Jourdain Searles

Though a bit shaky and mysterious at times, this story lands beautifully.

Despite the best efforts of the directors, Hell of a Summer just isn’t scary. Bryk and Wolfhard know how to tell jokes, but struggle with establishing a truly creepy atmosphere.

Opting for very few close-ups, Hosoda mistakes a large scope for compelling images and achieved something fans never thought possible: he’s made a film that looks generic.

It’s a loud, colorful, frantic and pitch black horror comedy about identity that mercilessly critiques modern anxiety about desirability and success.

None of it adds up to a coherent thesis on love or sex, but it doesn’t really need to. And there’s something thrilling about Dunham’s refusal to give her film a clear social intent. Much like Sarah Jo’s sexual dalliances, Sharp Stick is ultimately about the excitement of exploration.

Ultimately, The American Society of Magical Negroes is a film bogged down by its filmmaker’s inability to make the central joke work. The film simply is what it is satirizing: way too concerned with how white people perceive Blackness to the detriment of every single Black character in the film.

Prism doesn’t provide us with easy answers, because it can’t. This is something that we all must confront together, and that confrontation is on-going.

The Epstein conspiracy here is ultimately merely an excuse for taboo fetish play, culminating in a bloody finale that any viewer could see from a mile away. In the end, Nekrasova is too preoccupied with cultural relevance to actually craft a compelling film.

In the end, Antebellum is undone by a lack of empathy and emotion. It has no real perspective on the past and thus fails to make any real impact on the present.