A young married couple finds themselves trapped in one final, emotionally charged argument to determine whether their love is still worth fighting for or whether it should end in divorce.
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.
During the third act, the momentum stalls, largely due to the film’s obsession with Kubrick’s visual design. But all in all, Doctor Sleep is a cinematic success, defined by rich characters and high powered emotion.
Him is visually stunning—all concrete cathedrals and bone-rattling impact shots that look like a nightmare highlight reel. Marlon Wayans is magnetic as this legendary quarterback who's basically selling salvation with a smile that never quite reaches his eyes. But the story keeps running in circles: more tests, more cryptic pep talks, more ritualistic drills. The sports-as-religion metaphor beats you over the head when subtlety would've been more effective. The middle drags, and that finale chooses spectacle over substance. It's undeniably stylish, but left me cold. Also worth noting: despite the Monkeypaw connection, this isn't actually a Jordan Peele film—he didn't write or direct.
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.
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.
Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is a fan-favorite, as are some of the more science fiction angled movies like 28 Days Later or World War Z. I recently watched the 1995 Wolfgang Peterson-directed movie, Outbreak for the first time, which is currently available on Netflix.
