Netflix Archive

Black Earth Rising

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March 7, 2019 Jerry L. Holsopple

The opening music hooked me as Black Earth Rising, a mini-series on Netflix, came on with the titles featuring the fearful hope of the story, told with simple drawn lines rushing across the screen. I had to watch it again. It took me a few seconds to realize this was Leonard Cohen’s gravel-low voice chanting us into the darkness, surrounded by the voices of a choir and the cantor from a synagogue. The musical complexity is a fantastic opening to this multifaceted journey into the remains of the Rwandan genocide, and the tentacles that reach into the war next door […]

High Flying Bird

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February 14, 2019 Vic Thiessen

There is nothing worth watching at the local cinema this month, so I checked out Netflix, which released the best film made in 2018 (Roma). Roma is a perfect example of why I’m not a big fan of the concept of Netflix Original Films, because Roma deserves to be watched on a big screen, not on a TV (even if it’s 60” wide). The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, released by Netflix in November, is another example of this. But if Netflix is helping these films get made, I suppose I must view this as a positive thing. And some Netflix […]

The Expanse

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June 22, 2018 Michelle D. Sinclair

Unlike many far-future shows or movies, The Expanse is believable to a harrowing degree. There are no Vulcans, or lightsabers, or even aliens with strange protrusions from their heads. Instead, you have a premise and a plot that seem ripped straight from our past tendencies, projected into a future landscape as fascinating as it is terrible. Based on a series of novels by James S. A. Corey and set in the 23rd century, the series presents a future where humanity has colonized the inner part of the solar system, with stations located as far out as Jupiter’s moons. Even some […]

Amateur

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April 20, 2018 Michelle D. Sinclair

Netflix is releasing new movies direct to its streaming site at a rate of about one or two a week, and despite the acclaim garnered by some of its earlier projects, it is not skewing toward quality. “Throw everything at the ceiling and see what sticks” seems to be the ruling approach. From that inauspicious breeding ground comes Amateur, a social media–infused spin on the old underdog sports story. Number blindness poses challenges on the court as well—how does a point guard who can’t read the shot clock or the scoreboard control the flow of the game? Eighth grader Terron […]

Stranger Things

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December 23, 2016 Michelle D. Sinclair

Twenty minutes into the first episode of Stranger Things, a sense of deja vu, or at the very least, nostalgia will come over people of my generation. No cell phones, primitive computers, and kids riding bicycles like grown-ups use cars? We must be in the realm of the 1980s, or at least the version that used to inhabit the big screen. That impression is intentional, since writer/directors/brothers Matt and Ross Duffer crafted the series as an homage to Spielberg films and other classics in that era of storytelling–particularly E.T. or even The Goonies. Those adventures still took time to explore […]