South & Southwest Fort Wayne Indiana News
My best friend and I are romantic comedy aficionados, so when Emily suggested I watch a new Netflix movie because it’s a classic RomCom, I had to check it out. Set It Up is not breaking any new ground in storytelling, but it is silly and fun and would make a great pairing with some other films in
I got the chance to see an early screening of the new horror film and film festival favorite, Hereditary, followed by a live-streamed Q&A with the director, Ari Aster. When asked about what he was trying to accomplish with the film, he recounted how he wanted to make a movie about trauma and grief
School may be out for the summer, but you can still get in a lesson or two on American history thanks to two recent documentaries: RBG and Bobby Kennedy for President.
RBG documents the life and legal career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It follows the Notorious RBG from her childhood
From Making a Murderer to The Keepers, true crime has become a big genre for Netflix. I happen to be a huge true crime fan, so this week, I’m rounding up an assortment of true crime options on Netflix, along with a book recommendation and two podcasts.
The latest big true crime project on Netflix
Although Mother’s Day is a holiday meant to celebrate the joys of mothering and the impact those who mother have on all of our lives, mothers and motherhood itself can cause conflicting feelings for many people. Whether it’s a mother who feels in over her head, or a person who never had a caring
With its enormous budget and relative freedom, Netflix has an opportunity to support smaller, innovative films that would likely flounder at the theater. With this opportunity, however, comes mixed results. This week, I watched an independent movie I loved and one I was not so sold on.
In 6 Balloons,
It’s a special treat when a scary movie is also a beautiful film. A Quiet Place, a new monster movie from John Krasinski, infuses 90 minutes of uncomfortable suspense with a touching story of familial love. It also features impeccable sound design and outstanding performances from Krasiniski, his
You may have seen an article floating around about the movies on Netflix that are too scary for people to finish. I think a few items on that list are there due to gore and low quality, but I can say that when I saw The Conjuring in the theater (to review it for this paper), I was tempted to walk
Not long ago, I watched Heathers, the 1989 dark comedy about a teen girl (Winona Ryder) whose deranged boyfriend (Christian Slater) keeps killing their classmates and making it look like suicide. Whereas Heathers, now a cult classic, is bitingly funny and a little too “very” (in the words of the
Some movies I watch and forget. Others make me come home and hit Google. For example, the latest Marvel film, Black Panther, had me looking into Afrofuturism, the fusion of sci-fi, fantasy, speculative fiction and afrocentrism that made Black Panther seem so unique in the superhero genre.
In Black
In 2016, I got to visit The Winchester Mystery House. It was a long-time dream to go see Sarah Winchester’s 160 room mansion outside of San Jose, California, and it far exceeded my expectations. Winchester was the heir to her husband’s wealth earned from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company as
My freshman year of college, a friend and I dressed as Nancy Kerrigan (me) and Tonya Harding (Kathleen) for Halloween. We rollerbladed around campus and parodied a “major”, often-satirized news story from our youth. After watching I, Tonya, I feel like I owe Tonya Harding a bit of an apology.
With the weather turning colder, this month is the perfect time to bundle up and enjoy a good movie. This week, I weigh an option for the theater, a rental and a holiday classic in re-release.
In The Tribes of Palos Verdes, Phil (Justin Kirk) and Sandy Mason (Jennifer Garner) move to Palos Verdes,
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) grows so frustrated with the police’s lack of progress toward solving her daughter, Angela’s, brutal murder that she buys three billboards just outside of the small town she lives in and posts a blunt message asking
It is not an easy task to create a film about young people that is funny and imaginative while also doing justice to the deep and complicated emotions around making and keeping friends and navigating family dynamics. Wonder delivers on all these elements while also featuring a touching, but not overly-simplified
I normally find the collaboration between the Coen Brothers and George Clooney at least charming, even when the result is lackluster. Their latest film, Suburbicon, however, is so aggressively bad that it was hard to find any redeeming qualities.
Suburbicon is set in the 1950s in Suburbicon, an everytown
Happy Death Day can easily be described as Groundhog Day meets Scream, and at the story’s end it acknowledges its similarity to the Bill Murray comedy, but the movie does not suffer from a lack of creativity. Instead, it adeptly puts a funny, thrilling spin on familiar plots.
In Happy Death Day,
Battle of the Sexes dramatizes the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and their fight for more equal pay for women in professional tennis, leading up to the famous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). When the
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is sure to polarize audiences. Although it looks like a home invasion thriller, the film uses allegory and gore to explore an issue both ancient and timely. I cannot fully express my take on the film without discussing the plot and its interpretation, so if you do not
In a cultural climate fraught with anger, many artists have turned to imagining new versions of the Civil War to work through the issues that face us (i.e. American War or HBO’s Confederate). Bushwick follows Lucy (Brittany Snow) and Stupe (Dave Bautista) as they try to make it to safety and save
Since her days as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, I have been a fan of Aubrey Plaza’s dark, very dry sense of humor and subtle character work. I’ve enjoyed seeing her in more movies over the past few years, even as they often seem like different shades of the same character. In Ingrid Goes
When I was a kid, I collected dolls with my mother. I loved them, but my brother thought they were creepy, which made me love them just a just a little more. I am not afraid of dolls, but demons really scare me. Annabelle: Creation tells the origin story of the evil doll using many of the same scare
If grief is love with no place to go, then A Ghost Story is a beautiful, self-indulgent, flawed portrait of one man’s love for his wife and his home. A Ghost Story delivers plenty of haunting images, but is so slow and so pretentious, I wanted to walk out a couple of times.
The film focuses on C
It has become a trope for characters in films and television shows to want their lives to play out like romantic comedies (i.e. Mindy on The Mindy Project). It is less common for someone to turn their own love story into a romantic comedy, especially when the result is sweet, hilarious and genuinely
At the end of The Beguiled, as I was thinking, “what did I just watch?”
I heard a man mutter, “That’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”
Clearly, this latest film from Sofia Coppola, which earned her Best Director at Cannes, is not going to satisfy everyone. I found it, well, beguiling. It