Bird Box Barcelona
SimilarA Christmas Carol (1938), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Apt Pupil (1998), Chopper (2000), Die Hard (1988), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Heaven Is for Real (2014), I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016),
Jackie Brown (1997) Kiss the Girls (1997),
Live and Let Die (1973) Love and Honor (2006), Man on Fire (2004), Mystic River (2003),
Rebecca (1940) Shaft (2000) Starship Troopers (1997), Swimming Pool (2003), The 39 Steps (1935), The Bone Collector (1999), The Handmaid's Tale (1990),
The Name of the Rose (1986) The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Road (2009), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Wild at Heart (1990),
Okay, fine, Bird Box Barcelona isn’t exactly a sequel. It’s more of a continuation, as Netflix gets a belated start on making a franchise out of 2018’s Bird Box, a perfectly fine but unremarkable film that inexplicably became a smash hit. Smash or not, five years is a long time, so you might need a refresher course. Much of Earth’s population has been decimated by malevolent beings with visages so emotionally overwhelming that anyone who looks at them immediately commits suicide, and the survivors are forced to navigate what’s left of the world with their eyes covered, lest they see whatever “they” are. That’s really all you need to remember. Continue Reading →
The Batman
Watch afterDoctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Morbius (2022), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021),
The opening shot of Matt Reeves' The Batman evokes, if nothing else, the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation: we peer, ominously, through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur, looking at a young boy in a red ninja outfit playing with his father in a Gotham penthouse. While this isn't a flashback to young Bruce Wayne -- rather, we see Gotham's tough-on-crime Mayor Mitchell and his soon-to-be-orphaned boy -- the evocation is undeniable. By the time The Batman's three hours whiz past you, we'll have a similarly probing look into Bruce Wayne himself: what he prioritizes, what drives him, what he thinks he's doing for the city as Batman and what he realizes he should be doing. And it's that texture, that sense of interiority, that makes The Batman one of the best films of the year thus far, and one of the most fascinating cinematic adventures the character has to offer. Continue Reading →
The Wilds
There are two moments in The Wilds that so succinctly summarize the show’s tone, we have just have to start with them. In the first episode, Leah Rilke (Sarah Pidgeon) barrels directly down the lens of the camera and declares the life of a teenage girl in America in the 21st Century to be literal hell as if in direct conversation with the audience. Then, later in the series, Rachel Reid (Reign Edwards) searches for the word melodrama, applying it to the actions of her fellow island isolated survivors. And that’s The Wilds for you. Tremendously unsubtle and one-hundred percent aware of it. It also happens to be very good. Continue Reading →