best movie review tiktok

10 Movie-Review TikTok Accounts to Watch

Rotten Tomatoes isn’t the only website for movie reviews anymore; many are heading to TikTok.  TikTokers have plenty to say on new and old movies alike — the hashtag #moviereview has over 932.7 million views. If you’re a movie-lover, a brand looking to work with movie buffs or an influencer hoping to step into film reviews, there are plenty of opportunities to share new and exciting content on TikTok .

10 movie-review TikTok accounts to watch

Madi Koch, or Madi Moo as she goes by on TikTok, has created an audience of 3 million film buffs with her movie reviews. She’s been invited by brands like Netflix to see and review new films before they come out to the public. If you’re looking to work with a film reviewer or you want to focus your own TikTok around movies, check out Madi’s videos.

@maddikoch THE LIE. Spoiler posted ! #movierecommendation #movie #moviesuggestion #movieclip #scarymovie #moviescene ♬ original sound - Maddi Moo

Cameron Kozak

Dubbed “Your TikTok Movie Guy,” Cameron Kozak on TikTok has built a following of almost 790,000 followers by sharing his movie reviews. Most of his videos share a scene from the film with his own voiceover giving his opinion, like this one in the movie, “ Encanto ,” or this one about what he’s looking for in the “ Batman” movie. Don’t worry, though — Cameron always lets you know if he’s giving away any spoilers so the film doesn’t get ruined for you!

@kodak_cameron Come back every week for a new mystery waiting to be solved, stream POKER FACE today! only on @peacock streaming now. #pokerfacepeacock ♬ original sound - Cameron Kozak

J Buck Studios

With 393,000 followers, J Buck Studios is another favorite film and movie review TikTok account to work with or follow. Equipped with sarcasm, J Buck gives fun, in-depth movie reviews on new films and some of his favorites. He’s even started a YouTube channel where he can give even longer reviews on upcoming films.

@jbuckstudios Did you know this about Clue? #cluemovie #clue #moviedetails #jbuckstudios #jbuck #eastereggs ♬ original sound - JBuck

TikToker J Stoobs (aka Megan) shares in-depth movie and comic reviews with her 420,000 followers. She’s even worked with brands and gone to the red carpet event for the new “Batman” movie. Megan also dives into social injustices and likes to show scenes from movies to help change the conversation.

@jstoobs Also it’s genuinely funny as hell #tv #movies #girls ♬ original sound - stoobs

Let’s Watch That

With 173,000 followers , Let’s Watch That is another TikToker sharing movie reviews, but this channel has a slight focus on horror films . Love ‘em or hate ‘em, horror movies have quite the following and this TikToker shares her feelings on the horror films you should watch despite their bad reviews. If horror films aren’t your thing, don’t worry — she also throws in movies that will boost serotonin levels .

@letswatchthat The Pale Blue Eye is on Netflix now #fyp #newmovies #review #film #thriller #christianbale #harrymelling #thepaleblueeye #filmtok #letswatchthat #films2023 #2023 ♬ Chopin Nocturne No. 2 Piano Mono - moshimo sound design

Cinema Nation

Cinema Nation is a group-run TikTok about all things movies and television. They’ve grown their following to almost 150,000 other movie lovers with their in-depth movie reviews and letting their followers know which movies to watch out for in the upcoming month .

@cinemanation It’s About Drive. It’s About Power. #fyp #blackadam #dc #movie #moviereview #filmtok #cinemanation #greenscreen ♬ original sound - Cinema Nation

Muny Rags, a Toronto-based TikToker , is a movie writer and director who likes to not only give reviews, but show his followers why certain aspects are important in filmmaking. He also likes to show films that aren’t brand new and even explains why props are important in films. Muny Rags’ unique take on film reviews has helped his TikTok grow to almost 80,000 followers.

@muny_rags #smilemovie #smilemovie2022 #horrormovie #movieanalysis #filmanalysis #learnontiktok ♬ Smile - Lily Allen

Anime and movies are two genres that sum up Cinemonika on TikTok. If you’re looking for anime movie recommendations or funny skits on popular TV shows, Cinemonika has plenty of short TikToks for you to scroll through. While she only has about 16,000 followers on TikTok, you can also find Cinemonika on YouTube with a subscriber base of 138,000. Her YouTube videos show even more in-depth recommendations on anime movies she recommends.

@cinemonika the most wholesome show i’ve seen in a while 🥹💗 #themakanai #netflix #netflixrecommendation #tvshow #japanesetvshow #koreeda #hirokazukoreeda ♬ End Theme of “The Makanai” 舞妓さんちのまかないさん エンドテーマ (feat. キヨ) - Yoko Kanno

With just under 18,000 followers on TikTok, Vidz by V is an 18-year-old filmmaker who shares movie and TV reviews. Because of her love for filmmaking, she has a unique take on watching films and TV shows. She even did a roundup video on what she believes were the best films of 2021 .

@vm_b Just some of my fav films #film #filmtok #movies #spidermannowayhome #animatedmovies #marvelmovies #filmtokers #movieindustry #movietoker #gonegirl #ladybird #intothespiderverse #midsommarmovie #jojorabbit #womeninfilmmaking #womeninfilm #tiktikboom #andrewgarfield ♬ Boho days from tick tick boom Netflix - JameCur

Lindsay Shannon Joyner

Lover of all things film, Lindsay Shannon Joyner shares relaxing reviews of movies with her 25,000 followers. As a “film fatale” as she calls herself, Lindsay joins in on different TikTok trends to share 50 films set in the 50 states and even film ideas to watch on a first date .

@filmlinds movie tag! 🎞️✨ #a24 #filmtok #movietok #moviereview #everythingeverywhereallatonce #greenscreen ♬ sarahs movie tag - sarah ! 🦕

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TikTok is a social media platform which has become surprisingly massive in the past few years, despite being owned by a Chinese conglomerate with ties to China's government. Its algorithm allows many people to see and follow others they would never interact with. Once the TikTok algorithm receives a sense of what you enjoy, you will be shown videos from that 'side' of TikTok. For example, for those who watch films, it would be called "filmtok" or "movietok." Your FYP (or 'For Your Page') will show you only movie and film-related content if those are the only video you like or watch.

There are a few different types of creators in the movietok and filmtok side of TikTok. The most significant number of creators on this side of TikTok is "list" creators. They do videos such as "top five saddest movies of all time " or " top 10 Christmas movies ," all of which are opinionated and not for everyone. You can find any of these channels easily by searching for the title of those lists, but if you're more of a filmtok person, they will most likely find you without searching for them.

If you are looking for new shows or films, follow all the basic streaming services or any major channels you like. Most have a TikTok and are promoting their works constantly. This is an excellent way to track which shows and films are coming up for their premier. Aside from that, there are a variety of great TikTok channels out there for every kind of cinephile.

Reviews and Critiques

For a less biased recommendation on what to watch next, check out Maddi Koch (@maddikoch). She is a creator with three million followers who recommends movies to her viewers. She gives a short synopsis and generally a reason, in her own opinion, why she thinks you should watch the film. While this is her opinion, her followers all tend to agree with her recommendations, giving her more credibility for her taste in cinema. For mainstream movie recommendations, she is the channel to follow.

