488 Movies Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Page 32)

Genre: Drama

Actor: Alessandro Nivola, Andre Holland, Glynn Turman, Jordane Christie, Marc Menchaca, Moses Ingram, Olli Haaskivi, P. J. Byrne, Rebecca Dalton, Tiffany Boone

This series feels classic and cute, but also really questionable. It has whimsical fantasy elements injected into its main sports journey format that is easy to care about, and especially commendable given the fact that it circles around the dramatization of a sport as dry as golf. But the dynamic between Gawain and Ms. Kiria (at least in the early going) is unwatchably weird and can be cause to just dip from the show. Makes you wonder who this show is for, because while everything feels like well-done albeit tired untouchable-young-protagonist tropes, there is that promise of freaky humor that gets in the way and serves no real purpose, as if conceding that golf wasn’t a good enough hook.

Genre: Animation, Drama

Actor: Atsumi Tanezaki, Eiji Takemoto, Kaede Hondo, Katsuyuki Konishi, Misaki Kuno, Shunsuke Takeuchi, You Taichi, Yumi Uchiyama, Yumiri Hanamori, Yuto Uemura

Rating: TV-PG

Paraphrasing their words, the show is about taking the K-pop method of creating stars and trying to replicate it outside of Korea to create a “sensational, iconic, global girl group.” And there are good things about it in the early going. For one, the evaluators sound levelheaded, which might seem like the bare minimum, but you know how these things really go. The documentary-esque aspects are nice enough when the show is grounded in its audition/training purpose and in getting to know our contestants. But I could do without a survival competition style reality show again, especially ones that seem to just use the format for the sake of using it, a.k.a., "entertainment."

Genre: Documentary

Actor: Daniela Avanzini, Lara Rajagopalan, Manon Bannerman, Megan Skiendiel, Sophia Laforteza

Director: Nadia Hallgren

Rating: TV-MA

If you don’t like cheesy Koreanovelas to begin with, there’s no real reason to seek this out. You’re getting an over the top telenovela from the performances, to the wishing on a star and playful coincidences and all the forced meet-cutes. Lee Mi-jin (Jung Eun-ji) is sympathetic in her unenviable position receiving conditional kindness from her parents. And of course, the premise itself is just ridiculous enough to maybe stick around for. But what should be a simple story gets out of hand quickly, with an absolutely wack 60+ minute runtime per episode. While it can be a decent comfort show for the giggles, there’s no cheese you can get here that you can’t get anywhere else for better if you kept looking.

Genre: Comedy, Mystery, Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Actor: Baek Seo Hoo, Choi Jin-hyuk, Jeong Seok-yong, Jung Eun-ji, Jung Young-ju, Kim Ah-young, Lee Jung-eun, Yoon Byung-hee

Director: Lee Hyung-min

The most obvious cultural reference point for Barracuda Queens is The Bling Ring: both tell the based-on-real-life stories of a group of (mostly) wealthy young women who rob rich people’s houses. But where Sofia Coppola’s movie was rooted in a very specific era and explored the fascinating generational and psychological quirks that drove its disaffected teen burglars to do what they did, this Swedish Netflix series, at least in the first four episodes viewed for this review, makes only a half-hearted effort to evoke its ‘90s setting and takes a much soapier, less forensic approach to its story.

Here, the young women’s gateway into crime is the sky-high bill they rack up after a debauched weekend away. In need of cash to pay it off quickly, they convince themselves that they’re only robbing their wealthy neighbors to solve that problem, but other motivations soon arise. The women — who are mostly university-age, but seem closer to the protagonists of a teen drama — eventually begin to target people they have petty grievances with (like a love interest who spurns the ringleader after a one-night stand) as well as those who have wronged them more seriously (including a rapist, who gets off bizarrely lightly). The adrenaline rush of it all proves addictive for the gang, too. What’s more, for Mia (Tea Stjärne), the only member of the group not from a wealthy background, there’s also a Robin Hood-ish appeal to the burglaries, although this aspect regrettably takes something of a backseat to the girls’ escapades in the show. 

Between the gang’s crime spree and their unbelievably dysfunctional home lives, there’s enough broad drama here to keep Netflix’s autoplay function in good use. Even if it doesn’t provide keen insight, sharp nuance, or a remotely realistic plot, the show does go beyond a surface-level approach by exploring something of the girls’ inner lives, the class dynamics of their friendship group, and the shallowness of their parents’ milieu. At three hours total — and with an opening scene that teases a dramatic rise-and-fall story ahead — it all makes for a very bingeable, if ultimately forgettable, watch.

