Turning Point : 9/11 and the War on Terror is a documentary miniseries chronicling the 9/11 terrorist attacks and America’s subsequent military response — that has defined the last twenty years. With the total withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021, this miniseries provides a timely retrospective assessment of America’s foreign policy failures.
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How to Become a Tyrant is a Netflix documentary series based on The Dictator’s Handbook and narrated by Peter Dinklage. The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics is a 2011 non-fiction book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, published by the company PublicAffairs.
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Fear Street Part One 1994 is a 2021 American slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak, with a script co-written by Phil Graziadei and Janiak, from an original story by Kyle Killen, Graziadei, and Janiak. Based on the book series of the same name by R. L. Stine, the film was released by Netflix on July 2, 2021 as the first installment in the Fear Street Trilogy.
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Army of the Dead is a 2021 American horror action drama film directed by Zack Snyder, with a screenplay he co-wrote with Shay Hatten and Joby Harold, based on a story by Snyder. The film had been in development hell at Warner Bros since 2007 before being picked up by Netflix in 2019. Army of the Dead marks Zack Snyder’s first new film since Justice League and the release was accompanied has been accompanied with the attendant hype from the buzz over The Snyder Cut and so on.
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Jupiter’s Legacy Volume 1 is the first season of a superhero action-adventure streaming TV drama created by Steven S. DeKnight. This adaptation is based on the comic book series of the same name created by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely. Jupiter’s Legacy Volume 1 recounts the origin story of the Union of Justice – set in 1929 – and develops the generation gap threatening to tear apart the contemporary group of heroes.
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Outside the Wire is a 2021 scifi war thriller streaming on Netflix. The film is set in 2036 and stars Anthony Mackie (who also serves as a producer on the film) as an android officer who works with a drone pilot (Damson Idris) to stop a global catastrophe. Our short take on Outside the Wire is that it is possessed of both an interesting premise and a strong underlying message but certain narrative choices turn the third act into a unsatisfying cliché.
Please note that there are spoilers in our analysis of Outside the Wire that follows.
Room 2806 : The Accusation is a four-part Netflix documentary series focusing on the allegations of sexual assault made against French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn (“DSK”) in 2011. While Room 2806 : The Accusation is ostensibly concerned with a particular historical incident, thematically it addresses the wider issue of sexual abuse carried out by men of power and status.
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The Crown is a historical drama streaming television series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (played by Olivia Colman). Certainly, in modern times, no other royal family has captured public imagination like the Windsors. Also, in the context of the prolonged reign of Queen Elizabeth II, such a drama series is definitely merited. The Crown Season 4 perhaps begins the Queen’s most tumultuous years, to be concluded with Season 5, coming in 2022.
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The Alienist is a period drama TV series set in New York of the late 19th century. Based on the novel of the same name by Caleb Carr, The Alienist debuted in mid-2018 to mixed critical responses. The Alienist Season 2 was released in July 2020 and based on Carr’s sequel novel, The Angel of Darkness.
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The Queen’s Gambit is a Netflix limited series based on the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis. The series is alternately a chess fantasy and a feminist drama. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon, the main character, the story is set in the 1950s and 1960s.
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The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a historical drama based on real life events that took place in the late 1960s. 1968 was a tumultuous year for the USA. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy shook American politics. The nation was divided over the escalation of the USA’s involvement in the Vietnam War, which led to protests and demonstrations in the streets.
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Today, 8th August 2020, Netflix begins streaming two more Eric Khoo movies that I contributed music to. Over at the Kevin Mathews Composer Facebook page, I shared these song stories to mark this occasion. Hope you find the reading as much fun as I did the writing.
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Today, 1st August 2020, Netflix begins streaming three Eric Khoo movies that I contributed music to. Over at the Kevin Mathews Composer Facebook page, I shared these song stories to mark this occasion. Hope you find the reading as much fun as I did the writing.
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Daredevil Season 3 is the third season of the superhero action drama streaming TV series based on the Marvel Comics character.
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The Haunting of Hill House is a horror drama miniseries streaming on Netflix. Loosely based on Shirley Wilson’s classic 1959 novel of the same name, this Netflix series is a tour-de-force from writer-director Mike Flanagan and possibly one of the best of its kind this year.
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Welsh director Gareth Evans – best known for The Raid – is the person behind Apostle, a period religious horror film starring Dan Stevens (of Legion fame).
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As regular visitors will know, I am a huge fan of scifi author Phillip K Dick and I always take pleasure in discovering works that incorporate the themes that Dick’s novels focused on. In that light, I highly recommend the new Netflix streaming series, Maniac.
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Thanks to the idiocy of Paramount Pictures, Alex Garland’s Annihilation adaptation was only released in Singapore today via Netflix! Thus, geeks in Singapore are denied the opportunity of watching this imaginative scifi horror movie in all its visual glory. Well, fuck you Paramount!
A third of the way into the 2nd season of the Marvel-Netflix series Jessica Jones, one conclusion becomes unavoidable. The reason that Season 1 worked was down solely to David Tennant’s star turn as Killgrave.
The knives are out for Netflix original films, as far as the critics are concerned. Bright was panned and now Duncan Jones’ Mute suffers the same fate. We demur.
There was a moment – the briefest possibly – where it seemed that the writers/producers behind Discovery were going to reboot the entire series using the escape from the Mirror Universe as the plot device.
Perhaps then Discovery would exist in a reality more aligned to the original series (which is supposedly a decade away from the events depicted so far.
Black Mirror is back to reflect the impact of technological changes on a near future world.
