821 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 16)

North Carolina, 2032. Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a skilled gamer. Pro gaming (usually helping some rich schmucks win victories they couldn't on their own) is a viable way for her and her cyborg'd-former-Marine brother Burton (Jack Reynor) to earn extra cash. They live with their ailing mother Ella (Melinda Page Hamilton) a half-step ahead of financial ruin in a town more or less run by spiritual-cousin-to-Road-House-villain-Brad-Wesley Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum, Westworld). Continue Reading →

After fifteen seasons, ever-escalating seasonal arcs, and literally thousands of trips to the afterlife for both Winchester brothers, Supernatural closed its final chapter. Once you’ve killed God, Lucifer, and Death, is there anywhere else to go? The CW, faced with the prospect of losing it’s biggest moneymaker, was already laying the groundwork with Jensen Ackles (who played older brother Dean) for a new spin-off/prequel focusing on John and Mary, the ill-fated parents of the Winchesters. A bold move, considering the story of Mary and John was well-trod ground in Supernatural, even featuring the boys time traveling back to the days of their parents' courtship. Bold, too, because who would want to watch a show about two of the most reviled characters in the show’s history? Supernatural historians will tell you that John was neglectful, with some heavily implied physical abuse. Mary, only getting to know her children as adults, was distant and cold, not the sainted paragon of motherhood she’d been painted as. Continue Reading →

When I got to my first advanced writing course in college, our professor, a large woman with a positively terrifying intellect, asked us all to tell the rest of the class what our favorite book was. I, at barely 19, told a room full of adults that I loved the writings of Anne Rice more than anything. I’d read and reread The Vampire Chronicles many times since I was fifteen, and the Lives of the Mayfair Witches since I was twelve. To say these books had a significant impact on my adolescence and young adulthood is an understatement. In those pre-internet days, I’d satisfied my love of storytelling by filling entire notebooks with my Anne Riceaverse Fan Fiction. It’s what made me want to be a writer. So you can imagine how mortified I was when Professor Arl, barely holding back an eye roll, told me that, yes, Anne Rice was very popular with teenage girls but was—at best—escapist beach reading.   Continue Reading →

There’s no easy way to live your dream. But if you and your quirky, goth friends can open up a business that conjures up fake macabre events for money, it becomes a very real possibility. HBO’s Los Espookys, one of the best shows of 2019, returns after a long COVID hiatus with a second season abundant with the show’s trademark deadpan humor, random visual gags, and, above all, its big heart. Continue Reading →

Cobra Kai has always been about comebacks. Each season plays with its cast of characters — from the old guns to the new blood — like action figures in an elaborate playset, constantly shifting relationships, rivalries, and set-ups to drive home the most bingeable drama-lite comedy it can muster. But ultimately, when you strip it down to basics, the show only really cares about how the characters get back up after falling flat on their faces.  Continue Reading →

Stephen King is best known for his massive novels that require weight training just to hold. Entire forest ecosystems have been destroyed so we can have The Stand on our bookshelves. These epic tales are his bread and butter, but if you want to get a pure distillation of what makes King a gifted horror writer and storyteller, check out his short story collections. They provide the strong, grounded characters facing terrifying circumstances that he’s famous for in his longer novels, but in a digestible format. He can be hit or miss (even the best writers may have stinkers when they write an astonishing ten pages a day like King) but if one short story is garbage, chances are the next one will be a fun time.   Continue Reading →

“What is Vietnam?” is not a question with an easy answer, but The Greatest Beer Run Ever tackles the challenge anyway. Like the plethora of media featuring the country—in any capacity—Peter Farrelly’s film runs headlong into the notion that what is an S-shaped piece of land in Southeast Asia can also be a dream after the Fall of Saigon. Or that the starry banner that international bodies recognize is not the triple-striped one flying overseas. Or that any example henceforth will possess the same gist: try to ring up nuance when discussing Vietnam. Continue Reading →

Though the problems of bored wealthy white people don’t amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things, a startling amount of TV and film is still devoted to them. Where at one time they were supposed to be relatable and earn sympathy from the viewer, now there seems to be some sadism in their depiction, where the audience is meant to enjoy it. It always seems to come down to the same thing: what do these people have to be so unhappy about? How much of their problems are their own doing, and could be simply resolved instead of just whining about them? Being “trapped” for these characters isn’t the same as it is for everyone else. Continue Reading →

Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s latest film, is neither a masterpiece nor a disaster. Based on the amount of behind the scenes drama that has surrounded the entire production filming to promotion, this review will surely come as a disappointment to some. But if not for the gossip about the filming of the movie and the celebrities involved, this deeply forgettable film would probably fade from the public eye in no time at all. Continue Reading →

Makbul Mubarak’s debut Autobiography delves deep to examine loyalty & family under dictatorship. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival) Makbul Mubarak’s first feature Autobiography is only truly autobiographical in terms of the larger questions his upbringing in Indonesia under the Suharto regime raises about loyalty vs. fealty and whether “loyalty [is] still honorable if and when it is pledged to something monstrous”. Continue Reading →

