My reviewing of Turning Red has to, by the sheer presence of its theming, contain caveats. It’s a movie that has a heavy focus on periods and mother-daughter conflicts during adolescence. As an adult male reviewer, it’s not my place to speculate on how true to life this movie is. I’ve simply not grown up as a teenage girl.
Given recent movie adaptation trends, Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark has a lot of comparisons. Even attempting to evaluate it outside of context is semi-impossible because of its similarities.
Encanto is peak cinema. That’s a hot take, but it’s hard to argue against a movie made with this level of care, skill, and storytelling effort.
The House is an interpretive art piece. The creators had a point to make, and a message to send—but I’ve yet to figure out what that message was.
Watching The Wheel of Time is a real-time game of deciding whether the show will do something cool, or rote and overplayed.
I’d not read anything by T. Kingfisher before this novel, but given the grace of the prose, The Hollow Places will not be the last. She’s shown her sureness within both this subgenre and in the art of simply telling a good story.
To call Circle an intense film is to undersell it. Utilizing almost only a single location, this death game story touches upon politics, human nature, mercy, and bigotry. It uses a very simple premise and plays it straight and is one of the best-paced films I’ve seen in a long time.
Calling Harrow Lake a disappointment is perhaps too strong a phrase, but the book does fail to deliver in a few key aspects. There was a missing ingredient, a piece withheld, that made it appear mismanaged.
Horrid is a book about emotions more than anything else. Its plot, its ending, its momentum are all in service of getting across big emotional moments.
Trese has an awful first episode. It’s such an underwhelming piece of animated storytelling in almost every regard. I’m probably not even going to watch three episodes for a full review.
For better and not for the worst, The Ghost and Molly McGee is basically what you’d expect it to be. The first episode—which is all I’ve seen of it—is in the standard style of episodic comedy. But that’s not a complaint.
Finally, I got to see Spider-Man: Far from Home after nearly two years. It had been a missing piece in my viewing of the MCU—and I’d been really wanting to see it that entire time.
