129 Contributions by: Kerine Wint (Page 9)

Kerine Wint is a curator at A Good Movie to Watch. When she’s not absorbed in anime and weird docu-series, she reviews speculative fiction for Fiyah Lit Magazine or designs album covers and magazines. As for her film taste, One Cut of the Dead (2017), The Lure (2015), Inu-Oh (2021), and Dear Ex (2018) sum it up pretty well.

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121. Missed Connections, 2023

Mae is a hopeless romantic looking for love and more clients for her custom t-shirts. After a meet-cute at the grocery store, she turns to an app called Missed Connections to find him. After they finally meet, Mae realizes he has a connection with someone else. Now determined to make him fall in love with her, she hires him to rebuild her website. As a rom-com, the comedy isn't particularly outstanding or noticeable. The romance, and Mae, are hard to root for, especially when her obsessions go too far, her slut-shaming goes unchecked, and it all lasts for 90% of the film without any real cathartic resolutions.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Chie Filomeno, JC Santos, Kelvin Miranda, Matet De Leon, Miles Ocampo

Director: Jelise Chung

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122. Painkiller, 2023

Painkiller is a dramatized account of the opioid crisis that details how Purdue Pharmaceuticals manufactured and marketed the highly addictive pain medication OxyContin. Before each episode, the family member of an opioid victim recounts how the drug scarred their lives. Although the intentions seem righteous, the execution begs to differ. The drama leans heavily into crime thriller tropes, overproducing the events to a sensational degree with flat, cookie-cutter characters making it unwatchable at times.

Two episodes in, the theatrics in the production choices feel dismissive of the severity of the opioid crisis, prioritizing eccentricities and a shallow textbook overview.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Ana Kayne, Carolina Bartczak, Clark Gregg, Dina Shihabi, Jack Mulhern, John Ales, John Rothman, Matthew Broderick, Ron Lea, Sam Anderson, Taylor Kitsch, Tyler Ritter, Uzo Aduba, West Duchovny

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123. I Love You, and It Hurts, 2023

At its core, this series is a socio-economic commentary wrapped in heavy discrimination of poor and queer communities with a sprinkle of Disney Channel music numbers. It tackles issues like gentrification, climate change, the refugee crisis, and homophobia, but even for a teen drama, this all feels like too much, especially since it forwards a forbidden romance above all else. It tries to save face with music; the show uses songs and musical expression to bridge the divide between the people about to lose their neighborhood and the rich kids oblivious to it all. But the talent show quality eclipses the impact. One should expect the large cast and storylines to iron themselves out after two episodes, but with the class-difference romance carrying the bulk of the story forward, the investment isn't worth it.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Erika de la Rosa, Jorge Salinas, Mar Sordo, Marco de la O, Roberto Aguilar

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124. Unknown: Cave of Bones, 2023

Given the nature of the subject (the discovery of a species that predates humans), this installment of the Unknown documentary movies has more fanfare than its predecessors. The narrative never transcends positing that a Homo Naledi is just like Homo Sapiens, but not really. The experts' enthusiasm is often unsettling when you quickly realize that no opposing view is mentioned. In other installments, the balance of arguments for and against discoveries made the narrative compelling. However, Cave of Bones is suspiciously wrapped in (and warped by) the need to have Homo Naledis feel different from humans. What is initially fascinating eventually lends itself to fatigue when discoveries and philosophized theories are repeatedly aggrandized.

Genre: Documentary

Actor: Lee Berger

Director: Mark Mannucci

Rating: PG

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125. Trap House, 2023

After his brother's gruesome death at the infamous drug den, Trap House, Detective Grant Pierce is removed from the case to find its creator. He goes rogue and recruits a teenage drug dealer working for the Trap House with a plan to infiltrate. Whatever the film lacks in intrigue is not compensated by good writing or interesting traps/scares/twists that would befit its horror categorization. Even expectations to match its counterparts in the escape room genre are quickly lowered thanks to uninventive traps and shallow characters whose deaths weigh nothing in the grand scheme of the plot. The potential of a trap house horror/thriller to comment on addiction, race, poverty, or anything substantial outside of "crackheads are crazy" is ultimately wasted. Instead, there's stilted dialogue, caricatures of drug addicts, and a narrative that is hard to sit through, much less enjoy.

