Alci Rengifo
‘Selena: The Series’ Part 2 Charts the Tejano Singer’s Final Days, but Offers Few Insights
Features • Published on May 2021
Netflix’s “Selena: The Series” now enters tricky waters when it comes to chronicling both success and tragedy. It is also obsessed with trying ever so hard to explicitly build more myth around…
The Final Season of ‘Pose’ Enters 1994 With Exhilarating Hope and Despair
Features • Published on May 2021
“Pose” always worked as the best kind of fantasy, one where not everything was perfect, but was always wrapped in the haze of some exhilarating dream. Maverick producer Ryan Murphy’s crowning…
In Roy Andersson’s ‘About Endlessness,’ the Details of Everyday Life Become Dreamlike Stories
Features • Published on April 2021
“About Endlessness” defies categorization. It is not a drama or a documentary, yet it is a narrative. Swedish director Roy Andersson has made a meditation on the very rhythms of everyday…
Apple TV’s ‘The Mosquito Coast’ Updates the Acclaimed Novel Into a Visually Stunning yet Overlong Journey
Features • Published on April 2021
In many ways it makes perfect sense to revive “The Mosquito Coast.” It is a story about a man who feels detached from an increasingly material, consumerist society, zealously determined to build…
‘Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse’: Michael B. Jordan Skillfully Outruns the Plot With Action-Packed Adrenaline
Features • Published on April 2021
As the age of franchise-building continues, “Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” is one great-looking franchise-starter, and feels like it all the way through. Impeccably filmed, strongly performed, and convincingly staged in terms of…
‘Shadow and Bone’: Netflix Offers Up Its Most Visually Stunning Fantasy Saga Yet
Features • Published on April 2021
With fantasy now becoming a dominant TV genre, delivering a new series every month, it becomes a challenge to produce something that is truly immersive. Netflix’s adaptation of “Shadow and Bone” is…
‘Mortal Kombat’ Upgrades With Slick Visuals but Less Combat
Features • Published on April 2021
Since around the ‘90s, turning video games into movies has been one of the toughest challenges faced by countless screenwriters and directors. “Mortal Kombat” is the latest attempt and it succeeds and…
‘Stowaway’ Explores Deep Space for a Wrenching Human Drama
Features • Published on April 2021
“Stowaway” is the latest entry in an emerging genre of space thrillers that put an emphasis on both simplicity in the storytelling and hyper realism in the aesthetic. The environment of the…
‘Mare of Easttown’: Kate Winslet Tackles Murder and Emotional Turmoil With Fantastic Grit
Features • Published on April 2021
The starting point of HBO’s six-part limited series “Mare of Easttown” is a murder mystery. It then develops as an excellent thriller but along with the questions comes a stronger kind of…
‘Gunda’ Enters the Intimate World of a Pig for a Poetic Meditation on the Exploitation of Farmed Animals
Features • Published on April 2021
“Gunda” basks in the very rhythm of the natural world from an almost microscopic angle. The life of a pig can possess all of the intimacy, warmth and heartbreak we associate with…
‘Gunda’ Director Viktor Kossakovsky Found Inspiration in Porcine Life to Promote Animal Preservation
Features • Published on April 2021
The most evocative cinematic biography of the season does not belong to a major historical figure, but to a pig raising her offspring in a deceptively serene landscape. “Gunda” is a documentary…
Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly on the Energy of ‘The Nevers’ and Defying Old Superhero Gender Norms
Features • Published on April 2021
Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly have acted in numerous period pieces before, donning costumes and traveling to some other era. But they have never been in anything quite like HBO’s “…
‘Voyagers’: Space Thriller Gets Lost In a Battle of Awakened Teenage Hormones
Features • Published on April 2021
A cardinal rule in storytelling is that the moment you leave the kids alone they go wild. “Voyagers” raises the stakes by setting the hormonal chaos in space. Writer-director Neil Burger…
Raoul Peck on Chronicling Our Colonial Past in His Searing HBO Docuseries ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’
Features • Published on April 2021
Few directors can truly be called internationalist to the level of Raoul Peck. His journey as an artist and thinker is a collection of work that tells unknown or underground histories, from…
Amazon’s ‘Them’ Captures the Horror of American Racism With Frightful Suspense
Features • Published on April 2021
It’s a beautiful day in the racist neighborhood at the beginning of Amazon’s new anthology series “Them.” White picket fences and pristine lawns hide horrific secrets and monsters that are not always…
‘Queen of the South’: The Russians Are Coming in Kinetic Final Season
Features • Published on April 2021
With its splashes of melodrama and lots of ammo to spare, “Queen of the South” nears the end with both style and inevitability. At a time when we’re being constantly flooded with…
In ‘Exterminate All the Brutes,’ Raoul Peck Powerfully Traces the Bloody History of Colonialism to Who We Are Today
Features • Published on April 2021
The great Jewish-German critic Walter Benjamin once wrote as the storm clouds of World War II gathered, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of…
‘Chad’: Nasim Pedrad Goes Back To High School for Hilariously Cringy Laughs
Features • Published on April 2021
Adolescence has a universal way of giving us all great and terrible memories. It’s just part of the human experience to smile and cringe at our adolescence. “Chad” brings a fresh diversity…
Nasim Pedrad Was Inspired To Make ‘Chad’ To Bust Stereotypes and Capture the Persian-American Experience
Features • Published on April 2021
Nasim Pedrad felt there was something missing on television. It was her story. Rarely, if ever, is the Persian-American experience represented in popular media. The same could be said for many communities…
Idris Elba Is a ‘Concrete Cowboy’ in Netflix’s Stirring Modern Western
Features • Published on April 2021
Westerns tend to be defined by vast, stretching landscapes in a romanticized 19th century America. Netflix’s “Concrete Cowboy” is an excellent western set in the present, and not in some Montana frontier…