Tag: Hulu

Echo–Maya Lopez is Back

Written by Diana Paul on March 11, 2024. Posted in movie reviews.

Guest reviewer: Lora Chilton, author of 1666 : A Novel The character of Maya Lopez was introduced in the Marvel television series, Hawkeye (2021). Now she is back in the spin-off series, Echo. Played by the captivating Alaqua Cox, Maya tells her story in a series of flashbacks involving her childhood and trauma. Maya, of course, has the superpowers of a Marvel hero, but this time, passed down through her matrilineal Choctaw heritage from Chafa, a Choctaw leader. Focusing on the Choctaw nation, Echo is a Marvel series with a fresh and highly original cultural perspective. ...

Past Lives (2023)–You Only Remember One

Written by Diana Paul on February 26, 2024. Posted in movie reviews. 1 Comment on Past Lives (2023)–You Only Remember One

In Celine Song’s directorial debut, the Academy-Award nominated Past Lives, we see an exploration of a long-distance friendship between two childhood playmates from South Korea. Nora (Greta Lee) moves with her family to Canada when she is twelve years old. Her friend Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), still yearning for her years afterwards, remains in South Korea pursuing his professional career as a lawyer. While both have a shared past as the closest of friends, as adults that is insufficient for a long-sought reunion by Hae-sung. Anything but bittersweet and frustrating, nonetheless the...

Flee–A Flight to Hell and Back

Written by Diana Paul on April 4, 2022. Posted in movie reviews. 2 Comments on Flee–A Flight to Hell and Back

Flee (2021), a Danish adult animated/documentary film, is a highly original amalgam of the flat-graphic style of animation and archival footage of the conflict in Afghanistan from the mid-80’s until the present. Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal” and “The Night Of”) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Headhunters” and Jamie Lannister of “Game of Thrones”) are the executive producers. The true story of Amin Nawabi (an alias), follows his journey from a nine-year old boy through his adulthood. The story is a conversation...

Line of Duty—A Killer of a Murder Mystery

Written by Diana Paul on March 21, 2022. Posted in Television reviews. 1 Comment on Line of Duty—A Killer of a Murder Mystery

Line of Duty (2012-2021), a multiple-award winning BBC police procedural, is a gripping crime drama like no other, with a shocking death in episode one, series one (2012), the catalyst for all six seasons which build upon it. This is a killer of a murder mystery. Line of Duty is BBC’s most popular series outperforming both “Dr. Who” and “Downton Abbey.” Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) is transferred from the anti-terrorism unit to the internal affairs unit charged with uncovering police corruption—AC(=Anti-Corruption)-12. ...

“Pig”–Fatty with Little Meat

Written by Diana Paul on March 8, 2022. Posted in movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Pig”–Fatty with Little Meat

Pig (2021) is an odd indie film about a truffle forager, Rob Feld (played by a mostly grunting Nicolas Cage), a former elite restaurateur who has fallen on hard times. In the middle of the night, his beloved truffle-finding pig has been stolen somewhere deep in the woods where he lives in a cabin far from Portland.

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Written by Diana Paul on February 22, 2021. Posted in Film Festivals, movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Toni Morrison (1931-2019), the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was a complex artist who did not hold back from confronting the worst of human history. The documentary, Toni Morrison: Pieces I Am, is a historical panorama of a slice of history dating from the 1930’s until the conclusion of the film in 2019. Morrison emerges as a powerful, iconic, and formidable moral and intellectual force. The film gives us a retrospective of her groundbreaking novels which challenged the literary status quo, rewarding the reader with imagining black lives...