The Drama: A Marriage of Discomfort and Empathy
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.

Neon Reef dives into the interconnection between vibrant queer community and homegrown ocean activism. Amid the swaying palms and electric neon nightlife of Miami’s South Beach are unlikely underwater heroes: married couple Patrick Breshike and David Grieser. They strap on scuba gear, schmooze politicians, and marshal a diverse coalition of queer coral scientists, women divers, and a Guinness World Record-breaking mermaid in an urgent battle to save a coral reef from poachers, climate change, and ignorance. This is a sexy, sun-drenched, and sometimes surreal road map to pivoting community toward advocacy in America’s riviera: Miami Beach.
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.
Director Dana Ziyasheva made her directorial debut, 'Defenders of Life' which focuses on the Ngäbe community, and the hardships Ngäbe girls faced in Costa Rica.
Clocking in at about four hours, Stranger Things season 4 volume 2 is the length of a double feature. Despite the length and the hype, the finale still falls short of expectations thanks to poor pacing, poor character choices, and poor diverse storytelling.
Curry Barker’s film, Obsession, soars in success this past May leaving everyone who has watched it in extreme chills and disturbance. And taking it to new levels of why men are always the root of horror films even when they try not to be.
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.
Netflix's new thriller Apex, starring Charlize Theron, puts a twist on survival horror. Despite its setting in the beautiful- yet-dangerous Australian wilderness, Apex is not a movie about man vs. nature. Instead, it’s woman vs. man. While checking out the title card and its unpretentious Netflix release might lead viewers to believe Apex is just another celebrity project churned out of the streaming machine, Apex - whether by luck or by intention - is a consistently harrowing film about the reality of being a woman in a public space.