Untitled 2 (Kiss me.) (2020)

It’s dark, uncomfortable, and there are things that don’t make sense.

We chat with Penelope Lawson about her short film, The Dinner Party, her experience founding her own production company, and fun cinema.

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

“Trust your gut" is one of the most common pieces of advice you’ll receive during your lifetime. And as a person inclined to trust my intuition above all else, it’s the most common advice I find myself giving in real life and in my online socialising. But what happens when your gut is trying to warn you that something is seriously wrong without you being able to identify what triggered it in the first place? How can you act on a feeling or make it go away when you don’t have a clue about what could be wrong? How can you trust your intuition when you don’t know what makes it act out in the first place?

Disguised as a cosmic highway horror, Alexander Ullom’s It Ends is a beautiful, albeit terrifying, metaphor for learning that if you want to survive adulthood and become your own person, you have to learn to let people go.

A consumed-by-rage woman travels from universe to universe to avenge the death of her daughter by brutally killing her murderer over and over again. And that's all that she does.