17
May
This article contains spoilers for The Nevers episode 1 but not for future episodes. The Nevers is a series that often defies description. A Victorian-set fantasy adventure that features a gang of primarily young women who gain supernatural and superhuman abilities, it’s a story about everything from faith and prejudice to hope and change. Its narrative is sprawling and frequently confusing, with no real initial sense of how its disparate pieces connect to one another. (Or don’t.) And it features at least a dozen major characters who run the gamut from heroes to villains – and sometimes both at once.…
06
May
It’s been awhile since Stranger Things last graced Netflix’s servers with a new season. In fact, it was over a year and precisely one novel coronavirus global pandemic ago. Thankfully the streamer decided to remind us that season 4 of one of its biggest hits is still in the works. Netflix unveiled a new teaser for Stranger Things season 4 on Thursday and in fittingly Strange fashion, it looks to the franchise’s past rather than to its feature. Give it a look below to see what we mean. What we appear to be seeing here is a typical day at…
29
Apr
A Manhattan couple moves to a historic hamlet in the Hudson Valley and come to discover that their marriage has a sinister darkness, one that rivals their new home’s history.Rated: Not RatedRelease Date: Apr 29, 2021
29
Apr
A haunted house, a religious philosophy, and a horrible story of domestic abuse are at the center of this Netflix original horror-thriller, Things Heard & Seen, a movie that plays with big ideas but gets confused along the way. Amanda Seyfried stars as Catherine, a young art restorer who moves with her lecturer husband George (James Norton) to a small town and a new house when he secures a job at a local college. Isolated from her own work and friends, and now a full time mum to their young daughter Franny, Catherine grows increasingly frustrated while George appears to be…
22
Mar
This The Simpsons review contains spoilers. The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 16 The Simpsons Season 32, episode 16, ” Manger Things,” is the 700th installment of the series. That’s more episodes than Rocky and Bullwinkle and Gunsmoke put together. To celebrate, they are gifting us with a second holiday episode. This one is a Christmas story of failing and redemption, like every other yuletide tale. It stars the Simpsons’ neighborinos, Ned and Maude Flanders. As Bart says, Christmas is no time to think about your neighbors, but “Manger Things” repays the indulgence. It is set in the not too distant…
10
Feb
Quick-witted teen Mark contentedly lives the same day in an endless loop. But his world is turned upside-down when he meets mysterious Margaret also stuck in the time loop. Mark and Margaret form a magnetic partnership, setting out to find all the tiny things that make that one day perfect. What follows is a love story with a fantastical twist, as the two struggle to figure out how – and whether – to escape their never-ending day. Rated: PG-13Release Date: Feb 12, 2021
04
Feb
This article contains spoilers for The Little Things and Seven. Critics have not been kind to The Little Things, the new Warner Bros./HBO Max psychological thriller starring Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as two Los Angeles cops obsessed with catching a vicious serial killer. Although the film is apparently doing very decent business–especially on the streaming end–it sits at a mediocre 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with many comparing it to the 1995 classic Seven. In that juxtaposition, The Little Things is coming up short. On the surface, there are a number of similarities between writer-director John Lee Hancock’s new…
02
Feb
This article contains spoilers for Denzel Washington’s The Little Things. Read our spoiler-free review here. The opening of John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things is pure adrenaline. A young woman minding her own business and rightfully bopping to the B-52’s “Roam”—and also making a nice homage to Buffalo Bill’s final victim in The Silence of the Lambs—is targeted by a mysterious driver who tries to run her off the road. Once cornered at a nearby gas station, the would-be victim is only able to escape by the skin of her teeth. It’s all terrifying, partially because it likely has real…
01
Feb
This article contains The Little Things spoilers. You can read our spoiler-free review here. Despite what those looking for clear answers after that ending might hope, The Little Things is not based on any specific true story or serial killer investigation. It was a 1993 screenplay penned by writer-director John Lee Hancock. However, there are similarities to several well known cases. The film even mentions the Night Stalker, aka Richard Ramirez, all while stopping short of naming names or committing to a specific lethal predator in its own yarn. This is by design. In a recent interview with The Wrap,…
31
Jan
