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The 2024 major Grammy categories belong to women and (finally) not lip service

To say that the look of the top Grammy nominations from this year is an overall rebuke of former Recording Academy president Neil Portnow’s comments that female artists had to “step it up” to get recognized in 2018 would be an understatement. That’s with a year when albums such as Lorde’s Melodrama, SZA’s Ctrl, Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom, and Lady Gaga’s Joanne, amongst many great pieces of work, were released.

Low and behold – the 67th installment of the Grammys got it right, and seven of the ei
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‘May December’ is an uneasy, moral tugging, acting tour-de-force

Todd Haynes’ May December pits your emotions against each other, basking in situations that walk a fine line to where morality should land. At certain moments, the film can’t help but invoke laughter – especially when composer Marcelo Zarvos imparts his dramatic piano keys likened to a campy, melodrama. Then, when you think that you can enjoy yourself, the film acts like a Venus fly trap closing in on you – making you second guess why someone can want all this complication in the first place.

T
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Lily Gladstone-led ‘Fancy Dance’ speaks the truthful plights of indigenous women and bonds that keep them together

It’s hard to watch Fancy Dance and not see that the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma has been left to fend for itself. Erica Tremblay centers this film around one particular disappearance mystery and how family members try to pick up the pieces with little to no assistance. Tawi (Hauli Gray) has gone missing, and even as the FBI supposedly picked this case up, there has been little to no movement on it for a couple of weeks.

Time is of the essence, as her sister Jax (Lily Gladstone) assume
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‘Milli Vanilli’ documentary speaks about the lip-syncing duo that was and the machine behind them

How does a group with three number-one hits and a 1990s Grammy for Best New Artist become the center of ridicule and parody? People may remember the In Living Color skit or the VH1 Behind The Music episode that sadly contains the last full in-depth interview from the late Rob Pilatus. But there’s a lot more to the story behind Milli Vanilli than just the eventual fall from grace. At the heart of Luke Korem’s new documentary, two young men grew a friendship with the shared goal of achieving somet
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In ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ love is used as a weapon against the Osage community

Love is one of the most potent emotions anyone can experience. It’s a solidifier of bonds between two people, family, and community and a phenomenon. Love can either enhance all those fluttery, majestic feelings already there or act as a mask for a person who doesn’t have the best intentions. When I think about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, another cinematic marvel within a career full of them, I also think about the perspective of given Osage language consultant Christopher Cote
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‘Loki’s third episode is revolving around a Timely introduction (and love triangle?)

The prior two episodes of Loki established the overall problem and then had the characters develop around it to a satisfying degree. In “1893,” the Temporal Loom is still about to explode, and O.B. is freaking out about it. Sylvie has already been found, and now the attention turns to Ravonna Renslayer, Ms. Minutes, and a potential Kang variant in the late 1800s in Chicago. The episode provides a fresh landscape for Loki, Mobius, and co. to play around in. The World Fair setting looks incredible
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‘The Devil On Trial’ doesn’t get to the heart of the possessed matter

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It chronicled a specific time within the Warren casefile pantheon when demonic possession was at least initially going to be used as a means of defense in the 1981 murder trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson. The judge did not allow it to be entered as a non-guilty plea, even if it was successful in three prior cases in England. With all things considered, possession is something we see in horror films that move within our deepest, darkest religious fears and someth
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Michael Mann’s ‘Ferrari’ runs a powerful man through the fall from grace ringer

This review is published as part of DraftKings Network’s 2023 New York Film Festival coverage.

