Mission Accomplished: Langan in Iraq (2007)

This is not a film, it’s a drop tower.  A drop tower that you don’t get off of for the vast majority of its 106-minute runtime. 

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

In The Novelist's Film, Hong explores the meaningful things people share and inspire by virtue of simply engaging with one another.

Taika Waititi and the cast of Thor: Love and Thunder have been hyping up the gayness of this movie, and while there are queer characters, it's not quite the representation we were hoping for.

For anyone who is not a cis white woman, a justice-fueled murderous rampage is not framed as liberation. Instead, they contribute to harsh stereotypes that vilify minority women with dangerous consequences.

Sorry to Bother You ultimately speaks to the unfair advantages that the country’s power structures award to those with the resources to control others, as Lift’s easy access to the media allows his opinion to be the only one that matters in the eyes of the unsuspecting and easily impressed public. Moreover, it reveals the extent to which the American Dream has any true validity. It postulates how the promise of success and fulfillment as promoted by the American Dream more often than not leads to the undoing of the individual. Interestingly, in its revealing of the American Dream as merely a facade, Sorry to Bother You wisely questions whether or not anything can really be done to undo a system that has been accepted and in action for centuries.