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For a little more depth into the movie's themes, plot, and characters, check out Cameron Kozak (@kozak_cameron). He is a TikTok creator who reviews films. He generally begins with a short synopsis and then critiques the movie. He has 1.4 million followers and often has positive and agreeable comments with his critiques in the comments on the videos. He also reviews film industry aspects, such as "worst movie poster of 2022," and provides interesting thoughts on the film marketing industry. This is the account to follow for movie reviews, critiques, and more about the industry.

Another great reviewer is Megan @JStoobs. She gives fun but in-depth movie and comic reviews to her viewers. She has about 500 thousand followers and lots of positive feedback in her comments. She does reviews and content such as the top 15 most important animated films, which discusses what each film did for the world of animation.

Comedic TikTok Creators

Tiktok also has some very comedic videos for people who love film. Many channels take a cinematic concept and redo it perfectly in a comic light.

Nicholas Flannery (@NicholasFlannery) is one of those channels. He has three million followers on TikTok and creates accurate parodies of pieces of films in different genres. He makes videos such as "the dead wife at the beginning of the movies," which is a montage of him dressed in a wig and women's clothing, doing activities such as sipping coffee on the front porch, swinging in a park, going on a stroll, etc. It accurately portrays all the stereotypes that montage films tend to do when the character has a dead wife.

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Flannery has many others, including "every cafeteria scene in a teen movie," or "every movie when the husband is hiding something." All are extraordinarily accurate and make you think about how many similar movies set up their plots and scenes with overused clichés .

Caroline Klidonas (@Carolineklidonas) is a somewhat lesser-known creator with 354 thousand followers. She does videos similar to Nicholas, mostly parodying the stereotypes of genre movies . She tends to make videos in a series, outlining entire plots of essential films such as her "heist movie series," which involves three videos. These include the classic heist movie stereotypes of the meeting scene, the heist, and the plan going wrong. She puts all her series in organized categories to find at the top of her feed.

Overall, TikTok can provide you with whatever film content creation you want; you simply need to stay on the filmtok side of the algorithm, so it pops up frequently on your FYP. If you have trouble getting to filmtok, merely search #filmtok in the search bar and scroll through the hashtag for a while, liking videos. This should steer your FYP algorithm more toward the content you want to see.

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10 best tiktok accounts for film buffs.

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With the latest trailer drops for movies like The Fabelmans and White Noise, film buffs can rejoice for another packed season of arthouse crafts and blockbusters as the year soon comes to a close. While cinema fans wait for these films to hit the big screen, there are many content creators out there to provide their expertise and discuss their love for the cinema on TikTok.

Some of these creators tend to focus on a certain franchise more than others, such as Star Wars or The Lord Of The Rings , but that doesn't mean they don't discuss or tackle other subjects involving cinema. Others don't even talk about the films themselves but rather the making of the projects.

Critiquegeek

As her account name might suggest, Amber is a proud geek and content creator who covers various genres and franchises. Her biggest subject that many of her TikToks focus on is the Middle-Earth franchise. This can range from the Tolkien books to discussing theories about The Rings Of Power , including a parody video on theories about The Stranger.

This creator also showcases her love for Disney movies, Marvel, Star Wars , and more. Critiquegeek gives her opinions in calm and pleasant manners, but she is not afraid to face off against toxic behavior in fandoms. As a bonus, Critiquegeek also has several cosplay videos that are nothing but entertaining.

Bstarrcinema

Bryan Starr is an endearing creator who goes out of his way to showcase different entertainment media stores, from video rental stores to comic book stores to actual film-related museums. He even featured VHS tapes with their original covers in some locations. His upbeat energy makes it easy to want to find these kinds of stores since something is charming about actual media stores.

That's not all since Bryan also posts TikToks about film news, reviews, and more. Even a video talking about unique slipcovers for steelbook cases is enough to hook a viewer into watching his content. Each video shows a lot of effort as he uses multiple angles and gives rather eloquent narration that keeps the viewer engaged.

CodyLeachReviews

A very down-to-Earth creator, Cody Leach is as enjoyable to watch on TikTok as he is on YouTube, with his main focus being the horror genre. His YouTube gives much longer and more detailed reviews on films, games, and shows, while his TikToks are essentially a much quicker version of that. Cody Leach makes his TikToks as companion pieces to his longer videos, posting reactions to movies he just watched as he leaves the theater.

He also does movie rankings on his TikTok, such as all the films he's seen within a month. Typically, Cody Leach backs up all of his opinions with jokes that are sure to leave a lot of people's sides hurting. On top of it all, he has plenty of other videos on his account that isn't about cinema but is still entertaining.

The Matman Show

For those looking for a variety of pop-culture content, The Matman Show provides just that with his highly energetic videos. One video will have Matman discussing a new movie or show, and the next could be a voice impression video, with a few skits where he cosplays Lucifer Morningstar, given his many looks in the show. However, some of his best content is when he goes after calls out the negativity in fandoms in humorous ways.

There are so many trolls on TikTok who simply try to put creators down, and Matman always fights back in clever and often hilarious manners. Matman's TikToks showcase his love for Star Wars , the DC universe, and many other franchises. Like Cody Leach, his videos are usually mixed with humor to make them even more enjoyable.

Props To History

This account focuses on many kinds of films, but not in the typical sense. Instead, it's more of an educational account of the history and importance of props in filmmaking. Props to History will showcase how certain props are made, how they work, and more.

Some of his most fascinating TikToks are the ones that focus on famous props from iconic films , with the creator giving a detailed history of what happened to that prop and where it currently is if it still exists. It's a nice change in content that focuses on the behind-the-scenes as well as the creator's views on different movies, new and old.

People can name any franchise in pop culture, and Megan Cruz, AKA JStoobs, has covered it in some way via her TikToks. She keeps a bright attitude and gives her opinions on everything going on in the world with the likes of new horror films, such as Barbarian, the MCU, Disney movies, and more. She also has talked about older films, including the original star-studded Clue , and ranked her favorite movies from the 90s.

JStoobs also reports on movie news, reviews new episodes of TV shows, and will even have her own personal hot takes on subjects. The entire time JStoobs is never disrespectful to others and makes every video entertaining, informative, and pleasant to watch, whereas a lot of critics tend to fall into the trapping of making their videos negative and filled with bitterness.

Maceahwindu

This quickly rising content creator is the definition of a Star Wars fan that the community should use as an example. The Star Wars community has gained a poor reputation for being toxic and backbiting filmmakers. Joshua Johnson, AKA Maceahwindu, puts those kinds of toxic fans to shame and provides some of the most charming and enjoyable Star Wars content on TikTok.

He gives both positive and negative opinions without being too hypercritical or rude. He also makes a plethora of humorous skits and will cover other films, such as Marvel. Recently, he even made videos focusing on the new adaptation of The Little Mermaid . Maceahwindu has also made other forms of content, such as his own covers of famous songs, to show off his talented vocals.

Amandajustvibin

Due to her dozens of Marvel-related videos, Amanda Castrillo has quickly become known as one of the best comic book-related content creators on TikTok . However, that is far from her only content source, considering she has made videos on other movies, including Prey , Jurassic World: Dominion , The Invitation , and more.