To actively describe the overall ethos of Michael Mann’s Ferrari is to picture the hard crashing to earth of a compelling figure from all sides of his life within a three-month period in 1957. The first glimpse of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) that we see is in the 1920s in old-time footage, smiling and cruising to victory. Flash forward to the period the film is based within, and he’s aged and haunted b
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‘American Horror Story: Delicate’s’ part one finale stubs itself in trying to withhold too much for its own good

So, for all the American Horror Story: Delicate enthusiasts out there, let’s do a brief rundown going over some of the happenings before this part one finale. There’s Anna, an actress on the verge of superstardom and having her first child. But a wide range of weird things are going on in a world seemingly looking to make her choose between one or the other. She’s had a stillborn baby come back to life inside of her, and her husband isn’t privy to what’s going on and is close to a woman who look
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‘Dream Scenario’ puts Nicholas Cage in your dreams in a dark comedy about cancelations and influencer co-ops

Dreams are the place where impossibilities fall to the wayside. They are often containers of our biggest desires, replays of our greatest strugglers, and haunted houses of our greatest fears. Sometimes, they are just downright silly and unfathomable. Nevertheless, they are personal places of vulnerability – unless we decide to jot them down or speak about them. Imagine if somebody you never met could walk inside them (Not in a Freddy Krueger sense). They pass through like a stranger on the stree
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‘She Came To Me’ fields many ideas and characters that crash into a chaotic crescendo

Steven (Peter Dinklage) is struggling, which may be an understatement as he’s an opera composer who has been in the clutches of writer’s block for five years straight. In the opening moments of She Came To Me, we see him at an event, hiding from people because the word going around is that he had a nervous breakdown during his last composition. The anxiety and nervousness pour out of his body as his wife Patricia (Anne Hathaway) attempts to calm him down. She was once his psychiatrist, after all
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‘Rustin’ has Colman Domingo’s acting prowess take center stage in a conventional portrait of the civil rights titan

The 1963 March on Washington was one of the most historic moments during the Civil Rights Era, let alone American history. There, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech that stands today as a pillar to bring people together and has even been used by bad faith actors in their arguments to quiet certain parts of the horror concerning racism and prejudice. While King Jr. stood at the podium and gave those words, the foresight and tenacity of Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo) he
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‘AGGRO DR1FT’s attempted abstract world might not be quantifiable by simple adjectives or descriptions

This review is published as part of DraftKings Network’s 2023 New York Film Festival coverage.

“I am the world’s greatest assassin.” It’s one of the first lines from AGGRO DR1FT’s main character, BO (Jordi Mollà). He wants to clarify that he is excellent at what he does and loves his wife and child in a narration pattern echoing at specific points of the film. What is Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT exactly? Shot entirely through an infrared camera, Korine seeks to make you believe that the usual
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‘Poor Things’ puts Emma Stone front and center as a curious, sexually liberated delight without nuts and bolts

This review is published as part of DraftKings Network’s 2023 New York Film Festival coverage.

Frankenstein and adjacent stories mainly follow the blueprint of Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. A scientist decides to dabble in reanimation to defy death and restart life. They partake in an experiment to do so and briefly bask In the marvel of such scientific pursuit. After the “creature” becomes aware, even resentful and vengeful, they realize this type of creationist conquest comes at a cost.
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Does ‘Dear David’ want to be a ghost story or a media content cautionary tale? It’s not so clear.

The internet landscape in which the original 2017 Dear David creepypasta story took off has changed so much that this story might as well have been decades ago. For one, Twitter isn’t even Twitter anymore (I refuse to call it X), and the atmosphere isn’t as kind to a spontaneous creative endeavor such as this one. Even though it was fake, there was magic to following some unexplainable experience as another person was living it – providing pieces to the puzzle in small bites. In the movie adapta
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‘Loki’s second episode pairs the concept of free will against probable timeline calamity

At least we pushed the total destruction of time off the side for at least in the first episode of season two of Loki. “Breaking Brad” still has that same urgency, at least in the background that comes back together in the end. Even more so to that effect, the show found a way to broaden the character interactions with the concept of the TVA and the free will of the variants. OB is still trying to fix the temporal aura, and with that comes the other wrinkle of who can unlock the door that will p
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‘Dark Harvest’ ponders what would happen if a 1960s pseudo version of ‘The Hunger Games’ met small-town horrors

Living in a small town can be a drag as it feels like Groundhog Day. Everybody knows everyone, and there’s probably an expectation of the community synchronizing their schedules for particular events and specific times. How dare you skip the Friday night football game or the Sunday morning church service? Traditions are present in the small midwesterner town within Dark Harvest but with a little more nihilistic twist.

