What 'Magnolia' Says About Childhood Trauma
Magnolia focuses on how one’s childhood and trauma relate to their confidence and self.

After spending the night partying at a condemned river creek, the atmosphere is soon lost for quiet teenager Reece and his friends. Headaches and heartaches give way to a terrifying race back to civilisation as a grossly disfiguring virus takes hold on the most vulnerable.
Magnolia focuses on how one’s childhood and trauma relate to their confidence and self.
What makes the lighting in Casablanca even more impressive is how it reflects the emotional states of the characters without needing explicit dialogue.
It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.
The human experience is described through the eyes of a marginalized outsider, neither judgmental nor invested, just an observant donkey.
When it comes the horror genre, I am VERY hard to please or impress, much less scare. Coming from a current mindset of appreciation for chilling, unsettling, tension-inducing efforts such as "Hereditary", "The Conjuring" (ONLY the first one to date, mind you), "Lights Out", "The Babadook", "Midsommar", "Talk To Me", "Oddity", "Bring Her Back", and the like
One of THE most frustrating trends in the mainstream film industry over the last several decades has been the onset of comedy efforts that seem SO focused on being crude and/or gross-out in all ways possible. That, at least for me, makes them no longer funny.