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This film is based on a play that premiered in 1968. It was such a success that it was adapted into a film in 1970. That play was revived on Broadway in 2018, marking the 50th anniversary. That 2018 version won Best Revival of a Play at the 73rd Tony Awards. This 2020 entry is an adaptation of that revival, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1970 film as well. Joe Mantello directed the Broadway revival. He also directs this film, retaining the entire 2018 cast. The play and film were about the lives of a group of gay men. At this point, this production is about the past lives of a group of gay men. Yet, despite being about lives 50 years ago, there is a lot that feels still relevant and true. Yes, there is a level of homophobia at work here and specifically self-loathing that perhaps wouldn't allow this particular story to be set in the actual year 2020. The majority of the film, as the play, occurs inside one man's apartment. The film allows for some glimpses of the world out...

August 13, 2018, a pregnant woman and her two daughters went missing from their suburban home, just north of Denver, Colorado. While police interviewed him, the husband to the woman and father to the daughters, 33-year-old Christopher Lee Watts admitted to killing all three of them and disposing of their bodies. It was a fairly open-and-shut case, mainly due to the guilt and/or stupidity of Watts. The reason he got caught is because he agreed to take a police's polygraph test three days after the crime, which he obviously failed. With not much prodding from police detectives, he cracked and confessed to his father who didn't seem to know that his son should have kept quiet or at least gotten a lawyer. Three months later, Watts pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison, which essentially was the end of it. Directed by Jenny Popplewell, what makes this case outstanding is obviously the nature of the crime. Technically, Watts' crime didn't rise to the level of mas...

Writer-director Merawi Gerima makes his feature debut. He was born and raised in Washington, DC. He was raised in or near what's known as NoMa, which is a neighborhood in the District. Specifically, he grew up on or near Q Street in that part of town. That part of town is predominantly African-American in its residents, if not all African-American. Gerima spent his whole life there, except when he left to college. He went to school at the University of Southern California (USC). He was gone for some time, but eventually he returned to DC. When he did, he noticed some changes, mainly the gentrification of the  area. This caused him to reflect on his childhood and the differences between now and the time he left, both good and bad. He decided to do a semi-autobiographical film about that reflection. This film is the result. The look and feel of it are very much akin to a documentary. It looks as if it were shot using small and cheap, video cameras, cameras that could fit effortlessly...

Director Harry Bradbeer recently won two Emmy Awards for his work on Fleabag in 2019. He also worked on two other, highly-acclaimed TV series, that of Killing Eve and Ramy . The dark or really awkward sense of humor demonstrated in those aforementioned shows is a little bit reflected in this feature. That sensibility helps to keep this film engaging for the most part. Writer Jack Thorne won the Tony Award for his work on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2018, which is a stage play that focuses a lot on the relative of a famous literary character. This makes Thorne seemingly the perfect person to pen this film, which is also about the relative of a famous literary character. In this case, that character is Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1880's. Thorne is adapting a young-adult or YA novel by Nancy Springer about the titular relative and Thorne seems pretty faithful to the source material. Having not read the novel, I can't say for sure, if my is...

Mario Casas is an actor from Spain. I hadn't really heard about him until a couple of years ago, but he was an actor who had basically been discovered by Antonio Banderas, the most famous and well-regarded Spanish actor on Earth. Casas' feature debut was in the Banderas directed,  Summer Rain  (2006). Casas worked steadily for a decade, doing a couple of Spanish TV series. He even had roles in one of the highest-grossing films in Spain. Things kept going up for him starting five years ago when he appeared in his first English-language film Eden  (2015). That same year, he worked with Banderas again in The 33  (2015), the true story about the Chilean miners stuck underground. Since then, Casas has been very, very busy. He's starred in eight features in less than four years. All of which are available on Netflix. Of those eight, two of which came out this year, including this one. Yet, he has a third film in the can that will probably be available soon. As a result, he...

McG's sequel to his hit film, The Babysitter  (2017) is here, just in time for Halloween. It's unsure how much of a hit this film was, but the fact that Netflix green-lit this sequel is indication that it did reasonably well. One metric to prove how well it did is that currently McG's 2017 film stands as his directorial effort with the highest Rotten Tomatoes score. McG made a name for himself after directing Charlie's Angels  (2000), which became a blockbuster success for him. His follow-up in that franchise failed to impress. His highest-earning film in the box office was Terminator Salvation  (2009) and even that film wasn't well received and considered a disappointment. His 2017 film was a refreshing change for the mostly derided director. It's obvious that the hope here was for McG's follow-up film to do what James Cameron did for the Terminator franchise in its follow-up film. McG wanted this part 2 to be like Terminator 2: Judgment Day  (1991). This ...

Back in March when the COVID-19 pandemic had forced governments to tell citizens to stay at home and basically quarantine themselves, it was reported that Steven Soderbergh's film Contagion (2011) had jumped into the top ten on Apple's iTunes. HBO Max reported that Contagion had been the most viewed title for two weeks straight. It was seen as the perfect metaphor for what everyone was experiencing from a scientific community dealing with a worldwide pandemic. In the seven months since, Hollywood has had to deal with the damage that the coronavirus has brought to the industry and economy. In that time, many have also wondered how Hollywood will comment or reflect this time period in future films or even television programs. This film was produced and even shot in December right before COVID-19 was discovered, but, like Contagion , it's a perfect metaphor for what a lot of people are experiencing from the perspective of not the scientific community but the average person w...