It is easy to watch much of Amandajustvibin's content since every video is filled to the brim with charm and humor. One of her funniest ongoing skit series is when she plays herself chastising the personification of Marvel itself.

Similar to Cody Leach, Cris Parker delivers content in unison on both YouTube and TikTok. 3CFilms on TikTok will cover movie news in a more condensed format on the platform, giving his quick thoughts and even doing some reaction videos to trailers occasionally.

Cris will also throw in some skits, such as parodying Owen Grady's hand maneuver from the Jurassic World movies and the major spoilers for Pixar's Lightyear . His main content, however, is his updates and breakdowns on movie news, and they are always enjoyable to watch since Cris is a positive and lively creator who always knows how to make viewers laugh or smile.

Straw Hat Goofy

With over three million followers, Straw Hat Goofy has gained the reputation of "The Movie Guy" on TikTok since he will give his opinions on anything out there in theaters or streaming. From horror to family films to simply making videos showing love to Powerline's songs from A Goofy Movie , he gives his honest opinions in upbeat videos keeping things constructive, entertaining, and charismatic.

He also gives more than reviews, such as when he'll make different editorial video series on his account, movies he thinks deserve a sequel, praise great movie posters, and combines two movies to surmise another film. With a warm smile present the whole time, Straw Hat Goofy never slacks when it comes to his content.

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10 Horror Movies That Are Popular Among TikTok Users, Ranked

Some great ones here.

When it comes to horror movies , a lot of the time, I’ll watch a new one based on word of mouth. I gave the Ari Aster horror movies a shot at first because I heard how scary they were. I watched all the Halloween films based on my mom’s recommendation. I even checked out some goofy horror comedies because my friends told me to try them. Many horror movies I’ve come to love were brought to my attention with recommendations. 

In 2020 I discovered a new way of getting these suggestions: TikTok. Of course I found myself on the horror side at one point, and I have now been led to some fun movies – and others that aren't so much fun. Here are ten horror movies I have to talk about – ranked from worst to best.

10. Skinamarink (2022)

No. Just no. 

Skinamarink is what is classified as a Canadian experimental horror film that primarily follows two children who are left at home alone, and that’s really all you know. At first, you may think this is a good premise to follow, but the movie is so boring. 

I get who this movie is trying to go for – most of the shots are weird sounds and long shots of dark spaces. It’s supposed to appeal to those scared of the unknown and what could emerge from the dark. But Skinamarink is the slowest, non-horror filled horror movie. Even when there were jumpscares, they did not feel earned. You could tell from a mile away that they were coming. 

I get why some people might think this is a revolutionary film , but it’s not for me. 

9. Megan Is Missing (2011)

Megan is Missing came out when found footage horror movies were starting to get popular again (during the Paranormal Activity era), and the film itself got quite popular on TikTok in 2020. But I have to say, there’s nothing really surprising about it in any way. 

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The main premise is about a teenager who meets a boy online and decides to meet with him, and ends up going missing, hence the title. We are given several interesting scenes that are supposed to terrify, and to other viewers, sure, they could be scary. But for someone who is so used to found-footage horror movies, this movie did nothing for me. 

8. Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Okay, hear me out – I freaking love this movie. Jennifer’s Body was one of my favorite movies when I was just getting into horror, whether it be because it was a little campy, or Megan Fox ’s performance, or even Amanda Seyfried . But I don’t think it deserves to be considered horror. 

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The movie started to make the rounds again on TikTok in 2020/2021. The film follows the title character, Jennifer, who gets possessed by a man-eating demon after she is sacrificed by her favorite band in the woods. The film itself is so much fun and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it, but certainly not the best horror film that TikTok has put on my For You page. It’s more funny than scary. 

7. Hush (2016)

Mike Flanagan has become a master of horror with some of his most recent films and TV shows, and this movie furthers that. Hush, starring Kate Siegel, tells the story of a deaf woman who has to survive a home invasion. 

This movie isn’t gory in any way, but what makes it better than the others is that it’s so creative. I mean, think about it – we always think that we’d survive any horror movie like the Scream franchise because we have all five of our senses, but just imagine if you had to survive a home invasion while deaf. 

That’s terrifying – but Flanagan takes it a step further and really integrates the viewer into the experience because you feel as if you’re the one being chased. The sound design is great. 

6. Tusk (2014)

This is a weird-ass movie. But I like it.

Tusk is a horror comedy directed by Kevin Smith and starring Justin Long about a podcaster who ends up getting more than he bargained for while conducting an interview with a retired sailor who is creepier than he seems. This A24 horror movie is strange as heck, but it works in a weird way. 

I have to say that I do like it much more than many of the other horror movies before this. It doesn’t try too hard to be scary, and really embraces its hilarious aspects. It almost reminds me of M3GAN – it knows exactly what it is and isn’t trying to fool you. It’s just so weird. 

5. The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

Another documentary-style horror movie, The Poughkeepsie Tapes also got popular around 2020/2021, and is about the fictional murders of a serial killer in Poughkeepsie, New York, which features “interviews, footage,” and material that is obtained from the serial killer – basically, his snuff films. 

While I would also categorize this movie as a found-footage horror movie, The Poughkeepsie Tapes actually feels quite scary. There are several gory moments that made me turn away from my screen, and others that had me quite interested. It’s not the best found-footage movie, but interesting enough.

4. Excision (2012)

Moving onto another horror film, Excision came out in 2012 and boy, this movie is something different. It’s about a young girl who has dreams of working in the medical field, but she isn’t quite right mentally and has a weird fascination with blood – so much so that she’ll do anything to get it. 

This is one of those movies that I literally could not look away from, and I was upset when it ended. The performances were great, and it really makes you squirm in your seat. Plus, you can see a young Ariel Winter literally acting her butt off in a horror movie. I can’t recommend this one enough. 

3. Begotten (1989)

That’s right, we’re going all the way back to the 1980s. Shot entirely in black and white, Begotten takes its story from several creation myths, focusing mainly on Mother Earth and the Son of Earth, who set out on a journey. 

This movie messes with your head, man. Where Skinamarink was an experimental horror film, Begotten is just on another level of experimental. You have no idea what the heck is going on and yet, you’re scared out of your mind. It’s creepy in all the right places and features some pretty gory sequences. Definitely a good pick. 

2. Antrum (2018)

This movie literally comes with a warning before it, saying you could be cursed watching it. Come on. 2020 was a year for horror movies – and it was easy to stream.

This both a mockumentary and a horror film, focusing on the story of the actual film, Antrum, and the horrible things it has done to people, and then cuts to the film so it can be shown to the audience. The plot follows a pair of siblings and their journey in the woods. It's full of eerie imagery and has plenty of horrible trials for the siblings, such as running into cannibals and demons. 

1. A Serbian Film (2010)

Yeah…this film. 

I discovered A Serbian Film (classified as an exploitation horror) in early 2022. The main premise follows a financially struggling pornstar who decides to work in an art film, only to find out later on that it’s a snuff film – and he’s going to be the star.

