An Iranian former Muslim cleric who fled persecution for being gay confronts his buried desires through a haunting relationship with a mannequin that embodies the self he was taught to deny.
Stranger Things season 4 ups the ante to the max! The show’s scope has been expanding for the past three seasons, and boy do they give us a spectacle to behold. As much as I love spectacle, this season occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ambition.
Every movement becomes a question of identity. To become who we are meant to be. In order to reach that we often have to shed who we once were, and that shedding can sometimes be so brutal it’s ungraceful.
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.
I first saw Dear Evan Hansen on the Broadway stage. Apparently, I was so blown away by the magic of theater that I didn’t pick up on the questionable dynamics. The story's clumsy handling in the movie brought those issues to light.
If you enjoy the bizarre, silly and entertaining world of the horror B-movies and want a break from the nuanced and poignant big budget horror releases, I have a list of gore-fests from the last ten years to enjoy this October.
