It: Chapter Two Review: An Ambitious, Worthwhile Sequel
This is ambitious horror filmmaking, and in a lot of ways, I fully admire its ambitions. For me, the film’s sloppiness defines its overall quality.

A pickpocket falls in with a group of prostitutes who have one strict rule: none of them may ever sleep with a man without taking his money — falling in love is forbidden.
This is ambitious horror filmmaking, and in a lot of ways, I fully admire its ambitions. For me, the film’s sloppiness defines its overall quality.
After We Collided is a sequel to last year’s After, which itself was based on Anna Todd’s 2014 novel of the same name, and which was originally published as a Harry Styles-centric fan-fiction on WattPad (a similar path as E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey series).
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.
Gritty and bleak are the best words to describe this film. There’s nothing happy about it.