Still Up
SimilarNed's Declassified School Survival Guide,
Night owls and insomniacs will tell you it's special being awake while most of your family, friends, and community slumber. How sometimes weightless and creative you can feel when everyone else strives for that healthy rest. They’ll also often tell you how lonely and frustrating it can be. Wandering your home or the world outside all alone because their bodies’ circadian rhythm actually makes sense. Continue Reading →
Extrapolations
SimilarMurder Most Horrid, Pope John Paul II, Santa Evita, The Gold Robbers, Three Days of Christmas, White House Plumbers,
Watch afterCitadel, Severance, Succession,
Ted Lasso The Big Bang Theory, The Night Agent,
Much of the pre-release buzz about AppleTV+’s new original series Extrapolations was concerned with its potential to be preachy. In much the same way this writer doesn’t mind a bit of emotional manipulation in entertainment, I can be fine with preachiness. Some things are worth preaching about. Extrapolations’ flaw isn’t that it has a soapbox and is using it. It’s that it’s such a mess. Continue Reading →
The Recruit
From The Flight Attendant to The Rookie, there’s no shortage of comedy action series, flipping the script of formulaic procedurals and infusing a dose of relatable, if often quirky, characters as leads. Netflix looks to add to the roster with the new series The Recruit, which follows a dashing but stumbly new CIA lawyer Owen (Noah Centineo), as he falls deeper into internal espionage. While The Recruit gets muddled with an unbalanced tone, Centineo jumps in with enough charm and comedy to keep viewers coming back. Continue Reading →
Wednesday
SimilarKomi Can't Communicate, Stand Up!!, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Jenna Ortega is having quite the year. Between the success of Ti West’s brilliant slasher X and leading the new Scream franchise, she’s poised to become our next reigning Queen of Creepy. This looks even more likely now as she brings the definitive goth teen to life in Netflix’s Wednesday, helmed by Tim Burton. Continue Reading →
The English
SimilarMore than Blue: The Series, Queen Cleopatra, Star and Sky: Star in My Mind, World War II: When Lions Roared,
“Out there, back then…” That’s when The English takes place. “And in between…I wanted to kill a man for the murder of my child. You wanted back your land, stolen from you.” That is what The English is about. Continue Reading →
The Peripheral
SimilarFate/Apocrypha,
Pride and Prejudice Tales from the Neverending Story, The Family Game, The Strain,
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 →
The Patient
The Patient’s Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carrell) is a man of ritual. One can tell it from how he cuts his fruit, interacts with clients, and even walks through his home. The deliberate editing from Amanda Pollack and Daniel A. Valverde in the pilot help emphasize this point. Ritual upon ritual surrounds him. Continue Reading →
Exterminate All the Brutes
StudioHBO Documentary Films,
Following on from his work on I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck takes a holistic look at imperialism, the construction of whiteness, and how we form narratives about the violence of the past in HBO's four-part documentary series Exterminate All The Brutes. In doing so, Peck covers a lot of ground, moving from genocides to scientific racism to colonization and more, explicating the links between them all. He does a lot of brilliant work here, but the series doesn’t quite have the precision or focus to make it great. Continue Reading →