Jane Austen's Period Drama (2025)/The Singers (2025)/Two People Exchanging Saliva (2025)/A Friend of Dorothy (2025)

Nominated for Best Live Action Short    For expediency's sake, I'm lumping all the shorts together.

Jane Austen's Period Drama - Kanopy - a very funny short that people online have likened to a better class of SNL skit.  I think that's setting the bar too low but I don't like SNL.  

Miss Estrognia Talbot (Julia Aks) is in the middle of being proposed to by handsome bachelor Mr. Dickley (Ta'imua) when she unexpectedly gets her period.  Confused and alarmed, Dickley rushes her home where she argues with her sisters over how much she should educate him on women's biology.

Honestly, it's 2026.  If we cannot as a society be over the "ew, girls have cooties" factor about periods, what are we even doing?

The Singers - Netflix-  almost the polar opposite of Jane Austen, this doesn't have a single woman on screen and is four times as emotional.

A bar full of men is energized by a late-night bet:  whoever is the best singer wins a free beer and $100.

Absolutely magical performances.

Two People Exchanging Saliva - YouTube - what if Carol had been directed by Yorgos Lanthimos?

A shopgirl (Luàna Bajrami) and a wealthy housewife (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) try to suppress their desire in a world that criminalizes kissing as disgusting.

Only the French would think that the fastest way to show a dystopia is to make kissing illegal.  The garlic gum is going to give me nightmares, though.

A Friend of Dorothy - Kanopy - And we're back to being wholesome and cute.

A teen (Alistair Nwachukwu) trying to retrieve an errant soccer ball from a garden befriends an elderly lady named Dorothy (Miriam Margolyes) who encourages him to pursue his dreams.  All of them.

So sweet.  

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature  Content warning:  racial slurs, gun violence

Susan Lorencs described herself as a perfect neighbor in one of her numerous nuisance calls to police.  She constantly complained about the neighbor kids playing near her apartment, escalating her verbal rhetoric over the course of a year until it reached an inevitably violent end, documented painstakingly through body cam footage of the police responding to her calls.

This was absolutely infuriating to watch.  It is a portrait of entitlement and racism.  Like, I get being an antisocial curmudgeon.  The sound of children's laughter also grates on my nerves.  Do I feel like the Grinch looking down over Whoville every time children scream with joy as they sled down the embankment behind my house?  Yes.  Do I go out and threaten them or yell racial slurs?  No.  Because I am an adult who recognizes that they are CHILDREN and that it is a fucking privilege to have them feel safe enough to play.  And this bitch destroyed a group of children's safety because they were Playing While Black.

This is streaming on Netflix but I am honestly cautioning you if you are sensitive to children being threatened.  It felt a little exploitative when it lingered on the grieving relatives, but I get it.  They're trying to show the extent of the impact.

Blue Moon (2025)

Nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay    Lyracist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) prepares to congratulate his former writing partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), on the latter's smash success on Broadway.  

I was really skeptical but this might be Hawke's best performance in 30 years.  This is everything Maestro tried to be and couldn't.  Hawke is pitch-perfect as Hart, desperate to be loved but terrified of being seen, hiding his aching vulnerabilities under a mask of sarcasm and flippancy.  There are other people in the movie, sure, but none of them hold a candle.   As much as I would love to see Michael B. Jordan win, if there's any justice in the world, Best Actor goes to Hawke.  

I think there are stronger contenders for Original Screenplay but I'm not on the Academy.

Production design is great, but the costumes do most of the work establishing a setting and time period.  Especially good is the way they used forced perspective and set design to make 5'10" Hawke into 5'0" Hart.  Best of all, most of it looked practical.

This is not going to be for everyone.  There's a weird Venn diagram of theater diehards and Linklater fans.  But if that's your bag, you are in for a phenomenal performance.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Train Dreams (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song   Content warning:  racist violence, animal death (elk)

Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) searches his life for meaning in the face of tragedies while working as a logger in the late 19th century Pacific Northwest.