This movie…is disturbing. It’s been banned in several countries, and features heavy, heavy graphic violence. This was one of the first films in a while where, when it finished, I had to sit back and ask myself, “what the f*** did I just watch?” I felt dirty after watching it, disgusted almost. This is one of those movies where you certainly will never take your eyes away from the screen – but once it’s done, you never touch it again, which is why it’s number one on here. 

TikTok is great for many things, but horror movie recommendations? Kind of a 50/50 split on that. Either way, you might have found a new favorite film here. Or, maybe I gave you a million reasons not to watch certain movies. Whatever the case, have fun binging. 

A self-proclaimed nerd and lover of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, Alexandra Ramos is a Content Producer at CinemaBlend. She first started off working in December 2020 as a Freelance Writer after graduating from the Pennsylvania State University with a degree in Journalism and a minor in English. She primarily works in features for movies, TV, and sometimes video games. (Please don't debate her on The Last of Us 2, it was amazing!) She is also the main person who runs both our daily newsletter, The CinemaBlend Daily, and our ReelBlend newsletter. 

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TikTok Movie Recommendations

By Sophie Wells

Over the years, artists around the world have produced films with the ability to bring out some of the most intense emotions stored within each of us, both positive and negative. Many know how it feels to leave a theater with the weight of a storyline on your shoulders, stunned by the cinematic beauty that has unfolded before your very eyes. There are some movies that just stick with you, and give you new and interesting perspectives on various different aspects of life.

TikTok, being the creative and popular app it is, has become a great outlet for influential movie recommendations, especially during these strange, quarantined times. While you may have already seen some of these fan-favorites, it may be worthwhile to give one or two of the unfamiliar ones a try…I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

THRILLER and/or HORROR

To start, there are four particularly thrilling and scary movies that continue showing up on TikTok. Being that I have seen them myself, I can attest to the fact that each one will bring chills down your spine in their own unique and haunting way. More specifically though, I’d recommend these two if you’re looking for more of a scare:

American Psycho (2000)

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more thrilling experience (with hints of horror and mystery,) I would go with one of these:

Shutter Island (2010)

Gone Girl (2014)

The way I see it, the dramas that have been consistently and frequently recommended originate from three sub-categories: crime-based dramas, dramas involving romance in some aspect, and dramas with a little more thrill to them. No matter which you choose from, however, I guarantee the plot will have you captivated the entire time.

Crime Dramas

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

The Godfather (1972)

Romantic Dramas

Little Women (2019)

American Honey (2016)

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Lady Bird (2017)

Drama Thrillers

Fight Club (1999)

Django Unchained (2012)

Girl, Interrupted (1999)

Black Swan (2010)

What makes a great comedy? Some say it’s the charismatic characters and amusing, yet relatable storyline. Some say it’s the wide range of humor and timing of jokes. I say it’s all of the above, and is displayed in all of the following TikTok-recommended films:

Clueless (1995)

Superbad (2007)

Wedding Crashers (2005)

Step Brothers (2008)

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Last, but not least, we have action. The following recommended movies contain a stunning mix of science fiction, adventure, and coincidentally, were all directed by the talented and widely-recognized filmmaker, Christopher Nolan.

Inception (2012)

The Dark Knight (2008)

Interstellar (2014)

Sophie Wells is an editorial intern who is knowledgeable in all things fashion, cooking, and entertainment.

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TikTok , the omnipresent video-based social-media app that launched five years ago, has always seemed a less serious, more frivolously youthquakey destination than a number of other online networking services — most obviously Facebook. Yet as Shalini Kantayya’s sprightly, informative documentary “TikTok, Boom.” makes clear, there are more levels to the TikTok phenomenon than there are to almost any other blockbuster app.

There are the countless people who consume it: the kids from all over the world who get addicted to watching the up-to-three-minute-long videos (dances, pranks, sexy flaunts, tutorials, monologues, protest messages) as if they were popping Sour Patch Kids. There are the people who are on it: the makers of those videos, who could be just about anyone and might be doing it just for kicks, though what a lot of them want to be, if they can go viral enough, are influencers — the elite echelon of TikTok stars who have made themselves over into brands, based on a look or a talent or a signature or some combination of the above, and who succeed in attracting the attention of companies who will pay them to be casual endorsers of some product.

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The saga of TikTok doesn’t end there. The sheer hugeness of the app is its own paradigm-shifting story. It has been downloaded over two billion times, making it bigger than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter. As a result, it has shaken up the hierarchy of the tech universe. And since TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in China, the fact that much of what TikTok is actually about, once you peek beneath the candy-colored surface of its endless-shopping-mall-of-videos, how-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-dopamine-hit mystique, is data mining (the targeting of you , the user, as a consumer, who will be digitally read like a book and pitched products until your dying day), there are sizable geopolitical implications to the TikTok story. Does the fact that the data mined by TikTok is stored in a brain trust controlled by a Chinese corporation mean that the app, for America, represents a security risk? Some say yes. Beyond that, the fact that Silicon Valley, for the first time, has been beaten at its own game by China, America’s preeminent rival in the 21st-century global power structure, is its own kind of wake-up call.

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Not to mention this: What does it mean that the Gen-Z multitudes now spend obsessive amounts of time immersed in a never-ending digital casserole of content that is fast turning us into America’s Funniest/Wildest/Most Narcissistic Home Videos Nation?

“TikTok, Boom.” gives all those issues a workout. For anyone who’s not up on the story, or who has followed it with half a glance, the documentary, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is a lively, handy TikTok primer. Yet there are ways in which it’s all too content to skitter along the surface of what TikTok is. That may sound like a paradoxical complaint — TikTok, after all, kind of is all surface — but I wish the movie had probed, a little more deeply than it does, into how an app like TikTok is changing our habits, our society, and maybe our souls.

Kantayya, the director of “Coded Bias,” introduces us to a handful of TikTok influencers, like Spencer X, the ace beatboxer who actually came up on YouTube (his first deal was with Nike); or Deja Foxx, who went viral when she was 16 years old by confronting Sen. Jeff Flake at a Republican town hall about the defunding of Planned Parenthood (the next morning, the video of their confrontation had 18 million views), and now divides her TikTok presence between political statements and showing herself off in a bathing suit; or Feroza Aziz, an Afghan American activist who found herself in conflict with TikTok over videos she posted in protest of Chinese detention camps. (At one point she does an end run around their algorithm by nestling her activism in the middle of an eyelash tutorial.)

There’s a let-it-rip, if-it-feels-good-record-it aspect to the TikTok experience; the app basically turns the whole planet into your bedroom mirror. Yet as “TikTok, Boom.” reveals, that spirit is belied by how much of the content is regulated. Douyin, the original Chinese version of TikTok (it was launched in 2016), has strict provisions that don’t even allow people to appear with tattoos or dyed hair. And though TikTok itself is obviously much looser, the film explores the phenomenon of “shadowbanning,” in which certain videos, due to algorithmic judgments that happen off the radar, are basically banned by not being allowed to pile up any views or likes. At one point it was discovered that anything with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter or #GeorgeFloyd had been shadowbanned, a shocking suppression that the company tried to explain away as a “technical glitch.”

