If you’ve seen Us, the sophomore directorial effort from Jordan Peele, you know that you haven’t really seen Us until you’ve seen it more than once. Unlike the complex-yet-accessible themes of Get Out, Peele’s thrilling and thought-provoking directorial debut, Us is not interested in providing its audience with straightforward answers, taking a more psychoanalytical approach […]
I’ve been struggling with how to review Green Book, which I wanted to love, but wound up leaving me with some pretty complicated feelings, not all of them good. It’s currently sitting at 82% on Rotten Tomatoes (with a 94% audience approval rating), with most critics praising the powerful performances of its two leads and […]
Within the first few minutes of The Hate U Give, I was crying. The scene is a familiar one for Black families in America. Two parents sit with their pre-adolescent children at the kitchen table. As the mother jiggles a baby on her lap, her eyes filled with love and concern, the father proceeds, gently but firmly, […]
The thing with movies “about racism” is that racism is such a sprawling, leviathan of a topic that a movie “about racism” can really be just about anything. I’ve seen three movies “about racism” by Black filmmakers this summer, each slotting into a different genre, and each of them came at the topic of racism […]
Well, here we are. After walking this Earth for thirty-something years having never seen (or even heard all that much about) a single ALIEN movie, I’ve finally come to the last one in my watch-through, 2017’s Alien: Covenant. Maybe the future will give us more ALIEN movies — and if so, you can rest assured I’ll […]
Friends, I’ve done it. I’ve watched my way through two decades worth of ALIEN movies (it’s not that impressive; there’s only four) and have caught up to the modern prequels. Time to see what exactly was so compelling about this premise that Ridley Scott felt the need to revisit it 33 years after making the original. […]
So we’ve come to the last Alien movie in the chronology. There were two more movies made after this, but they’re both prequels to the original, so as of right now, this one still stands as the final chapter in the Ripley saga. Is that because it gives the series a satisfying ending? Or is it just […]
If you missed the first two installments in this series, you can catch up here: Lauren (finally) watches: ALIEN Lauren (finally) watches: ALIENS Now that I’ve made it through the first two films in the Alien franchise, it’s time for Alien³, which carries the distinction of having the lowest rating of the series on Rotten Tomatoes. […]
Welcome back for the second installment in my journey through the Alien franchise. In case you missed part one, I’ve somehow managed to go my entire life without seeing a single Alien film, despite being born in the ’80s and loving science fiction basically from the womb. I even managed to remain mostly unspoiled. I knew a few things […]
A few years back, I was chatting with a guy I’d just met a few hours earlier at a writing conference, and he told me that he bet he could guess my favorite movie. I told him to give it a whirl — after all, most of the discussion at writing conferences is based around […]