Social media has normalized behaving as though we know and can even speak for celebrities. Going beyond the concept of the “number one fan,” we address them directly, make demands of them, and attack anyone perceived as meaning them harm, acting as though we’re under personal orders. It peaked during the Amber Heard defamation trial, then that angry energy transferred over to Olivia Wilde, largely for committing the crime of dating Harry Styles. The mere tweeting of Wilde’s name seems to summon antagonistic replies listing her sins, accusing her of everything from being a rape apologist to a pedophile to preventing Styles from being with the person he truly loves, fellow One Direction member Louis Tomlinson. Though Styles and Tomlinson have both denied (many times) that they’re in a secret relationship, their “true” fans insist that they know better, and that it’s all subterfuge to fool the press. So it’s up to the fans to aggressively defend them, even threatening those they perceive as “enemies.” Continue Reading →

The difficult thing about reviewing a reboot/reimagining/update/sequel of an older property with plenty of accumulated goodwill is taking the new series on its own merits. It may be tempting to simply declare, “it isn’t as good as the original!” and call it a day. However, that isn’t exactly playing it fair. And yet, the temptation is there. Continue Reading →

Most of Generation X has received our AARP memberships in the mail, as our lurching journey down the road towards irrelevance comes to an end. Both the smallest generation in numbers, and the first generation to not do better than our parents financially, we’ve long been caught in the middle of the endless battle for dominance between Boomers and Millennials, and now with Gen Z steamrolling over them both, we’re fading out of the cultural picture altogether, like Marty McFly’s brother and sister. Continue Reading →

Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs Fixation, an uneven but fascinating psychological drama about a woman who undergoes an unorthodox version of therapy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival) Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Fixation is the kind of film that seems to have been created specifically to play in the late-night slots at film festivals. It's a dark and hallucinatory mix of Pink Floyd: The Wall, Synecdoche, New York and a offering from the Lifetime network, and while I can't exactly say I completely liked it (or could even pass a quiz regarding its particulars), it's presented with enough energy and daring that it's easy to overlook that it doesn’t quite come together in the end. Continue Reading →

Gina Prince-Bythewood is indisputably one of the most interesting directors working in Hollywood today. Since breaking out with the hit sports romance Love & Basketball, her work has ranged from intimate family dramas and love stories (The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights) to action-packed superhero movies (The Old Guard). It took Prince-Bythewood seven years to bring her new film, The Woman King, to the screen. Epic, thrilling, and jam-packed with delightful character beats, The Woman King understandably feels like the culmination of Prince-Bythewood’s work so far. As masterful at shooting stunning fight sequences as she is wringing emotions from intimate dialogue scenes, Prince-Bythewood delivers a crowd-pleaser for the ages. Continue Reading →

It's safe to say that no one necessarily asked for a sequel to Ti West's X, especially six mere months after its release. Not because it was bad, mind you; it was actually quite good, a nifty throwback to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a hefty soupcon of Debbie Does Dallas tossed in the mix. But its tale of a ragtag amateur-porn crew besieged by a murderous old country crone envious of their youthful beauty and raging libidos hardly cried out for a followup. Yet here we are with Pearl, a prequel that dabbles in decidedly different genre homages but might just be the superior slasher of the two. Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

God’s Country shows a place in America rarely described. There’s a vastness, an emptiness to Sandra Guidry’s (Thandiwe Newton) home. She’s moved from New Orleans out to the country. It’s the sort of place where a single man in law enforcement covers hundreds of miles of terrain. A Black professor in an all-white department at a local university, Guidry lives in her house alone on acres of land, prime hunting ground for those hoping to shoot and score. Julian Higgins’s thriller plays out like a matchstick, a burn that erodes everything until there’s nothing left to destroy.   Continue Reading →

On a chilly December night, mobsters in 1920s Chicago have nowhere to go but a tailor’s workshop. Apologies; not a tailor. A cutter. This isn’t like any man you’ve met, not at least while looking for someone to fix your favorite suit. He’ll put together the suit you’ll wear at your office Christmas party, but he may also be the cleverest strategist on the block. And that tension is at the heart of The Outfit, a surprisingly taut, stagelike thriller with some great performances at its center.  Continue Reading →

Whether it’s the cutthroat business world of Succession to the fantasy universe of House of the Dragon, television audiences are here to see the chaos and drama of families living and working with each other. Looking to add to the mix is Fox’s newest drama Monarch, from writer Melissa Hilfers. Continue Reading →

Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo is a 1980 neo-noir starring Richard Gere as a male escort caught up in a murder investigation. The film gave the world Gere as a leading man and the iconic Blondie song “Call Me.” In Showtime’s eight-episode reimagining, Jon Bernthal takes on the role of Julian Kaye (AKA John Henderson), the titular American Gigolo. He's living the high-paced high-society dream until the murder of one of his clients leads to his wrongful incarceration. Continue Reading →