Garage Sale Mystery: The Wedding Dress (2015)

"The Mitchells vs. The Machines" captures the eternal struggle between kids who want to pursue the arts and their practical parents who think they'll fail.

'The Menu' has a strong story. The 5 acts, which are defined by the courses, are an excellent subversion of the classic 5-act film structure.

"King Richard" paints a nuanced portrait of a Black father trying to ensure his daughters’ success in a racist, misogynistic world. Yet, Richard and his kids overcome that fear and adversity to succeed.

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.

This current year, as well as the past several, has seen a slowly building increase in something the horror genre has required for quite a while in this critic's opinion...originality. I've stated before that I am very hard to please when it comes to this vein of the film industry's offerings, always leaning more towards that which sends chills through my very being in lieu of buckets of blood and gore.

Intergenerational friendships and community can be so powerful, and this was a great example.