Danielle Deadwyler

40 Acres

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A silhouetted figure with an assult rifle

Prepping for the apocalypse seems to be mostly a white thing. 40 Acres rebalances things a touch. A paranoid survivalist drama set in a world where the “animal biosphere” has been killed off by a pandemic, and a civil war has further screwed things up, most of it plays out in a compound where a non-white family headed by Danielle Deadwyler’s Hailey and Michael Greyeyes’s Galen try to put some some semblance of life back together while fending off attacks from beyond the stockade perimeter. That “40 Acres” alerts us that something racial going on here. It’s a reference to the 40 acres and a mule promised to freed slaves during the American … Read more

Parallel

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Vanessa has seen something

A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother. Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning frantically busy films with a huge array of characters. Here, none of that. But Parallel isn’t just a calm corrective to an exhausting genre but also a smart drama that stands up on its own terms. Instead of busy, here we have a film that’s cool, almost static at times, wordy, contemplative. Set in a chichi modern lake … Read more