Next In Fashion is a fashion designer reality series with excellent production design. It’s a gorgeous show. It’s well lit with state of the art equipment available to every contestants. Fabric and notions are provided in a supply room revealed with dramatic lighting after each challenge is announced. Designers also have all the planning supplies they could ever want, included product placement tablets and smartphones to sketch off of.
Mati Diop makes quite a statement in her debut narrative feature Atlantics. She crafts an original paranormal drama with romantic elements unlike anything I’ve encountered before. She plays with reinventing the tropes of the literary Gothic in a way that celebrates marginalized people and otherizes those with money and power.
See You Yesterday is a response to police brutality against people of color in America. It’s a time travel adventure story about trying to right society’s wrongs no matter what the cost. It’s a tribute to the optimism of youth and a critique of how often society pushes the next generation to solve problems they had no hand in creating. It’s inherently a political text that never preaches.
Director Floria Sigismondi’s spin on The Turn of the Screw is an ambiguous text in a way that can only happen onscreen. There is no easy answer. There is no right or wrong interpretation. It’s a series of events inspired by the Henry James’ story told in a specific but not necessarily chronological order.
The Testaments, the long-awaited but never-expected sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, is an intentionally problematic text. Atwood is expanding the world of Gilead with three very different perspectives from the powerless Offred in the original novel. The three characters tell their own stories of what it’s like to be a child in Gilead, a teenager outside of Gilead, and an Aunt after Offred’s story is long over. They are contemporaries of each other, but strangers for most of the book.
