4 Best Movies To Watch After The Wrath of Becky (2023)

The Spool Staff

She Came to Me

Watch afterA Haunting in Venice (2023), Bullet Train (2022), Five Nights at Freddy's (2023), The Creator (2023), The Killer (2023), The Marvels (2023),
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Seven films into her career as a filmmaker and Rebecca Miller is still a perplexing study. From 1995’s Angela, her symbolic unpacking of a lost childhood (presumably her own) to 2015’s Maggie’s Plan, a symbolic study of a desire for independence (presumably her own), she's made female pain and pleasure her subject without ever settling on a formal approach. Miller is an auteur in the sense that the peculiar combination of confrontational sexuality and highly personal discursiveness seem like the province of someone who both knows exactly what kind of things she wants people to think about, even if she’s never decided the way she wants us to think about them, other than “immediately.” Continue Reading →

The Blackening

SimilarSaw (2004), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Shrek (2001) Shrek the Third (2007)
Watch afterThe Flash (2023),
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StudioMRC,

The Blackening is a horror-satire based on a popular 2018 short film of the same name. It mercilessly skewered the genre conceit that the Black character is always the first to die—a notion so familiar that this year saw the publication of an examination of Black-related horror films entitled The Black Guy Dies First. To do so, it presented a scenario in which all the potential victims are Black. They argue about who among them is truly the Blackest while downplaying their own ethnicity to survive. (“I qualified for the Winter Olympics.”) Continue Reading →

Kandahar

Watch afterBlue Beetle (2023), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Flash (2023),
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Gerard Butler's CIA-agent-on-the-run thriller aims to be more than a power fantasy, but for all its virtues, it doesn't stick that landing. There's an expected cognitive dissonance that comes with watching a man-on-a-mission genre piece set in the Middle East. Whether it's a glorified shooting gallery or a power fantasy where the hero stops just short of bleeding red, white, and blue - one needs to practice a mental limbo to either ignore or maybe be pleasantly surprised with the bare minimum concessions to showing the opposite side's perspectives.  Ric Roman Waugh's expertly mounted, ambitiously scattered Kandahar is, at its core, a Stagecoach riff. One where our leading man, career CIA operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler leveraging his soulful full-time divorced dad essence), has 30 hours to make a mad 400-mile dash across an Afghanistan desert from an impossibly large group of following forces. It's a foolproof premise, yet intriguingly, Kandahar refuses to embrace its conceptual neatness.  Continue Reading →

Influencer

Full disclosure: influencer culture is baffling to me. Though it’s hardly a new thing at this point, I simply do not understand the concept of looking to strangers on the internet (not even celebrities, just regular people!) for advice on everything from what to wear to what to eat to whether or not to vaccinate your children. How does this happen? Where do these people come from? Frankly, it’s a little creepy. Kurtis David Harder explores some of the aspects of it in Influencer, which doesn’t answer those questions, but is a tense, fun little thriller that takes some unexpected turns. Continue Reading →