Korean immigrant Amanda (Sandra Oh) and her homeschooled daughter Chrissy (Atypical’s Fivel Stewart) live a quiet life on a rural farm beekeeping and selling honey. They live without modern technology as Amanda claims to be “allergic” to electricity, and therefore rely on local shop owner and friend Danny (Dermot Mulroney) to sell their honey. Amanda is…
Review: ‘Night’s End’ is Saved by An Entertaining Final Act
Night’s End, the latest from Jennifer Reeder (Knives and Skin), written by American playwright Brett Neveu, follows Ken Barber (Geno Walker), a divorced dad suffering from anxiety and agoraphobia, who finds himself in a haunted apartment. The first act builds a picture of Ken’s life, including his daily routine: he wakes up counting backwards from 10…
Review: ‘The Requin’ Loses Human Story of Survival Message to Laughably Bad CG Sharks
I’m not a fan of Shark films. There’s nothing particularly wrong with them — they’re just not for me. I find them quite boring and predictable, the sort of qualities I much prefer to be in my beloved slasher flicks. I watched The Requin (which means “shark” in French) purely because of Alicia Silverstone, but she delivered what…
Review: ‘The Fallout’ is an Intimate Character Study of Life After Trauma
The opening of Megan Park’s feature-length directorial debut, The Fallout, which follows the aftermath of a school shooting, felt reminiscent of 2018’s Vox Lux, in that abrupt gunfire suddenly destroys what began as a normal day. Unlike Vox Lux, however, we don’t see anything, we just hear it. It’s an inciting incident that won’t sit well with everyone,…
Book Review: The Brightsiders
The Brightsiders has the worst opening lines to a book that I’ve ever read — so much so that I closed my kindle book. I was prepared for it to be YA, but wow. I picked this up again because I noticed it was included in my Audible membership, so I thought I’d see if I…
Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry
Lessons in Chemistry tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a female chemist in the ’60s who finds herself single, pregnant, and fired from her lab job. She ends up hosting a cooking show while raising her young daughter in order to make ends meet. Throughout her life, she has remained headstrong against setbacks and sexism and, especially…
Book Review: Good As Dead
After a hit-and-run accident leaves Holly injured and her husband dead, a fixer for a high-powered guilty party offers Holly and her daughter a life of luxury in exchange for silence. Told from alternating points of view, Susan Walter’s Good As Dead explores how an unlikely group of people are bound to one another by a…
Book Review: How to Kill Your Family
How to Kill Your Family sounded like exactly my thing because I love being in the mind of a sociopath/psychopath. I love unreliable and unlikeable narrators, as well as plots centring on murder and revenge. The book started off strong as it introduced us to our central character, Grace, and to her circumstance, but it didn’t take…
Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin
Actress Elizabeth “Betty” Gilpin (GLOW, The Hunt) has written a memoir about her time in the troubled teen industry called ‘Stolen,’ which I only learnt about yesterday. This morning I purchased the audiobook and listened to the entire thing. At 15, Elizabeth was an honour student, a state ranked swimmer, and a rising soccer star, but…
Legally Blonde at 20
Legally Blonde was released in the US on July 13th, 2001, and in the UK on October 26th, 2001. Even after 20 years, Legally Blonde’s feminist legacy still perseveres in empowering women by dismantling the blonde stereotype through a strong female character. In 2017, Reese Witherspoon told the Wall Street Journal, “At least once a week I have…