Selena + Chef
When I reviewed season one of Selena + Chef this past August, I ended on the note of “I dare not say I hope there’s a season two (because that would mean a longer time for all of us in quarantine), but if we have to spend several more months cooking at home, we might as well do it with Selena.” Little did I know that in January of 2021 the pandemic would still be a raging mess, paving the way for the second season of Selena + Chef. Rather than looking at it like the meal you didn’t order arriving at your table (you know, back when people ate in restaurants), it’s more like a surprise dessert you didn’t know you wanted, because once you dig into season two of Selena + Chef, you won’t be able to resist the charm Selena Gomez and her jovial quarantine pod cooking with chef friends. Continue Reading →
Search Party
We talk with the series co-creator, writer and director about finding the balance between darkness and comedy.
When it first debuted in 2016, Search Party was often compared to Girls and Broad City, mostly because all those three shows deal with the same topics of millennials and hipster culture. But to solely focus on that element will dismiss the excellent craft and surprises that co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter has shown throughout four seasons. After all, this is a show like no other on TV, always radically reinventing itself to keep things fresh.
Season 4 — whose first three episodes were just released on HBO Max last Thursday — is no exception, finding new angles in the story while still retaining what makes the show such a delight in the first place. The only difference is, where the three previous seasons lean more towards the comedic side of the story and keep the darkness secondary, season 4 decides to do the opposite: going full in on the psychological horror of the characters’ journey by taking references from captivity dramas like Room and Misery to an unsettling effect. Continue Reading →
Greenland
Nothing heals a broken marriage like the end of the world. That’s one of the takeaways from Greenland, a disaster movie about a massive comet that has Earth, and Gerard Butler, in its crosshairs. Butler plays John Garrity, a structural engineer who finds his marriage to Allison (Morena Baccarin) falling apart, just like the giant comet (named Clarke) that’s breaking up into smaller pieces so it can spread its damage all over the planet before its big chunk hits, creating a mass extinction event. Continue Reading →
Wonder Woman
Sixty-six years after she slew Ares, the God of War, and cleared the decks for humankind to fix their proverbial shit and end World War I, Diana Prince, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), has settled into a new life in Washington, DC. Her apartment, filled with reminders of the “Great War” and the man she loved ever so briefly, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), suggests that while she is alive, she hasn’t truly lived in some time. Continue Reading →
Let Them All Talk
SimilarEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004),
Steven Soderbergh may be best known for his remake of Ocean’s Eleven, a commercial hit featuring a cast of dashing male stars (and Julia Roberts). Who needs eleven when you’ve got Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen aboard a real-life ocean liner? In Soderbergh’s newest, Let Them All Talk, he embarks on a return trip to his indie filmmaking roots, bringing along celebrity pals and a few tricks of the trade he’s learned in his prolific career. Continue Reading →