Midnight Mass is an American supernatural horror streaming television miniseries created and directed by Mike Flanagan. Horror fans would be familiar with Flanagan’s recent work with the Doctor Sleep movie, The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor Netflix series.
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Squid Game Season 1 is the first season of a South Korean survival drama streaming television series written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk. The nine-episode series, starring Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo and Wi Ha-joon, tells the story of a group of people who risk their lives in a mysterious survival game with a ₩45.6 billion (US$38.7 million) prize. It was released worldwide on September 17, 2021 by Netflix and has been a popular hit for the streaming platform.
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Candyman (1992) is an American supernatural horror film, written and directed by Bernard Rose and based on Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden”. The movie has been recognised as one of the best movies of the horror genre, with the titular character becoming one of the most distinctive as well.
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Candyman (2021) is a supernatural horror film directed by Nia DaCosta and written by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and DaCosta. The film is a direct sequel to the 1992 film of the same name and the fourth film in the Candyman film series, based on the short story “The Forbidden” by Clive Barker.
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Old is a 2021 American horror thriller film written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan. It is based on the French-language Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters. As with most M. Night Shyamalan films, there is a significant plot twist in the story denouement, which ultimately will affect the viewers’ enjoyment of the film, depending on whether one is able to accept the logic behind said plot twist.
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Best Sellers is a 2021 comedy-drama film directed by Lina Roessler with written by Anthony Grieco. The premise : A cranky author (Michael Caine) must take part in a book tour in order to save his publisher’s (Aubrey Plaza) company.
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Malignant is a 2021 American horror film directed by James Wan from a screenplay by Akela Cooper, based on an original story by Wan, Ingrid Bisu, and Cooper. The film was released in the cinemas and on HBO Max in September 2021. Malignant is mainly a slasher movie, with faint unexplained paranormal tropes.
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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is an American superhero action-adventure film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and based on the Marvel comics character created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Jim Starlin. Our story analysis will closely examine the plot and characters of the film and will contain spoilers.
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The GodFather Trilogy consists of three crime drama films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and co-written by Coppola with novelist Mario Puzo. The trilogy traces the life of mafia don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) from the 1940s to the late 1970s. The constituent films in the trilogy were The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990), and were inspired by Puzo’s 1969 novel of the same name.
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Reminiscence is a 2021 American neo-noir scifi thriller drama film written and directed by Lisa Joy, in her feature directorial debut. Joy – together with spouse Jonathan Nolan – were the showrunners for the HBO scifi TV series, Westworld. And of course, Christopher Nolan is Joy’s brother-in-law and one cannot but feel that Reminiscence shares – or attempts to, in any case – similar high concept scifi tropes as Nolan’s Inception and Tenet.
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The White Lotus Season 1 is the first season of an American satire comedy-drama anthology television series created, written and directed by Mike White. The series focuses on the lives of the staff and guests at a tropical resort in Hawaii over the course of a week. Season 2 has been ordered and will feature a new set of visitors to the White Lotus resort.
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Titans S03E01 – S03E03 are the first three episodes of the third season of the superhero drama series streaming on HBO Max featuring the DC Comics superteam. The first two seasons were streamed on the now defunct DC Universe online platform, which is now focused only on comic books, with the movies and TV series being transferred over to HBO Max. It is highly unlikely that we will want to analyse the rest of Season 3, after the rather abysmal third episode in particular. Our analysis of this dismal failure follows.
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The Rewrite is a 2014 American romantic comedy film written and directed by Marc Lawrence. The film stars Hugh Grant as a washed-up screenwriter who begins teaching at Binghamton University, and Marisa Tomei as a single mother with whom the screenwriter finds romance. Considering that the main character is a screenwriter, we thought it would be appropriate to conduct a detailed analysis of the story in The Rewrite.
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The Tomorrow War is a 2021 American science fiction action film directed by Chris McKay in his live-action directorial debut. The movie stars Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J. K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson and follows a group of present-day soldiers who are sent into the future to fight an alien army (called the White Spikes).
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A Quiet Place Part II is a 2021 American scifi horror film, and the sequel to 2018’s A Quiet Place, following the family from the first film as they continue to navigate and survive in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind aliens with an acute sense of hearing. If you have read our review of the original movie, you would be aware that we found the premise to be critically flawed. Obviously that flawed premise has not changed but there are even more problems with the story of A Quiet Place Part II, as our analysis reveals.
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The Hand is a 1981 American psychological horror film written and directed by Oliver Stone, based on the novel The Lizard’s Tail by Marc Brandel. The film stars Michael Caine as Jon Lansdale, a comic book artist who loses his hand, which in turn takes on a murderous life of its own.
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Logan’s Run is a 1976 dystopian scifi action thriller drama film directed by Michael Anderson, and starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter and Richard Jordan. The screenplay by David Zelag Goodman is based on the 1967 novel Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson.
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Blade Runner is a 1982 dystopian scifi film drama directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford as the titular character. The film was loosely based on Philip K Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Despite the initial commercial and critical failure of Blade Runner (when it was first released in 1982), the film has attained cult status in the years since and has been retroactively hailed as one of the best science-fiction films of all time.
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Predator is a 1987 scifi action thriller drama film directed by John McTiernan and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film spawned a direct sequel – Predator 2 (1990) – a couple of spin-offs with Alien vs Predator (2004), Alien vs Predator (2007) and Predators (2010) – as well as a reboot with The Predator (2018).
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The Thing is a 1982 scifi horror drama thriller film directed by John Carpenter. Based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s Who Goes There? The Thing was ostensibly also a remake of Howard Hawk’s The Thing From Another World (1951) which was also an adaptation of Campbell’s 1938 novella.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 action-adventure drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Raiders of the Lost Ark starred Harrison Ford as archaeologist-adventurer Indiana Jones and launched a franchise, with three subsequent films.
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Infinite is a scifi action thriller drama directed by Antonio Fuqua. The movie is based on D. Eric Maikranz’s 2009 novel The Reincarnationist Papers and stars Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The premise of Infinite revolves around the concept of reincarnated beings who retain the memories of past lives.
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Time is a 3-part crime drama miniseries from the BBC, starring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham. Time is set in an English prison and features Mark Cobden (Bean), a convict and Eric McNally (Graham), a prison officer in the lead roles. The miniseries follows both characters through their life journeys as circumstances drive them into making difficult choices and decisions.
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The Dirty Dozen is a 1967 war action drama film directed by Robert Aldrich and based on the novel written by E.M. Nathanson. The story is a work of fiction, set during World War II and centred around twelve court-martialled soldiers who are promised a reprieve from their capital sentences if they are successful in completing a virtual suicide mission behind enemy lines, just before D-Day.
S P O I L E R S
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Woke up this morning (The Sopranos theme song performed by Alabama 3)
The Sopranos is an American crime drama television series created by David Chase. The story revolves around Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster, portraying the difficulties that he faces as he tries to balance his family life with his role as the leader of a criminal organization. The Sopranos was first broadcast on HBO from 1999 to 2007 ushering in a new age of serial TV drama that stands to this day.
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