This The Little Things analysis contains spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here. The Little Things can be seen as a tainted police procedural with its murky ambiguity and troubling ending. But it’s also the story of a man for whom the allure of a charismatic serial killer goes too far. After all, serial killers make up less than one percent of homicides but they average a double-digit percentage of Hollywood crime films, and probably a majority of prison fan mail. What is it about these one-percenters we love so much? Directed by John Lee Hancock, the supposed sociopath in The…
30
Jan
This article contains The Little Things spoilers. You can find our spoiler-free review here. It’s the piece of the puzzle Rami Malek’s Jim Baxter has been waiting for. The young—and now entirely ruined—LAPD police detective can stop wondering about the night before—the night his shovel cracked the skull of Albert Sparma (Jared Leto). At the time of the murder, there was no clear cut evidence Sparma was the serial killer that law enforcement was hunting—or that Sparma even committed a crime beyond being a full-on creep. But when Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) mails the younger man a red barrette,…
26
Jan
Kern County Deputy Sheriff Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) is sent to Los Angeles for what should have been a quick evidence-gathering assignment. Instead, he becomes embroiled in the search for a killer who is terrorizing the city. Leading the hunt, L.A. Sheriff Department Sergeant Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), impressed with Deke’s cop instincts, unofficially engages his help. But as they track the killer, Baxter is unaware that the investigation is dredging up echoes of Deke’s past, uncovering disturbing secrets that could threaten more than his case.Rated: RRelease Date: Jan 29, 2021
26
Jan
With the 25th anniversary of Seven having passed and the 30th anniversary of The Silence of the Lambs upon us in just a few weeks, it wouldn’t be surprising if nostalgia for the serial killer thrillers of the ’90s is now upon us. That makes the arrival of The Little Things, directed and written by John Lee Hancock (The Founder), almost uncanny in its timing. The film is an unabashed throwback with the visual and narrative cues of the films mentioned above, and others along those lines, like Manhunter and Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, liberally baked into its DNA. With its…
23
Nov
With the Shadowlands expansion, the World of Warcraft team hopes to make the legendary MMO more accessible than it’s ever been before. While I think they’ve done a pretty good job of breaking down some of the game’s more intimidating barriers, that doesn’t mean that Shadowlands offers the perfect new player experience. In fact, it’s entirely possible to leave Shadowlands‘ new player starting area (an island called Exile’s Reach) without understanding or even knowing about some of the game’s core mechanics. It would have been impossible for Exile’s Reach to teach you absolutely everything you needed to know about the…
03
Nov
At the Develop: Brighton keynote session, Bethesda’s Todd Howard stated that the studio is developing overhauls to their controversial Creation Engine which could represent the biggest leap in technology that we’ve seen from Bethesda since the transition from the Xbox generation to the Xbox 360 era. “It’s taken us longer than we would have liked, but it’s going to power what we’re doing with Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6, and when people see the result, they’ll hopefully be as happy as we are with what’s on the screen, but also in how we can go about making our games,” Howard…
18
Sep
Stranger Things Season 4 may have dropped a revelatory teaser back in the halcyon days of February 2020, but substantive updates on the hit Netflix show’s return have been practically nonexistent ever since. However, star David Harbour has seemingly shed some light on the story for the upcoming fourth frame, especially regarding his presumed-dead character, Jim Hopper. Indeed, Harbour’s Hopper sacrificed himself in an explosive climactic moment at the end of 2019’s Stranger Things Season 3, but the February teaser revealed (some might say spoiled,) that he’s alive and (arguably) well, pounding railroad spikes in a snowy labor camp in…
09
Sep
Charlie’s Kaufman’s filmic interpretation of Iain Reid’s celebrated novel I’m Thinking Of Ending Things has arrived on Netflix and it’s a complicated, beautiful, confusing work – certainly unless you watch it twice. The book and the film sit wonderfully together, both broadly the same narrative but both leaning into different strands and elements, with the movie picking up half-hinted at threads from the book. They both work, but in different ways. If you were wondering whether you should read the book first or watch the film, the answer is read the book. Not because it’s necessarily better – the two…
07
Sep
Netflix chiller I’m Thinking of Ending Things has arrived to confuse and bemuse. It’s based on the novel by Iain Reid, which is also a mystery, and it’s adapted by Charlie Kaufman, a man with a history of playing around with concepts of fiction and reality in his screenplays such as Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is no less oblique, no less confusing, particularly if you haven’t read the book and only want to watch the movie once. Yep it’s a movie, and a book, which really requires you…
