Sean Patrick

Trying to bring order to the chaos of Devil’s Night: The Dawn of Nain Rouge is an exhausting task. I am merely being hyperbolic here, but I may actually put more work into sorting out this ludicrous plot than anyone actually involved in the making of Devil’s Night: The Dawn of Nain Rouge. Based around an urban legend in Detroit, with both Native American or, more honestly, racist, origins and supernatural origins, Devil’s Night: The Dawn of Nain Rouge is distilled chaos.

The term 'Manchild' has a negative connotation these days. The term is used as a shorthand for a legitimate psychological issue called 'Peter Pan Syndrome.' It's a disorder for people who are unable to feel like grown ups. The term is used these days in a more colloquial sense. Manchild is used often to criticize men who exhibit childish behavior. The term has olde English origins but it could be argued that it took on a more colloquial meaning in 1990 when a young man from California named Shea Cotton emerged on the national basketball scene.

The plagues of the last 60 years of American history come to the fore in Spike Lee’s new movie Da 5 Bloods. The film is a reckoning of the Vietnam war, race relations, the murder of Martin Luther King, and the emptiness of avarice and greed. All of this on display amidst Spike Lee’s virtuoso direction and with a pair of performances from Delroy Lindo and Chadwick Boseman that will leave you breathless.

Mope is an exceedingly unpleasant pseudo-comedy-drama about the lowest depths of the porn business. Co-written and directed by Lucas Heyne, Mope opens on a porn set with a group of terrifyingly misshapen and desperate men performing an unspeakable act on a willing female porn star. She wants this thing to happen, apparently, but that does not alleviate the horror of this graphic scene, a jarring introduction to this story and to our main characters.

Parents and children are an area of drama that movies don’t explore enough. The rich layers of life in the parent-child relationship make for wonderful stories. Proof of that concept is the new movie The Short History of the Long Road, an award worthy drama that explores the life of a young woman dealing with the dual traumas of lost and absent parents. Nola, played by the exceptional Sabrina Carpenter, demonstrates beautifully how loss and absence adds up to so much of who she is.

Boy Erased is a powerful, infuriating, and deeply compelling work. This 'based on a true story' drama, from writer-actor-director Joel Edgerton, tells a very effective story in a straightforward and properly dramatic fashion. The story happens to tap a deep well of disdain in me, not toward the movie, but toward the subject. As a long time supporter of the LGBTQ community, love to my non-binary friends, Boy Erased made my blood boil just as it intended to.