On paper, this is not a film I thought I would enjoy.  It's paced very deliberately, the characters are bare sketches, and the cinematography centers on nature.  I hated Tree of Life for less.  But Train Dreams resonated in a way none of Terence Malick's films ever have.  Maybe Clint Bradley is just a better director for me.  

It is slow and incredibly sad, interspersed with sudden violence.  Bit like life, really.  Edgerton doesn't have a lot of lines but he does a lot of emoting.  It is heavily Vibes-based and will not be for everyone.  I recently had a death in the family so that may have been a factor in how well I responded to it.  It's probably my second choice for Best Picture but I seriously doubt it's actually going to win.  I don't think it will get anything, honestly.  It's too quiet and unassuming.  I will say that I absolutely hated the Nick Cave song at the end.  It felt so jarring tonally and did not work for me at all.  

It is streaming on Netflix.

Frankenstein (2025)

  Del Toro is back with more monsters, everyone!  Content warning:  blood, gore, child abuse, dead animals (CGI deer, CGI wolves, sheep)

A narcissist (Oscar Isaac) tells a polar explorer (Lars Mikkelsen) his tale of woe about being a shitty father to the creature (Jacob Elordi) he made from the parts of dead men he got from a war profiteer (Christoph Waltz).  

Are you one of those people that wish you had read the classics but can't seem to find your way out of the Paranormal Romance section of Barnes & Noble?  Good news!  Del Toro won't let you down, monster-fuckers!  This isn't a super faithful adaptation of the book, but most versions aren't.  This is, however, a very faithful Guillermo del Toro movie.  It is filled with hot men being sad and a beautifully dressed, distant, possibly slightly concussed woman who gently berates them and then dies (twice!).  There's a war happening somewhere in the background of which the Monster is completely innocent, because he is a gentle child-like soul that's treated as both asexual and extremely fuckable.  (The rare gender-swapped Born Sexy Yesterday trope.)

Isaac and Waltz are always good.  They're constant as the stars.  This was my first Elordi performance, I believe, and he was phenomenal.  I don't know if Mia Goth can act.  Presumably, yes, but she's basically wallpaper in this.  The movie fleshes out the character of Elizabeth more than the book does, but that means almost nothing.  The Arctic captain has more emotional range and he's just in the framing device.  Visually, it's stunning.  The costumes, the sets, the production design.  Flawless.  I understand the CGI animals and I approve in theory, but they look very fake still and it did take me out a little.

I liked it.  Did I like it enough to buy it?  I don't know yet.  It will depend on how I feel as I recall it.  I don't know if it will hold up to a rewatch.  Most of GDT's movies do, so we'll see.  It's streaming on Netflix and it might still be in theaters.

The Thursday Murder Club (2025)

  I thought this was a series.  Even when I saw the runtime was an hour and a half long, all I thought was "oh, a British series."  Nope.  It's a movie.  

Joyce (Celia Imrie) is very enthused about moving into the Coopers Chase retirement community.  Even more so when she gets invited to be a provisional member of the Thursday Murder Club, a group of retirees of varying backgrounds who solve cold cases.  As a former nurse, Joyce brings a wealth of medical knowledge to the team, which includes Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), a psychiatrist; Ron (Pierce Brosnan), a union organizer and general blue-collar guy; and Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) who did shady Cold War shit that she can't talk about.  The group finds itself sidetracked by a much more recent murder, however, when one of the owners of Coopers Chase winds up dead while the surviving partner (David Tennant) plans to sell the property and kick all the old folks out.  Now they have to solve the case before they lose their home.

This is ridiculously cute.  Everyone involved is phenomenal and it is a breezy, cozy murder romp.  If the Great British Baking Show hunted Paul Hollywood for sport, this is what it would look like.  Cannot recommend enough.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Horror Watch 2025 - Day 25 - Creep (2014)

  I'm counting this as Women's Horror.  There's no blood, no gore, only one violent scene, but if you're a woman, this might still be pretty triggering.  Proceed with caution.

