Netflix is packaging Locked In like its other Lifetime-adjacent thrillers, but it's neither kitschy nor tawdry enough to sit alongside films like Secret Obsession or Dangerous Lies. It's a gothic, or maybe more accurately a gothic lite? At the outset, recently orphaned Lina arrives at family friend Katherine's sprawling estate in the English countryside. Though she couldn't ask for more materially, emotionally she's starved of affection by her new caregiver's acting career and the social demands of the aristocracy. Lina…
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Juiced with O.J. Simpson 2006
From the folks responsible for Bum Fights comes Juiced with O.J. Simpson, a zero-budget, zero-effort, pay-per-view special frankensteined out of the cruelest and most exploitative elements of Punk'd and Girls Gone Wild. Cursed! Feels bad logging this on my birthday. I think I've been Juiced? In any case, between vignettes featuring O.J. on a throne gawking awkwardly at naked women, this thing provides its paying(!) audience with three categories of prank. The first involves O.J. waiting around until he's recognized—these don't…
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Earwig 2021
Once again, Lucile Hadžihalilović hits the ground dreaming with ambivalent caretakers and an almost overwhelming number of signifiers. Earwig is, for all its stillness, always in flux, caught between a fairy tale and a horror film, and routinely soaked in otherworldly postwar malaise. Every frame is a stunning collage of greens, ambers, and reds—and don't even get me started on the exterior shots, which make incredible use of texture and pattern. You can almost smell the rain, run your fingers…
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R.M.N. 2022
While an actual MRI figures in the narrative for just a brief period (R.M.N. is the Romanian acronym), it encapsulates what Cristian Mungiu is doing here: scanning the collective consciousness of a small Transylvanian community for the root causes of rising enthnonationalism, xenophobia, economic stagnation, and a general sense of social malaise. It layers an almost maddeningly complex (and necessarily interconnected) array of dynamics to tease out these issues. This is a rapidly transforming world, with preexisting relationships between Romanian and…
