821 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 21)

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

[Editor's Note: A prior version of this review contained inaccuracies about the film's characters/content and otherwise did not need the editorial standards of the site. After further consideration, and justifiable feedback from readers, the editorial team at The Spool have chosen to retract this review. We deeply regret the error, and apologize to anyone affected.] Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival. Continue Reading →

With When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg directs Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard to strong turns as a mother-son duo united by self-obsession. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World reminds me of Alex Ross Perry and Noah Baumbach’s early work. Its dialogue is witty and often cringe-inducing. Its characters are deeply flawed, unlikable people out to hurt each other. Given that Eisenberg worked with Baumbach on The Squid and the Whale, the similarities make sense.  Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack weave effortlessly through a sizzling, intimate two-hander about the therapeutic nature of sex work. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) There’s a moment early on in Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in which one of its leads says to the other, “Desires are never mundane.” It’s a simple line, but one that defines the film and the relationship at its core well; Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) desires a new experience and Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) exists to fulfill that desire. Their interactions are awkward at first, as with any arrangement between a customer and someone providing a new service, but gradually shift with time and further interaction.  Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

A game cast can't save Abi Damaris Corbin's misguided, manipulative account of a real-life tragedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) In a long line of recent movies that are desperate to say something important about our society today, 892 takes an ideologically muddled approach to racial and social politics. Abi Damaris Corbin's film functions similarly in its structure and tone to a few other past Sundance offerings like Fran Kranz’s Mass and Gustav Möller’s The Guilty, a lot of it stemming from the use of a single location for the majority of the action. Unfortunately, 892 is the weakest of these movies, a limp social-issue thriller that suffers from an uncontrolled eagerness to say everything all at once. Continue Reading →

Kogonada's sci-fi followup to Columbus is just as mournful and architecturally-minded as its predecessor. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) Science fiction is a genre that, when handled with care, can wield the ability to explore intimate parts of life through narratives that explore the unknown. Kogonada’s sophomore effort, After Yang, seamlessly blends common sci-fi components with a narrative deeply rooted in humanism, while looking beyond the typical action-packed tropes that make up much of the genre, to paint a poignant portrait of the complexity of human nature.  Continue Reading →

The latest from oddball extraordinaire Riley Stearns is a sci-fi curio about scrambling to find your will to live. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) Writer/director Riley Stearns introduces the viewer to the offbeat world of Dual through something of a Hunger Games or Twilight Zone knock-off, with a bloody duel between two men who look exactly the same as an audience watches. It’s a smart and captivating start, one flooded with Sterns’ usual dark sense of humor, and one that introduces the core premise succinctly: in a world where you and your double both want to live, how willing and able are you to survive a duel to the death?  Continue Reading →

Into every generation, a teen horror drama is born: one series in all the media landscape; a chosen show. It alone will wield the quips and metaphors needed to fight the supernatural villains, social pressures, and other various youthful troubles. To stop the spread of standard high school melodramas and the swell of their number. It is...the newest supernatural young adult T.V. series. Continue Reading →

While there are a lot of autistic characters in pop culture, there’s very little variety to be found. The eclectic personalities, genders, ambitions, and every other trait imaginable that exists in actual clusters of autistic individuals is absent in general pop culture. Instead, we’re either super-geniuses who function more like X-Men or childlike figures who need a neurotypical person to rescue them. If you were to go by mainstream media, autistic people were like M&Ms circa 1964: we only come in two flavors.  Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

The sleeper hit of 2022 (so far) has undoubtedly been Showtime’s Yellowjackets, a grisly, enthralling tale of a 1990’s all-girls high school soccer team forced to survive the Ontario wilderness after a plane crash, it hit audiences like a bolt of lightning. The simplest way to describe it is “LOST meets Alive meets Lord of the Flies with Riot Grrl energy” - but even that does a disservice to the stunning character development, the devolution into savagery—a particular kind of savagery that only young women are capable of—and the relentless pacing that creates as many questions as it answers. The brilliance of Yellowjackets is that you know these girls will descend into madness, and yet you come to love them knowing the ritualistic cannibalism that awaits them. Yes, there is cannibalism, but funnily it becomes the least interesting part of Yellowjackets as the first season progresses.  Continue Reading →

Say what you will about Apple TV’s Servant, but give it credit for its audacity. We’re three seasons in, and the series, executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, remains as clear as mud as to both what’s happening, and to where it’s all going to lead. Not since Twin Peaks has a TV show been so dedicated to being completely incomprehensible. Watching it is like being led down one path, only to be violently jerked toward another. “No, it’s not about that, you silly goose,” it says. “It’s about this.” Until it becomes about something else. Season 3 throws less things at the wall to see what sticks, but things remain frustratingly opaque. Continue Reading →

Previous seasons of Netflix’s Ozark followed Martin and Wendy Byrde’s (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) quest to survive death and prove their family’s worth to the cartel and their violent rivals. Now, in the fourth and final season, the Byrdes must figure out if they can survive without their dark, criminal lives. They sacrificed a lot to get to the top—but what would they sacrifice to stay there? Thanks to this ask and its answers, Ozark Season 4 Part 1 is slow-burn suspense at its finest, with the Byrde’s maneuvering to stay on top, no matter the personal costs.  Continue Reading →

With the meteoric popularity of Yellowjackets, a new installment of the Scream franchise, and the revival of shows like Saved by the Bell and The Babysitters Club, 90’s nostalgia is in full swing. It was only a matter of time before the true entertainment staple of the era made a comeback as well. I’m talking of course about the humble made-for-tv movie. The original TV movies of the 80’s and 90’s came in four basic flavors: teen morality play, hardboiled sleaze, young women being kidnapped/stalked/unalived, and Stephen King. The very best made-for-tv movies had overlap between the categories, with classics like Cyber Seduction, A Friend To Die For: Death of a Cheerleader, and No One Would Tell fueling the Monday morning water cooler roundups.  Continue Reading →

It seems like every TV show is set in Manhattan. Be it Friends, Sex & the City, or Seinfeld, Manhattan is the de facto environs for our favorite television. Somebody Somewhere, HBO’s latest series from Hannah Bos (High Maintenance) and Paul Thureen, keeps the Manhattan setting, but swaps out the Hudson and East Rivers for the Kansas and Big Blue Rivers.  And just like the Little Apple seems like an inverse of the Big, this new show is a slice of lives drastically different from the hip and connected characters of Girls or And Just Like That....  Continue Reading →