Aaron (Patrick Brice) gets hired to do a day of videography for Josef (Mark Duplass), who has terminal cancer and wants to record a video diary for his unborn son.  As the day progresses, Aaron gets more and more uncomfortable with Josef's overly affectionate behavior, weirdly intimate questions, and sudden attempts to startle and scare.  

This is just a horrible blind date.  If you are a woman attracted to straight guys, you have likely had a fairly similar experience at some point in your life of a dude being overly familiar, unwilling to accept the word "no," and disrespecting your boundaries while claiming everything is a joke.  If you were very, very unlucky (a little more than 1 in 100,000), it ended exactly like this.  So this movie will feel exhausting.  If you are a dude, this is what you look like when you do this shit.  Stop.  No one likes it.

It's not found footage, technically, but there is a lot of shaky-cam and we all know how I feel about that.  Duplass and Brice are solid performers; I just didn't care for this at all.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Horror Watch 2025 - Day 20 - I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

  I am starting to despise the term "legacyquel".  Content warning:  blood, gore

A group of friends accidentally cause the death of a stranger on the 4th of July and decide to cover it up instead of coming clean.  A year later, one (Madelyn Cline) receives an anonymous note stating that someone knows about their indiscretion.  Guilty and afraid, the group digs into the past of their town, discovering that a similar incident took place in 1997, where a vigilante in a fisherman's coat carved up that year's hot twenty-somethings.  They reach out to a survivor (Jennifer Love Hewitt) for advice before the bodies start piling even higher.

I never watched the original or any of the sequels so some of this was probably wasted on me.  It's still pretty decent.  I was a little annoyed at how indiscriminate the killings seemed to be but the Evil Monologue actually tied it all together, so I will give it points for that.  Overall, a solid enough slasher.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Horror Watch 2025 - Day 12 - Host (2020)

  Okay, the first thing you need to know is that this poster is wildly overselling this movie.  It is not the scariest film of the past decade.  Not even close.  Content warning:  blood, violence

Bored in quarantine, six friends get together on a Zoom call to have a seance.  Only Haley (Haley Bishop) is a true believer; the rest are just there for a good time.  But when Jemma's (Jemma Moore) joking angers an entity, all the participants are suddenly fighting for their lives.

Before I delve too deeply, let me say that I enjoyed watching this.  It's not a bad movie.  Better than Paranormal Activity but not quite as good as Unfriended.  Maybe because I saw Unfriended first.  I had to get my praise in early, because the rest of this is probably going to sound super negative.  

This was filmed during the pandemic and it is not subtle.  All of the characters are isolated, forced to watch their friends suffering, unable to help or even help themselves as an invisible force invades their homes and kills them.  It is 56 minutes long, so it barely even qualifies as a feature-length film but that works to its advantage.  There's no time to really establish them as characters unless you have been part of a similar kind of friend group.  Then you can do some mental shortcuts.  Should they have spent more time fleshing them out?  Eh.  I was good with just the bare bones, especially since that meant there was more time to focus on the supernatural shit happening.  If anything, I would have put extra into the ending, since that did feel very rushed and unsatisfying.  Can't hate the hustle, though!  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

2025 Horror Watch - Day 4 - CAM (2018)

  I do think it's very funny that so far I've been alternating between 2025 and 2018.  I don't know why it worked out like that but I'm not mad about it.  Content warning:  suicides (gun, knife), blood

Alice (Madeline Brewer) works as a camgirl.  As Lola, her popularity is rising, especially as she does more extreme shows, but she can't quite break into the top ranks.  One day, she opens her computer to see that her channel has been stolen by someone who looks exactly like her.  IT support is useless, the cops are worse, and Alice is growing increasingly concerned that she's not the only one being replaced.

When this came out, it was probably really interesting as a concept but now we have Tilly Norwood so the horror of real life has once again eclipsed the horror of imagination.  This future is stupid.  It doesn't ever come out and say what or who is behind the fake account, but we know.

I feel terrible saying it but Brewer will forever be Janine from Handmaid's Tale to me.  The whole time I was watching this, I was like "mmm-hmm, this is why Aunt Lydia hated you."  But bless her, she was very game, considering the entire movie rested on her performance.  