But beyond such flagrant acts of censorship, the documentary examines the larger ethics of TikTok’s control of content. The tech writer David Ryan Polgar claims that “Major tech companies, if they have the power of deciding what’s okay and what’s not okay with what I say, if they have the power to de-platform…that puts a tremendous level of power in an unelected official.” He calls this “anti-democratic.”

The movie does full justice to the insidious implications of what TikTok does and does not allow. Yet given how much “TikTok, Boom.” looks askance at aspects of TikTok, the film still betrays a certain wide-eyed eagerness to accept and (implicitly) endorse the way that TikTok operates. It was back in 2015 that Zhang Yiming, the 38-year-old Chinese founder of Douyin and TikTok, introduced the idea of “recommendation engines,” which would create an intricate profile of the user and then show that user what he or she likes. TikTok has been compared to the Sorting Hat from “Harry Potter,” splitting its audience into niches, tailoring products to a micro delineation of their tastes. We hear testimony from TikTok users who express amazement at how totally the app “knows” them.

But does the app really know you? Or are its relatively crude sorting methods creating a crude version of you? That there is now a passionate desire on the part of consumers to have computer technology tell them “who they are” may say more about those consumers than it does about the all-seeing nature of the technology.

For scores of the Gen-Z faithful, TikTok turns everyday reality into a show. On the surface there’s no harm in that, yet we should increasingly be skeptical of it, especially when we’re encouraged to think that TikTok, through the very grip of its appeal, creates a place for people to “speak truth to power.” The movie plays up the moment when a TikTok user got the idea to reserve a ticket to a Donald Trump rally in Oklahoma and then not show up for the rally. Her gambit was imitated by scores of others, and it worked. At the rally, there were large sections of empty seats; Trump was infuriated; the denizens of TikTok had pranked the president.

Yet here’s the thing. If you believe that you’re speaking truth to power, but you’re doing it on a playing field where grabbing eyeballs and going viral is the yardstick of success, then the people who are hucksters and liars and political fantasists will always have a built-in advantage. Because lies can always be made to look more entertaining than the raw political truth. Only time will tell how TikTok is changing us, but in its very success the app could be a way of getting us to fiddle while the world burns.

Reviewed online (Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition), Feb. 3 25, 2022. Running time: 97 MIN.

• Production: A Campfire Studios production, presented by Olive Hill Media, in association with Forbes Entertainment, Such Content, 7th Empire Media. Producers: Ross M. Dinerstein, Shalini Kantayya, Danni Mynard. Executive producers: Rebecca Evans, Ross Girard, David Tomlin, Michael Cho, Mimi Rode, Tim Lee, William Rosenfeld, Robert Kapp, Randall Lane, Travis Collins.
• Crew: Director: Shalini Kantayya. Camera: Steve Acevedo. Editor: Seth Anderson. Music: Katya Mikailova.
• With: Feroza Aziz, Spencer X, Deja Foxx, Shelly Banjo, Emily Barbour, Matthew Brennan, Scott. R. Drury, Merrick Hanna, Shawn Hanna, David Jay, Aleysha Johnson, Taylor Lorenz, Rui Ma, Kyra Maxwell, Rick McElroy, David Ryan Polgar, Eugene Wei, Jason Zhang.

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‘tiktok, boom.’: film review | sundance 2022.

Shalini Kantayya's documentary examines one of the most influential social media platforms today, tackling issues of cultural influence, algorithmic bias, cybersecurity, geopolitics and more.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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As noted in a voiceover near the start of TikTok , Boom. , there are so many through lines to be explored here: “It’s a cybersecurity story. It’s an algorithm story. It’s a bias story. It’s a geopolitical story.” Shalini Kantayya’s documentary tries, to varying degrees, to explore seemingly all of them. And if it’s perhaps too broad to serve as the definitive last word on the buzzy social media platform, it does at least make for a thoughtful conversation starter.

TikTok, Boom. is loosely structured around three prominent TikTok personalities: Feroza Aziz, an Afghan-American teen censored by the platform for speaking out on the Uyghur genocide; Spencer X, a beatboxer who found creative and commercial success on the app; and Deja Foxx, an activist and political strategist who founded the online community GenZ Girl Gang.

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Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition) Director: Shalini Kantayya

Woven around their stories are shorter appearances from other content creators (including one on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart) — plus interviews with experts like New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz and tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar, who provide larger context about TikTok’s history, its data-collecting algorithm, its effect on young people, its role in the cultural tug-of-war between the U.S. and China, and more.

The film’s wide view makes for a more complete portrait of TikTok than a more narrowly focused one might have offered, and possibly a more nuanced one. While TikTok, Boom. does not shy away from criticism of the platform, Kantayya seems no more interested in unilaterally condemning it than praising it. Instead, she takes the time to engage with a diverse array of voices and viewpoints, and consider the platform from all angles. Her open-mindedness gives TikTok, Boom. a sense of trustworthiness — it’s more interesting to process a sincere exploration than a pointed screed.

So for one content creator, TikTok might represent a “gold rush” of sponsorship opportunities, while for another, it might feel like a burden she can’t escape because it’s how she supports herself and her family. It’s what one creator calls a “blow-up-overnight kind of place” that can mint new stars overnight, and at the same time a restrictive space with internal policies that can silence the already marginalized. The For You Page is a groundbreaking feature that makes TikTok terrifyingly good at tailoring itself to a user’s specific tastes; what shady things it does with the information it gathers isn’t necessarily all that different from what every other social media site does with it, as documented in other projects like The Social Dilemma or Kantayya’s own Coded Bias .

Kantayya’s careful construction keeps the deluge of information from overwhelming the viewer. Often, it mimics the organic flow of a conversation. When one influencer vents, “‘The algorithm’ — what does that even mean?” the film cuts to a tech developer describing it as a sort of digital Sorting Hat, emphasizing the point with a clip from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone . That the film never seems to stay on one topic too long seems wryly appropriate for its subject; after all, no TikTok video lasts more than a few minutes either.

But TikTok, Boom. ‘s ambition of covering seemingly everything to do with TikTok in 90 minutes means that it rarely has time to dig beyond basic concepts. Much is made of TikTok being the first Chinese social media app to blow up in a tech landscape previously dominated by American companies, for example — but less clear is what this means for individuals who have no particular stake in the pissing contest between Mark Zuckerberg and Zhang Yiming, the Chinese founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance.

Its Gen Z subjects give chewy, sometimes slightly depressing soundbites about their ambivalence around social media. “I kind of have to live with fact that there’s gonna be people that are profiting off my data and I have no real recourse for that,” says one teenage user — the son of Scott R. Drury, a data privacy lawyer who speaks at length in the documentary about, among other things, TikTok’s failures to protect minors from child predators. Another young influencer muses that “I don’t know what it’s like to live in a world where I’m not being perceived, always.” But a deeper exploration about how those realities change their self-perception, or how it might shape their futures, remains outside of the film’s scope.

