Grief, Fate, and Destiny in 'Wolf Like Me'
'Wolf Like Me' works if you want a show to shut off your brain while watching. If you think too much, you'll hurt yourself.

A bold crime caper about muckraking journalist Hans Steindecker, who happens to witness a spectacular murder. Shortly afterwards, he makes the acquaintance of Nelly who desperately wants to leave the country and asks for Steindecker′s assistance. Without giving a second thought, he agrees, and only after Nelly has disappeared does he realize that the young woman duped him.
'Wolf Like Me' works if you want a show to shut off your brain while watching. If you think too much, you'll hurt yourself.
Haven't you heard? There's a new horror subgenre: cerebral gore, that's probably been around for decades and we're now just starting to talk about it.
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.
If you were to watch it on streaming when you have nothing to do, it’s still probably a giant waste of time, but you could do far worse. Paying $18 for a movie ticket and who knows how much for concessions turns this from an exercise in boredom to an exercise in frustration.
Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara (2025) is a soulful musical romance led by fresh faces Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda. A heartfelt tale of love, grief, and emotional healing that’s taking the Indian box office by storm.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.