The movie is pretty positive towards the cam performers, which I am not well-versed enough in to know if it's an accurate portrayal of the industry.  Some shit seems pretty universal, though.  It's more of a thriller than straight horror.  There's no jump scares or supernatural flourishes.  If that's your bag, you'll probably enjoy this.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Barbarian (2022)

  For my birthday week, I got to pick the selections for Movie Club and I picked The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Barbarian.  Didn't have a theme in mind, but they worked pretty well together anyway.  Content warning:  sexual assault (off-screen), violence, some gore

Tess (Georgina Campbell) booked an AirB&B in Detroit for her job interview, but when she arrives, she finds that it has been double-booked and a strange man (Bill Skarsgaard) is inside.  A tense night is made worse by strange occurrences in the house, leading to the discovery of a hidden door in the basement.

I laughed so hard during this movie.  I don't want to spoil anything for you but this was one of the most delightful movies I've seen this year.  Wildly entertaining.  It has a triptych-style story with tonally jarring edits at the breaks that could have felt like being bludgeoned but if you just go with it, I promise it's worth the whiplash.  Cannot wait to inflict this on everyone I know.  

It's currently streaming on Netflix but they are taking it off at the end of the month (31 Aug) so hurry or you'll miss your chance.

Divines (2016)

  This is a super cute female friendship movie right up until the Trauma.  Content warning:  sexual assault, violence

Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) are best friends in the Paris projects.  They idolize Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), a hardcore girlboss drug dealer, for her flashy lifestyle and badass demeanor.  Dounia especially sees Rebecca as a stand-in maternal figure and becomes ever more desperate for her approval.  

I have straight up not been having a good time this month so the whole time I was watching this, I kept anticipating something bad happening to one or both girls but I didn't guess the specific thing which still sucker punched me.  I'm not going to do spoilers but FYI, not a happy ending.  It definitely lessened my enjoyment of the film, which sucks because the three actresses were phenomenal.  Kalvanda was menacing and charismatic and Lukumuena's face was so expressive.  I hope both have incredible careers ahead.  But this was Amamra's movie and she took every scene.  A tiny powerhouse.  

So if you're in the mood for a depressing, feel-bad character drama, Divines is streaming on Netflix.

Kpop Demon Hunters (2025)

  This movie is so fun.  Even if you're not into K-Pop.  

Huntr/x are pop stars by day and demon slayers by night, the latest in a long line of singers that maintain a magical web keeping the Demon King, Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun), from stealing the souls of mortals.  But Gwi-Ma has a plan to destroy the girls before the web becomes permanent.  He sends Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), a human turned demon, to form a rival boy-band to steal all of Huntr\x's fans.  Lead singer Rumi (Arden Cho) is pissed but believes there's still some good in Jinu, especially after he refrains from revealing her own terrible secret.  

I found the animation a little off-putting.  There's just something about it that doesn't gel for me.  But the whole movie is so freakin' cute, I stopped caring about a third of the way in.  It is fizzy bubblegum for your brain.  Utterly charming.  And the soundtrack is phenomenal.  I'm not a big K-Pop person (I like BLACKPINK and that's about it) but I immediately bought this one.  So good.  It is streaming on Netflix.

Popstar: Never Stop Stopping (2016)

  Your enjoyment of this film will be directly related to how tolerable you find Andy Samberg and/or Lonely Island.

Conner (Andy Samberg) split from his boy band to go solo(-ish because he kept his buddy Owen (Jorma Taccome) on backup) and had a wildly successful debut.  But now, with his sophomore album, interest is waning and Conner is willing to do almost anything to stay in the spotlight.

It's not really a parody so much as it is a paint-by-numbers music biopic comedy.  It's basically an extended SNL skit with a massive budget.  If that is your jam, you've probably already seen this, honestly.  The original songs are fine.  I didn't find them super funny or interesting but that kind of works for the character, a paper-thin man-child on the edge of being a has-been at 22.  There are a ton of cameos from actual pop musicians, again lending to the SNL-ness of it all, and a surprisingly subdued performance from Sarah Silverman that kind of stole the show for me.

