Once The Haunting of Bly Manor’s narrator (Carla Gugino) has finished her long, spooky story, a listener approaches her with some edits. “I liked your story,” she says. “But I think you set it up wrong. You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story.” It’s a moment that reads as a wink from creator Mike Flanagan to fans of his first horror-anthology installment, 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House. That series used Shirley Jackson’s novel as a springboard for exploring familial grief, aided by a healthy dose of gothic horror—it’s set at a creepy mansion and […]
Netflixs
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Netflix’s new mystery movie, Enola Holmes, showcases the full breadth of Millie Bobby Brown’s talents with one of the entertainment industry’s time-honored traditions: Letting her do battle against the lung-crushing oppression of a corset. From the moment Brown crushed a Coke can with her brain as Eleven in Stranger Things, it was obvious she was going places. But the young actress’s fascinating potential could only be revealed with time and a proper starring role. (And her feature debut, a supporting role in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, did not quite meet that mark.) Enter Enola Holmes, a delightful adventure that premiered […]
In the history of love stories, few have been as strange and unlikely as the one depicted in My Octopus Teacher. Netflix’s first original South African feature documentary concerns the wholly unexpected, and ostensibly transformative, affair struck between Craig Foster, a South African filmmaker, and an amphibious mollusk that he discovered in the Atlantic Ocean near the small seaside bungalow he frequented as a kid. It’s a relationship that transcends all boundaries, and serves as a quietly profound (and crazy) portrait of the bonds we share with everything in our environment—even if its cinematic depiction is sometimes far from perfect. Debuting […]
What is it about space? The black, starry void is a singularly vexing backdrop; it evokes endless possibility and terrifying nothingness all at once. We love to watch celebrities scream in space, contemplate fictional long-lost loved ones in space, and, of course, mull the very real existential doom that faces our planet in space. Enter Netflix’s Away—a gripping drama that embraces this galaxy of thematic potential while also grounding its action in reality. Oh, and its lead is a powerful, multi-faceted Hilary Swank—whose tenacity brings the show’s stakes to life in visceral, at times unsettling ways. In other words: If ya […]
Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, available on Netflix from September 9, has been met with the ire of the religious right, as well as a wider online public that believes that the film sexualizes children. To be fair, the poster Netflix initially chose to promote the French film, which won the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance in 2019, was a grossly inappropriate choice—one that decontextualized a scene from the film in order to promote a movie about the complexities of growing up in both modest and modern cultures at once. Netflix has taken the image down but, despite outcry, is continuing with […]
A portrait of the way in which our lives are shaped not only by our parents and the examples they set—and values they instill—but by the traumatic events we’re forced to endure, Father Soldier Son is a quietly incisive and moving Netflix documentary about a military family beset by hardship. Prepare to cry more than once before its opening credits roll, and then make sure to have tissues at the ready for the rest of its intimate, unaffected runtime. Directed and produced by Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis, Father Soldier Son (now streaming) spends ten years with the Eisch clan, comprised […]
People might debate whether The Old Guard is a superhero movie, what with its blessed existence outside the Marvel-DC dick-measuring contest and not a swatch of spandex to be found. To me, the film is as if the Avengers and the Justice League met up with the Fantastic Four and teamed up with the X-Men. It did the thing the superheroes movies are supposed to do—present a world where the best among us fight for what’s right—but which none had done before: present a world that feels like my own. The first time it’s acknowledged that the characters Joe (Marwan Kenzari) […]
Watching Dark’s third and final season is like clutching the hand of a person who’s dangling from a helicopter over a vast canyon—you’re just holding on for dear life, desperate to maintain your grip on the wild situation. Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar’s German-language series has always been a masterpiece of time-travel intricacy, and that continues to be true with its closing eight-episode run (premiering Saturday, June 27), which keeps tying itself in temporal knots—heck, everyone even calls their interconnected circumstances “The Knot”—while simultaneously adding a new mind-melting complication to the mix: the multiverse! For a show about existential grief […]
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: Everyone watching Netflix is horny. Floor Is Lava, a thing that exists. 30 years later, Splash Mountain is finally not racist! Hanging at the LGBTQ Community with Britney Spears. The Chicks making everyone angry again. Hell yeah. In the show The Floor Is Lava, the floor is lava. That’s it. That’s the show. It’s just like in the game so many of us played […]
There are few actors as accomplished, or as effortlessly cool, as Delroy Lindo, who for more than three decades has brought a commanding intensity, sharp humor and easygoing magnetism to a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. That charisma is once again on grand display in Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee’s Vietnam War film about four vets—played by Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis—who return to their former battleground to recover both the remains of their dearly departed comrade Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and the millions in gold bars that they buried decades earlier. With its […]
This post contains spoilers for Dead to Me Season 2. Maybe it’s the surreality of, well, everything lately—or maybe it’s just aged like the fine wines all of its characters toss back by the bottle. Whatever the reason, Dead to Me Season 2 hits even better than Season 1—fighting off a sophomore slump with a fresh batch of twists, dramatic ironies, and, most importantly, some more Christina Applegate angsting out to metal. Perhaps this season’s smartest move, however, is a trope pulled straight out of Soapy Dramas 101: Bringing James Marsden back to play his own twin. Series creator Liz Feldman […]
The best of the new Netflix show The Eddy, about an eponymous jazz club and its multicultural house band in Paris, is not at all in Whiplash and La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s first two episodes (he is also an executive producer of the series, along with writer Jack Thorne and lead actor Andre Holland). Instead, the show’s brief streak of brilliance can be found in Divines director Houda Benyamina’s following two episodes. It’s Benyamina, and not Chazelle, who understands what jazz can and should do, and is able to advance the show well beyond its tedious crime subplot and […]