Month: January 2024
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Cigarette Girl review: Indonesian TV series
Cigarette Girl (Gadis Kretek) comes from Indonesia. Two generations of interrelated people are set in the world of spiced and flavored cigarette making. Some of them were small entrepreneurs, some were wealthy. Part of the story happens in the 1960s and part is in the 2000s. The series features romance, danger, secrets, women’s struggles and…
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Return to Seoul review: drama about finding yourself and your roots
Return to Seoul is an intense, sometimes difficult, drama about a Korean adoptee. Raised by French parents, she returns to Korea for the first time at age 25. For the next several years in the woman’s life we watch her struggle to find her roots and her birth parents. Park Ji-min stars. There are spoilers…
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Dead Lucky review: Australian police mini-series
Dead Lucky stars Rachel Griffiths in a police drama set in Sydney, Australia. It’s a story of only 4 episodes. It manages to cram a lot of story in those 4 episodes with subplots, multiple characters and suspects, and small but interesting relationship side dramas. This series, created and written by Ellie Beaumont and Drew…
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You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment
You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment is a 4 part documentary detailing an experiment with 20+ sets of identical twins. In an 8 week experiment, the twins ate different diets – one vegan, one omnivore. They did all sorts of tests and exercises and took a look at the end to see what…
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Miranda’s Victim review: the victim behind your Miranda rights
Miranda’s Victim is a fascinating story about a legal precedent established in 1966 called the Miranda warning. The story is told from the victim’s point of view. Abigail Breslin plays the victim of a rape (trigger warning, folks) by a man named Ernesto Miranda (Sebastian Quinn). The legal cases that followed the victim’s decision to…
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Lift review: heist movie with Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Lift is an attempt at the heist movie using all the tricks and techniques you’ve seen in several outstanding heist movies before. Lift doesn’t come up to that high quality standard, but it has an interesting cast including Gugu Mbatha-Raw. It’s good enough for a night on the couch with a bag of chips if…
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Queen Bees review: Why, yes, elders rock
Queen Bees is a story about how it’s never too late to make new friends and it’s never too late to fall in love. Set in a retirement home with a great cast of elders, it’s a touch of mean girls combined with a romcom. As the film says, “It’s like mean girls in Medic…
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Queenpins review: comedy based on a true story
Queenpins is a lighthearted comedic telling of a story based on fact. Two women made millions of dollars selling coupons that they obtained free (okay, they stole them). A similar thing really happened, but I doubt if the real life version of the story was anywhere near as funny as this film.
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Foe review: I mean, what?
Foe is set in 2065. The earth is burned to a crisp. Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) live in an old house on a dried up farm. Late one night Terrance (Aaron Pierre) knocks on their door. He says he’s from the government and wants to recruit Junior to work for a year…
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An Amish Murder review: Neve Campbell plays a cop
An Amish Murder stars Neve Campbell as a small town chief of police. She was uniquely qualified for the job because she’d grown up Amish in the town and left her community years ago. She went away and came back later as a police officer. Her family still lived in the area, but none of…