Genre: Crime, Horror, Thriller, TV Movie

Actor: Anthony Timpano, Benjamin Wilkinson, Bruce Crawford, Fletcher Donovan, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Jaime M. Callica, Jason Tremblay, Peter Bundic, Ryan Mah

Director: Nicholas Humphries

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126. Devil’s Advocate, 2023

Quick to start and slow to deliver, Devil's Advocate follows Bader, a renowned football player who is tried for being the primary suspect in his wife Dalal's murder. After the series' initial commentary on how the court of public opinion affects a case, nothing else about it stands out. It's mostly just the lawyer Loulwa desperately proving Bader's innocence, going against her father (the prosecutor), and avoiding her ex-fiance (the officer assigned to the case). All of those things collectively sound like a good setup, but they somehow have no impact. In two of the six episodes, there are countless conversations and baseless speculating, and yet nothing progresses past emphasizing Dalal's mental illness. So our two options, by that point, are to trust Bader or (if you can) believe that Dalal stabbed herself 14 TIMES. There's certainly more to the story, but the allure is no more than an ignorable simmer.

Genre: Crime, Drama

Actor: Haya Abdulsalam

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127. Dance Brothers, 2023

At 20 minutes per episode, the story of two brothers trying to make their dream of becoming professional, industry-changing dancers a reality is surprisingly uninteresting. Roni and Sakke are chasing their big break, but Roni is rude to anyone who doesn't think he's transformative, and Sakke insists on sticking by his brother even as he ruins their chances. By the end of episode two, they're offered a chance to open their own club and work with a suspiciously generous patron from their mother's laundromat. But despite the compelling gist of it all, nothing holds attention. The dancing sequences are mostly a miss, and the story's progression feels painfully by the numbers. If "chasing your dreams" is supposed to be the redeeming quality, the execution alone dismantles it.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Fanni Noroila, Jeanine Muyima, Laura Lohi, Roderick Kabanga, Samuel Kujala

Rating: TV-MA

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128. Millennial Hunter (2023)

Satire or not, 70 minutes of jokes about demographic cohorts is a lot to sit through. But if it is satire, it only leans into exaggeration. There is no irony or humor, and there's definitely no commentary on anything substantial. And a boomer dad going on a millennial killing spree would only be a funny premise for a 5-minute short, which this film, unfortunately, isn't. And although it's set in the modern day, the generalizations and jokes feel tired, dated, and uninspiring. Yes, there's inter-generation beef, and some of it is ridiculous, but a little commentary on why the divides exist would have made up for the lack of chuckles and saved us all some time.

Genre: Action, Animation, Comedy

Actor: Carmen Christopher, Chris Parnell, Eudora Peterson, Rachel Pegram, Sam Taggart

Director: Sam Taggart

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129. Gold Brick, 2023

Making a heist so unoriginal and uneventful is a feat, and Gold Brick manages to do both without missing a beat. None of the characters are particularly interesting or distinct enough to remember their names. The idea of stealing from a big corporation (usually a solid setup) has no bite because the motivations feel hollow and unrealized. Most of the "ingenious" slight of hands and master plans don't impress or stick, and later plot points' payoffs stay as lackluster as their setups. Crisp, saturated cinematography is pleasant on the eyes but not enough to stop them from glazing over.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Agathe Rousselle, Antoine Gouy, Bruno Lochet, Grégoire Colin, Igor Gotesman, Irina Muluile, Ludovik, Madeleine Baudot, Nicolas de Lavergne, Nina Meurisse, Raphaël Quenard, Slimane Dazi, Stéphan Wojtowicz, Youssef Hajdi

Director: Jérémie Rozan

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