TikTok, Boom. feels not like a dispatch from the heart of TikTok culture, or a deep dive into the issues surrounding it, but an introduction meant for people who might be familiar with the app just in passing. It seems less likely to come as a revelation to people who are Too Online as it is (myself included, admittedly). As I write this, we’re just a few days removed from West Elm Caleb, the latest TikTok tale to go viral enough to inspire think pieces on what the whole saga says about TikTok specifically, about social media more generally or about the world more broadly. These are ideas worth grappling with, and TikTok, Boom. is helpful as a way in. But those most engaged in them may find that the discussion has already moved past what’s offered here.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition) Production companies: Campfire Studios Director: Shalini Kantayya Producers: Ross M. Dinerstein, Shalini Kantayya, Danni Mynard Executive producers: Ross Girard, Rebecca Evans, Travis Collins, Randall Lane, Michael Cho, Mimi Rode, Tim Lee, William Rosenfeld, Robert Kapp Director of photography: Steve Acevedo Editor: Seth Anderson Composer: Katya Mihailova Sales: CAA

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‘TikTok, Boom.’ Review: Technology and Influencer Documentary Tries Too Hard to Be Everything at Once

Siddhant adlakha.

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The opening frames of “TikTok, Boom.” feature an extreme closeup of a ring-light reflected in a content creator’s eye. It is, at once, a reminder of a familiar cinematic image — the opening of the 1982 film “Blade Runner,” which explores the intersection of humanity and technology — and a promise of an up-close, intimate look at the omnipresent details of digital media, which you may or may not have noticed. However, Shalini Kantayya’s 90-minute documentary fails to live up to the tongue-in-cheek grandeur of this punchy introduction. It frequently finds itself torn between personal stories and a chilling bigger picture, in a way that struggles to blend and reconcile them.

The film chronicles both the rise of Chinese social media giant TikTok as well as the viral success found by some its young creators — among them, beatboxer Spencer X and activists Deja Foxx and Feroza Aziz — as it weaves in and out of stories about privacy in the tech sector and the app’s eventual overlap with global politics. TikTok was a lightning rod for U.S.-China relations under the Trump White House, and the film’s latter half deftly captures at least some of that scope. However, en route to this vital development, it feels far too fragmented. It touches only on the basic premise of each idea, for a brief moment at a time, before charging swiftly to its next check-point.

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The result is less a coherent tapestry of an evolving digital world, and more akin to TikTok’s own algorithmic “For You” page — though not in any way that feels intentional or mirrors the experience of using the app — cycling through truncated snippets, each carefully curated towards anyone with a vague interest in the subject, though it rarely explores any one concept long enough for it to matter.

An enormous part of the problem is that “TikTok, Boom.” feels entirely undiscerning in its selection of personal tales. Each creator on which it focuses has an interesting story to tell, some of which even intersect with the broader narrative about censorship in the digital age, but it features so many personal threads, in so little time, that each one ends up slotted across the film in mechanical fashion. The creators are introduced, before the film switches to journalistic talking heads who contextualize the tech landscape; some of the creators are then afforded a middle section, where their personal issues come to the fore before the journalists return; finally, the creators appear once final time to wind up stories that the film never fully began telling in the first place.

This rote and over-stuffed approach is made all the more frustrating by the fact that Kantayya has, in fact, succeeded at balancing the micro and macro of the digital world before. Her chilling 2020 Sundance doc “Coded Bias” mostly used a single, central subject — computer scientist Joy Buolamwini — as its guide through the unsettling rabbit-hole of racism in A.I., beginning with her own experiences as a Black woman in tech.

“TikTok, Boom.” does, at least, offer similar hints of a cultural thread running throughout its story; Spencer and Aziz, the children of Asian immigrants (like Kantayya herself) find belonging and community on TikTok, while Chinese-American creator Jason Zhang, who moves from Brooklyn to Beijing, feels culturally unmoored, and is tasked with being Kantayya’s eyes and ears in China (he uses the Chinese version of the app, Douyin). There’s a rigor, one assumes, to the questions Kantayya asks them, because their answers paint a vivid picture, as they recall the more harrowing parts of their experiences in a world where they’re hyper-visible, and hyper-scrutinized, as Asian Americans with something unconventional and challenging to say.

However, despite the many times TikTok is spoken of in a geopolitical context, the analysis is frustratingly U.S.-centric for an app that was popular elsewhere for years before it hit the American market. The film, for instance, goes long about the potential of the app being banned in America as an extension of anti-Chinese sentiment, though instances of this actually happening elsewhere, such as in India ( which had 200 million users ), are largely ignored. Furthermore, its U.S.-centricity is so spread out over so many narrative elements — from online harassment and the app’s impact on teenage development, to the shift in global power structures, to data collection and related legalese — that the aforementioned subjects, Spencer, Aziz, and Zhang, are eventually afforded little by way of insight as Asian Americans, despite attempts to frame this part of their experience as key to the global TikTok narrative. What these artists say directly into the camera is somewhat interesting, but they’ve also said it in more flowery, energetic, and visually engaging ways in their own TikTok videos.

One fascinating thing about the film’s approach is that it introduces many of its political stories using fear-mongering ideas about China, with which people might already be familiar. But as the film goes on, it begins to parse these claims in an attempt to separate truth from fiction. It’s a continuing bait-and-switch that will likely keep some viewers on their toes, though one wonders if this recontextualization will convince anyone susceptible to it in the first place. After all, this information is mostly presented as words spoken at the lens, rather than images that stir, or last, or permeate (one exception is a dimly lit dramatization of a confession by a Chinese TikTok employee, a woman presented in shadow, but this scene happens to fall in the “confirmation” category, rather than a refutation of existing biases).

The film, in trying to be about TikTok from every conceivable angle, ends up featuring little of substance, and its straightforward presentation rarely justifies its approach. While Katya Mihailova’s eerie music creates a sense of intrigue — an element of “Coded Bias” that carries over admirably — the filmmaking is otherwise bog-standard, with talking-heads providing contextual expertise interspersed with largely interchangeable footage.

“TikTok, Boom.” may not be an aesthetic analysis of the app, but each time it features clips of viral TikToks, it becomes a reminder of how much more inventive and energetic its own visual fabric could be. Instead, it discusses the dangers of a novel technology using techniques from the 1980s, imbuing iPhone cameras with the text-on-screen gaze of “The Terminator” or “RoboCop.” Perhaps this might ease older viewers into understanding new ideas, but the film’s extemporizing about Gen Z as digital natives is rarely complimented by an aesthetic understanding of this experience. “TikTok, Boom.” may be chock-full of disquieting information, but it’s rarely more than a list of bullet-points.

“TikTok, Boom.” premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking  distribution.

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This is the one that put Apple TV+ on the map. The movie’s title is an acronym for “child of deaf adults.” It’s the story of Ruby, the only hearing person in a family that includes two deaf parents and one deaf sibling. When Ruby discovers a love of music, she's forced to reconcile her own aspirations with those of her family, who run a small fishing business and often need her to help communicate. Warm and gripping,  CODA  is the kind of movie that will have you cheering and crying at the same time.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

In 1985, Michael J. Fox was one of Hollywood’s biggest names as the star of a hit TV show ( Family Ties ) and the year’s highest-grossing movie ( Back to the Future ). Just a few years later, at the age of 29, Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In  Still , Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim offers a poignant portrait of Fox’s personal and professional life and his journey from teen idol to advocate for a cure.

