3 Best Movies To Watch After Love Hard (2021)

The temperatures are dropping and the stores are getting crowded, which can only mean one thing...it’s time for another installment of Netflix’s holiday cavity-maker...no, not that one. Noth that one either. That’s right, we’re talking Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star, so grab your peppermint martinis and your fuzziest slippers as we delve into the film that begs the question “Is Vanessa Hudgens using Netflix as a vehicle to kiss cute boys?” Fair warning, there are some spoilers ahead.  Continue Reading →

Adam Randall’s Night Teeth, Netflix’s latest foray into vampire mythmaking, finds the streaming giant betting big on name recognition and slick visuals as blood splatters across Los Angeles. Following Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), a broke college student who picks up two vampires on a mission to take over the city, the film leans on its bright, exciting initial energy. It constructs a world in which vampires and humans have coexisted peacefully for decades, giving enough information to intrigue but not enough to answer all necessary questions.   Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For March, we celebrate the birthday (and the decades-long filmography) of one of America's most pioneering Black filmmakers, Spike Lee. Read the rest of our coverage here. The world still isn’t ready for Spike Lee. In 1986, Black cinema wasn’t in a renaissance. In fact, it had barely been uplifted, except for a few short spaces of time. Oscar Micheaux (often heralded as the first major African-American filmmaker) produced his own works in Chicago during the ’20s and ’30s: He made race films in fact—and did so when filmmaking still ran akin to the Wild West. Like Micheaux’s works, Blaxploitation flicks during the early ‘70s were originally made by Black directors and existed outside the traditional Hollywood system.  But when Black creatives did hold some agency, even during these brief periods, the economics of the Hollywood system would change that. Race films, for instance, were stymied when World War II began and Hollywood absorbed the Black actors who starred in them (like Sidney Poitier). In the '70s, white directors began to take over Blaxploitation films from its Black originators, the form losing its boldness under the guise of stereotypes.  Continue Reading →