The Obsessive Viewer

Project Power (2020)

Premise: A thousand 17-year-old boys from Texas join together to build a representative government from the ground up.

Netflix’s Project Power gives summer 2020 movie audiences a much needed infusion of blockbuster entertainment and superpowered action. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jamie Foxx, and Dominique Fishback make up a strong triumvirate in a story that’s exciting and filled with varied big-budget set pieces. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman create impressive action sequences and Mattson Tomlin’s script provides an engaging plot with sympathetic yet flawed characters, despite some missteps along the way.

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Sputnik (2020)

Premise: The lone survivor of an enigmatic spaceship incident hasn’t returned back home alone-hiding inside his body is a dangerous creature.

Sputnik, the new Russian sci-fi horror film from IFC Midnight directed by Egor Abramenko, infuses elements of creature and body horror with the humanity of a compassionate protagonist. At the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, psychologist Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is brought to a secluded research facility to analyze the bizarre case of a cosmonaut who returned to Earth with a parasitic entity in him. Charged with having to figure out a way to separate the entity from the host, Tatyana finds her conviction not to harm others being tested as the morals of those assisting in the institute are slowly called into question.

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Boys State (2020)

Premise: A thousand 17-year-old boys from Texas join together to build a representative government from the ground up.

In a sense, Boys State acts as a document of the political climate of today. It shows the passion and fervor of those who seek elected office while also showcasing the lengths to which people will go to win; whether it’s in the name of their political party or if they are seeking office for themselves. The fact that this depiction of our democracy is filtered through the perspective of 17 year old boys creating a mock government over the course of a week gives Boys State a prescient energy. Seeing the potential next generation of politicians navigate an ultra conservative group and play to the whims of the general populace helps peel back the curtain on the democratic process while also exposing the less savory aspects of the political machine.

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An American Pickle (2020)

Premise: An immigrant worker at a pickle factory is accidentally preserved for 100 years and wakes up in modern day Brooklyn.

An American Pickle‘s concept should be a delightful fish out of water story around which to build a movie. For the first 20 minutes or so, it achieves this well enough. However, it soon abandons that concept in favor of a satirical look at capitalism and the pursuit of the American dream in the age of social media mob rule. Unfortunately, it isn’t as interesting or as funny as the premise that it leaves behind in its first act, which itself was only skating by on the charisma of Seth Rogen’s performance.

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She Dies Tomorrow (2020)

Premise: After waking up convinced that she is going to die tomorrow, Amy’s carefully mended life begins to unravel. As her delusions of certain death become contagious to those around her, Amy and her friends’ lives spiral out of control in a tantalizing descent into madness.

She Dies Tomorrow, the latest from filmmaker Amy Seimetz, offers a unique exploration of existential anxiety by personifying depression as a contagion that’s easily spread. It’s a film that takes its subject matter seriously and eschews any subtlety or subtext with it. Instead, the specter of impending death and anxiety takes the forefront and drives what very little plot is in the movie. In a strange way, this approach actually works to the film’s benefit some of the time. Unfortunately, at other points, She Dies Tomorrow feels too meandering for its own good.

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