Crops have to be attended to, and to ensure that happens, the teenage boys of
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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is Martin Scorsese’s depiction of America’s thirst for power and the communities it destroys

One of the most harrowing things about Martin Scorsese’s latest three-hour-and-twenty-plus minute epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, is the changes within the physical makeup of the 1920s Osage community in northeastern Oklahoma – a subtle warning to the bluntness of the actions of the outsides that take place. As more Osage members are murdered, the town is rich in culture and specific rituals, and wealth becomes progressively whiter and unidentifiable from many American cities at that time.

Wh
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‘American Horror Story: Delicate’s fourth episode gives us witchy backstory and strange pregnancy craving

The first three episodes of American Horror Story: Delicate put much into play in the creepy world of budding actress and presumably expectant mother Anna Victoria Alcott. She has a husband who doesn’t seem exactly the most trustworthy. A publicist she confides in as a friend, but is also full steam ahead with her career despite the traumatic things Anna has been through. The creepy ladies Anna spots either watch her or warn her not to trust people. And oh, let’s not forget a small door in the b
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A nuanced take on the tribalism wrestling Tuesday night that was

For a second, I remembered what the Monday Night Wars felt like. A weekly WWE and AEW show would face off in a constant, up-the-ante bid for wrestling fans’ attention for one night. NXT announced they would do the first 30-minute commercial free, and then AEW announced the same thing. WWE announced a wealth of talent to come on the show, including Cody Rhodes, The Undertaker, LA Knight, and Askua. AEW instituted a ten-minute overrun, a pre-show including Eddie Kingston vs. Minoru Suzuki, an open
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‘V/H/S/85’ has static fuzz and gore galore in an anthology entry that excites and wanes

Only a few things are certain in life – death, taxes, and the V/H/S franchise finding a new sandbox for horror creators to create their craziest thoughts within a short film. Within six installments and two spin-offs, we’ve gone through different periods in the 90s and tackled the sensation to go viral – all amongst a found footage style esthetic. Given that so many foundational horror films were formulated during the 1980s, it’s only fitting for the next installment to find a home during this p
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‘Totally Killer’ is ‘Back to the Future’ meets slasher with ‘80s sheen

Totally Killer is certainly not shy in letting you know it draws some of its inspiration from the time-traveling, “try not to touch anything” escapades of Back To The Future. The film even draws upon the murky rules of Avengers: Endgame and implements some of its own. In sum, it mixes up some of the slasher vibes of Scream and Halloween with the urgency of time being of the essence. Director Nahnatchka Khan provides enough twists and hilarity to make Killer its own thing while drawing upon the o
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‘Hit Man’ is not a problem-free philosophy, but Glenn Powell’s entertaining rom-com forte

This review is published as part of DraftKings Network’s 2023 New York Film Festival coverage.

It’s safe to say everybody has a different layer of themselves they bring out as situations call for them. Some people are naturally introverted, but can be the life of the party at a get-together with friends. In the “somewhat true story” of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) almost fits that description. He’s a New Orleans psychology professor by day who drives a Honda Civic, go
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‘When Evil Lurks’ is a tremendously bleak and stark possession film

This review is a part of DraftKings Network’s 2023 Fantastic Fest coverage.

Possession films are a dark piece of business as is. The mere thought of some evil entity being able to take over somebody’s physical and mental state to act as a totem to inflict harm has been driving the nightmares of horror fans for years. It’s a test of faith and the ultimate battle between good and evil. Even with how shocking films like The Exorcist and Prince of Darkness are, there are some parameters to them. De
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