Genre: Crime, Drama

Actor: Alva Bratt, Carsten Bjornlund, Izabella Scorupco, Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Max Ulveson, Sandra Strandberg Zubovic, Sarah Gustafsson, Tea Stjärne, Tindra Monsen

Rating: TV-MA

When a group of people have to band together for survival, whether it be due to zombies, bus accidents, or being lost from civilization, there’s no higher stakes than life or death. If we care about the characters enough, the will to survive already drives the plot. However, Netflix show Pending Train doesn’t trust in the entertainment of this survival premise. Instead of focusing on the group’s survival, it constantly shifts to flashbacks depicting everyday drama. When the group finds out that they got lost way into the future, there’s less strategizing, and even more flashbacks. This strange episode structure makes the series feel less like a compelling survival show and more like a soapy melodrama.

Genre: Drama, Mystery

Actor: Ayaka Onishi, Eiji Akaso, Goki Maeda, Kai Inowaki, Kotone Furukawa, Miho Kanazawa, Moka Kamishiraishi, Sara Shida, Sayaka Yamaguchi, Sho Nishigaki, Shunya Shiraishi, Takayuki Hamatsu, Tetta Sugimoto, Yasuko Matsuyuki, Yoshiyuki Tsubokura, Yuki Yamada

Director: Kenta Tanaka, Naoki Katō, Okamoto Shingo

At times, Terror Tuesday: Extreme feels straightforward in a flat way: making the connections for you, holding your hand like a child, and almost guiding you to a moral lesson. Other times, the presentation feels like old folktales, or ghost stories around a campfire: simple and engaging. Even then, the highs don’t make up for the drawn-out lows, which consist of simplistic stories and handing out training wheels for the viewer’s imagination in a TV-MA series. The twists and the drama portions are fun at times, but with a title like that, the viewer deserves to enjoy more than just a few moments here and there.

Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery

Actor: Charada Imraporn, Cherprang Areekul, Nat Kitcharit, Parada Thitawachira, Sutthirak Subvijitra

While based on a rom-com novel, Not Dead Yet adapts it with a supernatural twist… And proceeds to forget about it. The book that inspired the series is structured like personal journal entries, with the classic gratitude list, from a forty-year-old writer wanting to restart her life. Unfortunately, the US series removes the confessional vibe, by shoehorning ghosts into the plot. Instead of developing an appreciation for life through interviewing dead people’s loved ones, the ghosts lecture it for her, individually doing so until they disappear when their obit gets published. As a result, lessons aren’t internally realized and the relationships she forms feel hollow. Any dynamic she forms with a fleeting ghost or their loved ones could easily be brushed away in the succeeding episode. In adding the twist, Not Dead Yet fails to juggle its additional ghostly plot line, while also missing the empathy wanted by millennials missing generational markers.

Genre: Comedy

Actor: Angela Elayne Gibbs, Gina Rodriguez, Hannah Simone, Lauren Ash, Rick Glassman

We start off at peak drama straight away, with incredibly stressful plot points at 2 different periods in time—an eerie flash forward cold open, and the more traditional drama bulk of the story. On first glance, it could read like an issue of ill pacing, like these intensely scandalous things could’ve been built up more, to maximize the emotion behind them. But it becomes pretty clear that using every soap opera trope in the book is just the foundation of the whole show. Things happen, things that happen to be traumatic, but there is no discernible story outside of the affair tropes and the reveal at the end of the first episode.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Felipe Abib, João Vitti, Juliana Paes, Martha Nowill, Paloma Duarte, Vladimir Brichta

Rating: TV-MA

Science fiction imagines new worlds we’ve never seen before, but the world of Synduality: Noir doesn’t feel that way. Noir feels like it presents a familiar world, except with an added touch of AI assistants called Maguses. The fighting piloted mecha robots are reminiscent of Gundam and Pacific Rim. At times, the action looks like automated 3D animation made to cut costs. However, even if the world-building was stronger, Synduality: Noir doesn’t feel like a show that wants to tell a story. There aren’t enough moments that we get to spend with the main characters Kanata and his Magus Noir to justify creating a whole series around it. We don’t even need to get into the icky slave-like dynamic between the (mostly) male Drifters and their (mostly) female Maguses.

Genre: Action & Adventure, Animation, Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Actor: Aoi Koga, Ayaka Ohashi, Fuminori Komatsu, Mao Ichimichi, Nagisa Aoyama, Taito Ban, Takeo Otsuka, Yusuke Kobayashi