Seems like a good background movie for cooking or cleaning your house.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Heart Eyes (2025)

  I took a little hiatus from posting that turned into a much longer hiatus than I expected, but I'm back now.  And it seems fitting that the first post after an absence would be a horror rom-com.  My favorite and least favorite genres smashed together in defiance of God.  Content warning:  blood, gore, violence

Marketing executive Ally (Olivia Holt) created a morbid ad campaign for her boss's (Michaela Watkins) jewelry company because she was still reeling from a breakup.  Now she has to deal with the hotshot --emphasis on hot-- freelancer her boss brought in to make changes.  Jay (Mason Gooding) is a hopeless romantic and eager to get on Ally's good side, inviting her out on Valentine's Day to the most romantic restaurant in Seattle, and inadvertently making them a target for a serial killer.  The Heart-Eyes Killer has been moving from city to city, killing couples on V-Day in gruesome ways.  Ally and Jay are not a couple, but it's hard to explain the circumstances when you're running for your life from a crossbow-wielding anti-Cupid.

If you like horror and hate rom-coms, this is hilarious.  If you like horror and rom-coms, this is hilarious.  If you hate horror and like rom-coms, this might be too much.  If you hate both, why are you here?  Go back to watching sad character dramas, freak.

The ending does kind of drag on but the majority of this movie is a rollicking good time filled with excessive gore and every rom-com trope known to man.  And for my 90s kids, it's got supporting turns from Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa.  It's streaming on Netflix.  

The Six Triple Eight (2024)

Nominated for Best Original Song    The women of the 6888 deserved better than this.  Content warning:  war violence, blood, racial slurs

Lena (Ebony Obsidian) decides to join the Women's Auxiliary Corps after her boyfriend (Gregg Sulkin) is killed during WWII.  As a Black woman, the only unit available is the Six Triple Eight, led by Major Charity Adams (Kerry Washington).  MAJ Adams has been training these women but never receiving any orders to actually do anything useful until General Holt (Dean Norris) assigns them to be the new postal battalion in the European theater.  It sounds like a meaningless job until MAJ Adams realizes that her battalion is meant to organize, sort, and deliver over 17 million pieces of mail in six months.  They were set up to fail but they persisted.

This is a remarkable story that deserved better than this vehicle.  It's schmaltzy, filled with montages, poor characterization, and abysmal dialogue.  Washington, Obsidian, and Milauna Jackson do their level best to rise above the material but this could have been a Hallmark special.  It's honestly insulting but it's also the only attempt made to bring this story to a wider audience.  That is a shame on behalf of the entire film industry.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Anuja (2024)/A Lien (2024)/I'm Not a Robot (2023)

Nominated for Best Live Action Short Film    I managed to find three of the Live Action shorts so I just shoved them all into one post.  This one is on Netflix.  

Anuja (Sajda Pathan) is 8-years-old and working with her older sister (Ananya Shanbhag) in a textile factory.  A math whiz, she is offered a chance to take a placement exam at a boarding school but the factory owner (Nagesh Bhonsle) makes a counter-offer:  work in the office for slightly more money or he will fire Anuja and her sister.

It has an open ending but it's still a little fucked up that an 8-year-old child has to weigh her entire future and choose between opportunity but being separated from her only family and crushing poverty but not being alone.

  Content warning:  deportation  

This one is on Vimeo.  Oscar (William Martinez) is in the Immigration office for his final interview before he receives his green card when he is targeted by ICE for deportation.  His frantic wife (Victoria Ratermanis) struggles to find the paperwork that will keep their 7-year-old daughter (Koralyn Rivera) from being taken as well.

Here's your friendly reminder that ICE is an evil organization and should be abolished.

  Content warning:  suicide  

A woman (Ellen Parren) fails a Captcha test at work and spirals into an existential crisis.  

This is also fucked up but at least it's funny, like a Black Mirror episode filmed by Wes Anderson.  It's on YouTube and The New Yorker website.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Nominated for Best Animated Feature    No content warnings needed for this one!

