Review: Dead to Me (Season 2)

By Spencer Coile 

We’re living in a strange time right now. Yet if these past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that it’s a good time to acknowledge feelings - anxiety, anger, disillusionment - and find ways to channel them into healthier outlets. Personally, I’ve been using this time to catch up on TV I’ve been missing out on. And what I’ve found is that, in their own strange way, these shows have helped me tap into my own complicated emotions - something that may not have happened without the circumstances surrounding it. 

Dead to Me, returning for its second season on Netflix, is exactly the type of show I needed during this time...

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Review: How to Build a Girl

by Chris Feil

Beanie Feldstein has spent her time in coming-of-age comedies sharing the screen, whether in a tandem spotlight in Booksmart or stealing scenes in smaller doses in Lady Bird. With Coky Giedroyc’s early-90s-rock infused How to Build a Girl, she gets her own showcase this time. While the actress makes good on her potential to carry her own vehicle, the film itself offers more modest results.

From Caitlin Moran’s popular and semi-autobiographical novel, Feldstein stars as Johanna Morrigan, a teenage music obsessive and writer with dreams outsized to her family’s low income. After an embarrassing public attempt at sharing her writing, she adopts a brash exterior as Dolly Wilde to pursue a journalism career and sexual liberation. As she is confronted by the ingrained sexism of a male dominated industry, Johanna develops Dolly’s voice into caustic extreme to establish herself, reaping success through persona. But the self-reinvention that was once an escape from her perceived weaknesses quickly becomes a wedge between her passion and her true self.

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Review: Liberté

by Chris Feil

Cineastes missing human touch might find an antidote in Albert Serra’s Liberté, another gallery-ready period piece from the Catalan filmmaker. The film is a barrage of increasingly queasy, bewigged kinky fumblings in the woods with the director audaciously exploring the repetitive nature of lust.

Set just prior to the French Revolution, Liberté opaquely follows a set of libertines who have been banished from the king’s court. Opening on the fringes of a forrest at dusk, the voice of one of them describes the public torture and dismemberment of a prisoner in brutal detail. The story goes beyond the biologically possible, the telling centering as much on the violence as the response from those who witness it. “The crowd enjoyed the show,” he muses, “and you know, I have a taste for these things.” As this grotesque story preambles for the audience, the film's extremity is as much about voyeurism to the act as the act itself.

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Review: Bad Education

by Tony Ruggio

Filmmaker Cory Finley is fast becoming an auteur. That much is clear, and more, when watching his second directorial effort Bad Education, a great film unfortunately relegated to the streaming fringes of HBO. A film this good would’ve been poised to make a bigger splash with Netflix or Amazon, as well as contend for Oscars over Emmys.

Hugh Jackman gives the best performance of his career as Frank Tassone, a Long Island area school district superintendent who in the early aughts, along with district business manager Pamela Gluckin (Allison Janney) and others, embezzled millions of dollars from school funds to support their lavish lifestyles... 

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Review: Extraction

by Tony Ruggio

Chris Hemsworth, good actor and better action hero that he is, has had a helluva time finding material worth his salt outside of Marvel. Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Sam Hargrove and produced by the Russo brothers, it’s a rough-and-tumble action film set mostly in the slums of Bangladesh. His name is Tyler Rake and he’s a mercenary with a troubled past, hired to whisk and wend his way out of dangerous slums with a drug lord’s kidnapped son intact. Where have we seen this before?

Well, never mind the plot, silly and often pedestrian, and focus instead on the action. It's visceral and often well-choreographed... 

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