I am obsessed with this book! It perfectly encapsulates what it’s like to grow up online and be caught in the lifelong search for connection while capturing the changing culture and social media of the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Harriet Gibsone manages to write about all the embarrassing and cringeworthy stuff we do and think and…
Review: Ghosted
“We only have one life and you are too afraid to live it.” Directed by Dexter Fletcher (Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman) and written by Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and Tom Holland-era Spider-Man writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, Ghosted is more action-packed than romantic-comedy, but it takes its shot at both anyway. Needy farmer Cole Turner (Chris Evans) and…
Killing Eve’s Tragic Love Story
Also featured on Medium. Contains spoilers for Killing Eve Season 4 finale. Killing Eve’s finale was a betrayal of what made the series so remarkable in the first place. Television producer Sally Woodward-Gentle, who optioned Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle in 2014, said: “The notion of a female assassin was not unique,” but Jennings’ take was “fresh, intelligent, and tonally…
Review: ‘Umma’ Has Compelling Ideas but Falls Short Due to a Restrained and Disjointed Script
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…