Faithful companion Gromit feels the sting of rejection when Wallace (Ben Whitehead) invents a "helpful" robot gardener called Norbot (Reece Shearsmith) and seems to prefer its company.  But the pair's old nemesis, Feathers McGraw, is plotting revenge from his prison cell/enclosure and hacking Norbot is the first step.  Gromit must stop the rogue AI garden gnomes from destroying Wallace's good name and reputation and framing him for theft before Wallace is locked away.

At this point, the "turn evil" button/setting on robots is old hat but still funny.  I would have liked more focus on Feathers McGraw and less on the cops but I understand you need some characters to talk in your movie.  

If you are already a W&G fan, congrats on another successful entry.  If you're not, this won't make you one.  Head on back to Memoir of a Snail, fellow degenerate.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Emilia Perez (2024)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Song (x2), Best International Feature, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and Best Film Editing    Content warning:  kidnapping, discussion of medical procedures, cartel violence, mass graves, dismemberment (fingers cut off)

Overworked, underpaid, underappreciated Mexico City lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) gets an offer she can't refuse from a cartel leader looking to make a change.  In exchange for several million untraceable dollars, Rita researches and compares doctors worldwide to find a reassignment specialist and helps her client fake an appropriate death.  Years later, Rita is approached once more by the new and improved Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofia Gascón) who feels the heat has died down significantly enough to renew her relationship with her former wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and children.  

Let me begin by saying that when I watched this I was unaware of the controversy surrounding it.  My first impression is that it was entertaining but had some significant flaws.  The plot meanders and could do with some tighter editing, and the songs (oh, it is a full-blown musical, by the way) are okay but lacked pizzazz.  I think contemporary musicals are like this.  You either embrace the OTT nature and lean in or you might as well just film a straight drama.  Saldaña is the star of this film and she should have been nominated for Best Actress, not Supporting.  No shade to Gascón, but Saldaña literally dances away with the movie.

So the main controversy is that this is a French film set in Mexico but filmed in Paris with no Mexican leads and the director admitted he did zero research and was plainly uninterested in any sort of nuance surrounding narcocultura, modern Mexico, or even transitioning.  And it shows.  This is very trope-y, generic, clichéd window dressing for a story that could have been set anywhere.  This could have been a Breaking Bad episode.  Audiard told reporters that he wanted to see if he as a 70-year-old white cis heterosexual man could make a film about transitioning without getting cancelled.  Is that a good enough reason?  Probably not.  But it happened anyway.  And Netflix has thrown a fuckton of money into campaigning for this Oscar season.  

As a piece of streaming entertainment, I thought it was fine.  If it were not nominated for 13 Oscars, it would probably just disappear into obscurity as a pandering, stereotypical cash grab.  But it is nominated, so now the question becomes is this outrage going to propel this film into being awarded Best Picture?

It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

  This was one of the Oscar nominees I didn't get to last year and I missed it again when it came up in Movie Club, so this has been kind of a catch-up week for me.  (Also, I completely missed the nominations for both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards so my TBW list has jumped up like 100 slots.  Thank God the Oscars don't drop until the 17th.)  

Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) chickened out of being a kamikaze pilot at the end of WWII, landing instead on a small island for "repairs" and inadvertently witnessing a local monster, Godzilla, which rampaged over the island and killed all the maintenance workers.  Shikishima returned to a war-torn Tokyo to find that his family is dead and his neighbor (Sakura Andô) hates him.  He takes in refugee Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and orphaned Akiko (Sae Nagatani) but refuses to allow himself to care for them.  And then Godzilla returns, angry over nuclear testing and even larger than before.  Shikishima needs to come up with a plan to stop the giant lizard before it ruins his life even further.

Maybe this was just overhyped to me, but I didn't think it was nearly as good as Shin Godzilla.  It felt more cynical, more depressed, and more like a Jaws riff than a Godzilla movie.  Maybe because Shikishima is not a sympathetic protagonist?  Nothing about this worked for me.  

It has a ton of critical acclaim and won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects so clearly other people like it.  It's streaming on Netflix.