Annabelle: Creation Scares Up a Win
In Annabelle: Creation, the titular doll’s first owner loved to play hide and seek: “Find Me,” she’d write on a note for her father. Eventually, the doll seemed to pick up the game, as well … much to the chagrin of its parade of owners. But you don’t have to look too hard to find […]
Robot Love
The Curiosity rover recently celebrated its fifth birthday on Mars, and it did so without so much as a cupcake. No presents, no candles, no nothing. Perhaps that does not surprise you: Curiosity, after all, is a machine, and machines are notoriously low-key about celebrations. Wish Siri, the digital assistant on the iPhone, a happy […]
The Dark Tower Ekes Out a Win
After more than a decade of development, Stephen King’s fantastical world of The Dark Tower hit theaters this weekend. But while the film features a Man in Black (courtesy Matthew McConaughey), it will be a while before the film gets into the black. The Dark Tower movie—an amalgamation/sequel of sorts to King’s massive series—did debut […]
Culture Clips: Is 13 Reasons Why Really Dangerous? Science Says …
Oh, Netflix. How did we manage to fill this blog without thee? Last week, we wrote about your newest controversial show, To the Bone. This week, you’re back in the news again for 13 Reasons Why—and for a rather unfortunate reason. When 13 Reasons Why was released earlier this spring, many viewers and health experts […]
Dunkirk Wins Again
A miracle for Dunkirk? Well, probably not. But Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic still pulled out another win—fending off a platoon of smiley faces, a plutonium platinum-haired hero and the year’s most successful raunchfest. We can almost hear the subsequent speech at Warner Bros. headquarters: “We’ll fight them at the multiplex. We’ll fight them […]
The Dangerously Mixed Messages of To the Bone
A confession: I don’t understand eating disorders. I get the desire to be thin. But I don’t get the compulsion to starve oneself, or to binge and then purge, or to do any of the many, many things that those with eating disorders do to become so very, very skinny. So when I watched Netflix’s […]
Seeing Ghosts (and a Hint of Faith) in A Ghost Story: An Interview with David Lowery
Pete’s Dragon director David Lowery seems obsessed two things: time and loss. And he mulls them both deeply in his quirky new film, A Ghost Story. In the R-rated movie, a recently deceased character known only as C is a ghost—one draped in a sheet like Charlie Brown on Halloween. He spends most of the […]
Dunkirk Shows Us We’re Stronger Together Than Alone
This Christopher Nolan guy? Yeah, he can make a pretty good movie. In the decade I’ve been working at Plugged In, I think I’ve reviewed almost all of his films, and they’ve all had a takeaway for me—something that, even if the movies themselves weren’t uniformly positive, I could point to and say, “That resonated […]
War For Planet of the Apes Wins Weekend Battle
You could say that Caesar made some salad. War for the Planet of the Apes, featuring the super-smart alpha chimp Caesar, scrambled up the box office skyscraper, pulled down your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and thumped its metaphorical chest in triumph this weekend. The latest Planet of the Apes flick cleared an estimated $56.5 million to […]
Parents Blame Children’s Deaths on 13 Reasons Why
The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why has been out for more than three months now, but it’s still in the news for all the wrong reasons. Two California teens committed suicide in April, and their grieving parents are speaking out now, blaming 13 Reasons Why for their children’s deaths. Bella Herndon hanged herself in her […]
