Summertime, on a deserted river. 75-year-old Yvette is determined to obtain her pedal boat license, a way to make up for the life she never fully lived. Brian is approaching his thirties and has worked at Pedal'eau for the past ten years. Trapped in this menial job and suffering back aches, he dares not dream of another life. These two individuals, seemingly living in isolation, unknowingly venture down a stream of personal freedom. Between them, it's a matter of give and take.
America is the crux of the storyline: she is the only person in existence with the power to jump between universes. As central as America is to the Multiverse of Madness story, she somehow didn’t get that much to do.
'The Lost Daughter' doesn't paint over the choices Leda and Nina make as mothers as right or wrong but examines the messy in-between.
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.
Honey Don't! is a chaotic queer noir that's part detective story, part midnight movie madness. Margaret Qualley is fantastic as the wise-cracking private eye Honey, with Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans adding their own dry humor to the mix. The mystery itself is pretty loose, but the film makes up for it with crackling sexual tension, weird side characters, and razor-sharp dialogue. It's messy and uneven, but in the best possible way.
Do not trust Rotten Tomatoes. That is what I learned after watching Eternals. Critics currently rate it a 48%, but it's an amazing character-focused Marvel movie with positive diverse representation.
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.