Mahershala Ali stars alongside, well, Mahershala Ali in this romantic-sci-fi-drama. Yes, it’s all of those things. Cameron (Ali) is a loving husband (to Naomie Harris) and father who, after learning he has a terminal illness, must decide just how far he’ll go to protect his family from having to know the truth, or deal with the devastating aftermath.

Sharper is one of those movies where the less you know about it going in, the better. Just know that no one is what they seem or who they say they are in this neo-noir starring Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith, and John Lithgow. This twisty little thriller flew largely under the radar when it was released in theaters for a half-second in early 2023.

Cha Cha Real Smooth

“Sundance hit starring Dakota Johnson”s are almost a dime a dozen, but this one, about a young bar/bat mitzvah party-starter is the, ahem, real deal. It also proves that Cooper Raiff—who writes, directs, and stars in the movie—is one to keep your eye on.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Yes, most people already know the story of Macbeth—Scottish lord with an eye toward ruling his country—but not everyone has seen it through the eyes of director Joel Coen. Shot entirely in black and white and starring Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as his powerful wife, the film was nominated for three Oscars and brought a very new twist onto a classic Shakespearean tale.

Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues

Above all else, Louis Armstrong is known as one of the most famous jazz musicians of all time. But he was also a figure in the struggle for equality in America—albeit a complicated one. As director Sacha Jenkins illustrates in this documentary, while Armstrong broke racial barriers in entertainment he also faced accusations that he didn’t stand up as much for civil rights as other performers of his era. Jenkins got access to scores of photographs, clippings, and even recordings Armstrong made of his own conversations for this documentary, and that access provides a much fuller picture of the legendary musician than the world has ever had.

One of the most popular video games of all time,  Tetris  was a phenomenon for Nintendo Game Boy owners in the 1980s. But  Tetris (the movie) is the story of the people who made the game and brought it from the then-Soviet Union to the rest of the world. Part historical dramedy, part espionage flick, the movie doesn’t always hit its marks, but if you’ve never heard the story of how  Tetris  got out from behind the Iron Curtain, it’s worth a watch.

Causeway  kind of came and went when it was released in 2022, but that’s also the sort of movie it is. Focused on a soldier (Jennifer Lawrence) who returns home after suffering a brain injury in Afghanistan, the film from director Lila Neugebauer is about trauma and how people lean on each other to get through it. A worthy watch for the times when you have your own stuff to work through.

Sidney Poitier died in 2022, the same year Apple TV+ released this documentary looking at the actor’s long-running career— In the Heat of the Night ,  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —and impact on American culture and politics. With interviews ranging from Spike Lee and Morgan Freeman to Harry Belafonte, the film goes beyond his time in Hollywood, starting with his upbringing in the Bahamas and ending with his massive impact on the civil rights movement and elsewhere.

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100 Best Movies on Netflix Ranked by Tomatometer (September 2024)

In our world of massive entertainment options, who’s got time to waste on the below-average? You’ve got a subscription, you’re ready for a marathon, and you want only the best movies no Netflix to watch. With thousands of choices on the platform, both original and acquired, we’ve found the 100 top Netflix movies with the highest Tomatometer scores! Time to get comfy on the couch!

New top movies this month: Field of Dreams , Jaws , Midnight Run , Stand by Me , Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit , Edge of Tomorrow , Rebel Ridge , Grave of the Fireflies   ( on our list of the 100 saddest movies of all time and 100 best anime movies of all time )

Leaving this month: Bodies Bodies Bodies   (September 19), Back to the Future , The Breakfast Club , Clerks , The Conjuring , The Lego Movie

His House (2020) 100%

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) 100%

Miss Juneteenth (2020) 99%

The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020) 99%

Under the Shadow (2016) 99%

Godzilla Minus One (2023) 98%

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) 97%

Dolemite Is My Name (2019) 97%

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) 97%

Mudbound (2017) 97%

Jaws (1975) 97%

I Lost My Body (2019) 97%

Roma (2018) 96%

The LEGO Movie (2014) 96%

Tangerine (2015) 96%

Atlantics (2019) 96%

Monty python and the holy grail sing-along (1975) 96%.

Life of Brian (1979) 96%

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018) 96%

Outside In (2017) 96%

The Irishman (2019) 95%

Marriage Story (2019) 95%

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) 95%

Hit Man (2023) 95%

It Follows (2014) 95%

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) 95%

They Cloned Tyrone (2023) 95%

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) 95%

Klaus (2019) 95%

Rebel Ridge (2024) 96%

Midnight Run (1988) 95%

Call Me by Your Name (2017) 94%

The Power of the Dog (2021) 94%

The Woman King (2022) 94%

The Lost Daughter (2021) 94%

X (2022) 94%

Emily the Criminal (2022) 94%

The Sea Beast (2022) 94%

Private Life (2018) 94%

Captain Phillips (2013) 93%

Hustle (2022) 93%

Back to the Future (1985) 93%

Enola Holmes 2 (2022) 93%

Cam (2018) 93%

Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022) 93%

Baby Driver (2017) 92%

Da 5 Bloods (2020) 92%

American Hustle (2013) 92%

Pearl (2022) 93%

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) 92%

The White Tiger (2021) 92%

The Squid and the Whale (2005) 92%

Nimona (2023) 92%

The Little Prince (2015) 92%

Stand by Me (1986) 92%

Set It Up (2018) 92%

Uncorked (2020) 92%

1922 (2017) 92%

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) 91%

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) 91%

Phantom Thread (2017) 91%

May December (2023) 91%

The Gift (2015) 91%

The Spectacular Now (2013) 91%

Beasts of No Nation (2015) 91%

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022) 91%

High Flying Bird (2019) 91%

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) 91%

Happy as Lazzaro (2018) 91%

Gerald's Game (2017) 91%

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023) 91%

Orion and the Dark (2024) 91%

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) 91%

The Willoughbys (2020) 91%

The Imitation Game (2014) 90%

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) 90%

Society of the Snow (2023) 90%

The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) 90%

On Body and Soul (2017) 90%

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 90%

Clerks (1994) 90%

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) 89%

The Big Short (2015) 89%

Zombieland (2009) 89%

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) 89%

The Two Popes (2019) 89%

Oxygen (2021) 89%

Always Be My Maybe (2019) 89%

Mary and The Witch's Flower (2017) 89%

I Am Mother (2019) 89%

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017) 89%

The Breakfast Club (1985) 89%

Paddleton (2019) 89%

1917 (2019) 88%

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021) 88%

My Father's Dragon (2022) 88%

Field of Dreams (1989) 88%

Donnie Brasco (1997) 88%

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) 86%

The Conjuring (2013) 86%

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Review: A Hollywood star wants more time, but ‘The Substance’ doesn’t give her a reason

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Filmmaker Coralie Fargeat is fascinated by butts. “The Substance,” her Cannes-winning gross-out joke about an aging Hollywood actress with a high threshold for self-inflicted pain, boasts more butts per minute than a chainsmoker’s ashtray, a feat all the more monumental for the film’s nearly 2½-hour running time. Be they spandex-wedgied or jiggling nude, each is caressed by the lens with the same hunger a burger commercial has for its buns. Point made: In this body-horror flick, a human’s only worth is as meat. With fearless, ferocious leads Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley willing to let the camera chop them into chunks of flesh — lips, calves, hair, wrinkles and, yes, keisters — for a film that prioritizes shocks over plot, get ready for a whole lot of their blood and guts too.

