The Queen’s Gambit is a fictional story based upon the 1983 Walter Tevis novel by the same name. A Netflix original series released October 30 of this year, the drama opens with a scene of an eight-year old girl, Beth Harmon (newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy), soon to become an orphan residing at a bleak orphanage, Methuen, under a severe headmistress. It is the mid-1950s and there are few options for an orphan, especially a little girl.
Struggling with loneliness, adoption and being a social misfit, Beth finds solace through learning...
“The Social Dilemma”– Addiction or Threat?
This is a Netflix docudrama not to be missed. The Social Dilemma, a granular investigation of the rise of social media and the ongoing damage it is causing to segments of society around the globe, is chilling. Focusing on exploitation of Internet users, The Social Dilemma, produced by Jeff Orlowski, reveals how most users are oblivious about how their surfing patterns have been monetized. We are all highly valuable assets being sold for financial gain. The user ‘s data is sold to advertisers through embedded algorithms. The advertisers are the real customers of the...
“Hinterland” —The Remote Interior of the Mind
An original Welsh-noir murder series on Netflix (in three seasons, 13 total episodes), Hinterland is for those who love this genre. The main character, DCI Tom Mathias, is a deeply troubled unsympathetic detective who, together with his more mature and brilliant partner Mared Rhys, travels around a small hamlet in Wales solving at least one murder per episode. The dark, forboding, and gloomy landscape rivals that of the best Nordic noir raising the same question: how can there be so many murders in such a small...
The Way I See It–What’s Before Your Eyes
The Way I See It, a documentary film released by MSNBC on October 16, 2020, narrates the career of the former Chief Official White House Photographer, Pete Souza. He covered two of the most popular US presidents of the past fifty years: Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.
Only in his mid-twenties when he was invited to be the White House official photographer for Ronald Reagan, Souza admits he wasn’t a fan of Reagan’s politics but came to admire Reagan’s loving relationship with Nancy. The Way I See...
“Flesh and Blood”–Deadly Sins
Don’t be fooled. This dysfunctional family gives the appearance of happiness and love, but Flesh and Blood disguises a murder. This mystery-thriller set in the sunshine and warm beaches of West Sussex is a multigenerational psychodrama. The gentle surf and sunny skies can lull the residents into a false sense of comfort and security. Flesh and Blood immediately goes to the darkly secretive interior family drama that throws shade on the murdered. Wisely keeping the identity of the victim hidden,–although the obscured...
“Ratched”–Ratcheting Up the Tension
This Netflix quasi-horror thriller creates a backstory for Nurse Ratched, the heartless villain in the 1975 Academy-Award winning classic “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. “What made Ratched so vile and so unimaginably cruel and unempathetic?” The answer, of course, has roots in Nurse Ratched’s tragic early years, unhealed wounds that continue to fester. Ratched is a female-villain origin story.
Ratched opens in 1947 as Mildred Ratched arrives in Big Sur to seek employment...