The Shadow Effect (2009)

In Paul Feig’s newest comedy, Last Christmas, Katarina (Emilia Clarke) didn’t give a heart, she got a heart, you see.

The new biopic 'Elvis' highlights the beginning and end of the career of this rock and roll legend. The audience is taken on this journey knowing the tragic ending but not so much about what led him there. A large topic of discussion is the influences on Elvis that made him who he was as a singer, musician, and performer, which were blues, gospel, and country. Many of the songs that rose him to fame were songs by Black artists he heard growing up in primarily Black settings.

It is up to the community to decide if this film is a force for enlightenment or not.  

If Miguel Alexandre were trying to make a revenge story seem dull without using all the effective formulas that work great in this catchy genre, he could not have accomplished his purpose much better than he unintentionally has in Black Island.

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.

The trouble with Yara (2021) is that in its attempt to tell the whole story, it struggles to tell a consistently engaging story.