s a story of family, and of war, and of destruction. It’s painful to watch, but not in a bad way. It makes its audience reflect on their own actions, and in how they are complicit in the sufferings of others as the adults in this film are. Grave of the Fireflies does not hold back from being heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t. It tells a message that needs to be heard decades after the war, and a story that cannot be forgotten by history.

What starts off as a success story for a single mother living below the poverty line, slowly begins to weave itself into a tangled web of greed, guilt, and destruction.

The newest in a long line of Cinderella adaptations, Amazon’s Cinderella (2021) prizes girlbossification above the very story it tries to adapt.

The film may be a thriller, but I wasn’t thrilled by it. If anything, I was bored and annoyed.