The story is simple. Former star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is too old to continue hosting televised aerobics, the last stop on her slide out of the industry. Once, Elisabeth had talent. She even won an Academy Award if you believe the mutterings of her boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), who, in the spirit of the film, grumbles, “Oscar winner, my ass.” But that was so long ago even Elisabeth’s forgotten she’s more than a set of toned thighs.

There will be blood: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and director Coralie Fargeat on the fall’s most shocking movie

A darkly surreal fantasia about Hollywood misogyny, “The Substance” delivers some of the year’s most fearless acting, along with a bold new directorial voice.

Sept. 3, 2024

Elisabeth’s solution is a solution — a green goo called the Substance — that cleaves her cells in two and grows a second, youthful her who climbs out of her back and takes over her existence. When her alternate, Sue (Qualley), sashays into Elisabeth’s old TV station, a palpitating Harvey instantly anoints her his new exercise goddess. Cue butt montage! The editing is high-energy, entertaining and hammering; if every scene’s hip thrust or needle stab was shown only once, the movie would be 90 minutes long.

“The Substance” has two catches. First, the women must alternate weeks, giving Sue only seven days to twerk before ceding her consciousness back to Elisabeth, who then must trust herself — and her other self — to continue trading the baton, or else. The more tragic catch is that, under the skin, Elisabeth/Sue hasn’t changed at all. She still has the same shallow ambitions, the same ugly self-loathing that lets her leave her comatose older body lying on the bathroom floor like a dirty towel. Watching Qualley strut about in a pink bomber jacket with matching lip gloss, it’s as though Barbie became human but refused to evolve.

Every man in the film is repellent, even the hunks, and as the film goes on, they metastasize into an anonymous graying horde. But Fargeat is a messy feminist — a Carrie-on-a-killing-spree-at-the-prom feminist — who, rightly and excruciatingly, insists that her heroine is her own worst enemy. Sue even continues to smile obediently for the same jerks who kicked Elisabeth to the curb. Her back got sliced open but there’s no glimpse of a spine.

I’m unconvinced there’s that much going on inside the movie, either. It’s a superficial film about a superficial world and, like its protagonist, it’s got no pretensions of anything more. Fargeat has flair, and she’s clearly earned an unofficial PhD in MTV and ’80s VHS, particularly the gory stuff that makes you gasp and giggle. She and her cinematographer, Benjamin Kracun, love bold grids, bright colors, extreme closeups and distorting fish-eye lenses. Her style is as subtle as a stop sign (she even named Quaid’s vile producer Harvey) and her storytelling so visual that her storyboards could be a comic book. (The wordless opening sequence on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame that captures Elisabeth’s rise and fall is fantastic.) If this were a graphic novel, all we’d miss is the ghastly effective soundscape of squelches and pops, although that would make it easier to endure a shot of Quaid gnashing shrimp into his maw, or when he strides up to the screen like it’s a urinal and appears to pee in our laps.

I can’t think of another Cannes screenplay winner that seems as indifferent to its own script. A native French speaker, Fargeat’s stripped the dialogue down to what feels like 10 pages, and much of that gets recycled in flashbacks. At heart, Fargeat is a remix artist who’s constructed the movie like a medley of her own DVDs of “The Fly” and “Sunset Blvd.” and sleazy music videos from the early aughts. She flaunts her influences like a plastic surgery client who requests Angelina’s lips and Charlize’s nose. In one scene, I thought to myself that a special-effects creature in the film looked like Gollum…. — and then the end credits actually described it as Gollum. Still, by the time Fargeat cues up “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (a piece of music that doesn’t need to be in a movie for another 2001 years) we’re restless to hear her own voice.

The film keeps its focus tightly on Elisabeth and Sue as they become each other’s roommates from hell. It’s got zero interest in who made the Substance or how many other people are taking it, or what its manufacturers are getting out of people upending their lives. To its own disservice, it doesn’t really care about Elisabeth, either. The character has no friends, no layers, no hobbies or interests other than being the hottest woman in the room. When her younger self goes on a talk show, her inanities get the kind of rapturous applause that means her fans don’t care what she says. If it weren’t for Moore and Qualley hurling themselves into the shared role, it’d be as flat as a scotch-taped pin-up. If it weren’t for Moore, I’m not even sure it would work.

Moore lived through the Hollywood that Fargeat is satirizing, and in her 40-something years in the business, she’s probably been asked more about her workout routine than her craft. Her conviction gives the movie credibility. No one would allow themselves to be lit that harshly if they didn’t believe in the cause. In return, she’s received a big, bleak, brave, funny, showy role that demands an entire career reappraisal, plus the flattery of, at age 61, convincingly playing 50. No matter how much the film insists she’s a hag, we know — and Moore knows we know — that she could do more squats than any of us in the audience. (And if she’s not happy with her looks, we’re all screwed.) As for Qualley, the fact that this is merely the latest audacious challenge in her filmography is the closest thing “The Substance” offers to optimism. Her body of work — far more than her body itself — proves that an actress’ lot can improve.

'The Substance'

Rating: R, for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Playing: In wide release Friday, Sept. 20

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‘Milk & Serial’ is One of the Best Horror Movies of 2024 (here’s why)

Milk & Serial is a smart and satisfying horror movie. Here are a few of the best reasons why it’s one of 2024’s most exciting independent films.

Table of Contents

Milk & Serial was posted on YouTube on the evening of August 8th, 2024, and it quickly went viral. The found-footage horror movie sparked interest in hundreds of thousands of viewers thanks to its clever writing, chilling acting, and underground appeal. But when a movie made for a reported total of $800 starts getting articles written about it in Variety and other mainstream industry media outlets, it might make some people wonder: is the movie really that good? Is there substance behind the buzz? I’ve seen Milk & Serial , and yes, it is that good. It is one of the best horror movies of 2024, and this article explains why it works so well.

A Brief Review of Milk & Serial (no spoilers)

This article is not meant to be a review of Milk & Serial , but you might have come here looking for one, so here is a spoiler-free assessment.

Milk & Serial takes full advantage of its found footage format, and of its character archetypes, in clever and completely entertaining ways. The beginning of the story establishes roommates Seven (Cooper Tomlinson) and Milk (Curry Barker) as YouTube pranksters. Social media influencers are a common sight in modern horror movies, especially in lower-budget movies, so hearing that this is yet another influencer-led movie might cause some eye rolling. But there are many good reasons why this character type is used in Milk & Serial , and that becomes clear fairly early on.

To be as vague as possible so as not to give anything away, the movie is about a prank gone wrong. Or does it go right? Or can it even be considered a prank? That’s the hook, and it keeps the tension simmering throughout the entire 62-minute run time. During that time you’ll be treated to a genuinely chilling performance from one of the film’s lead actors, and you’ll experience a twisty story that uses humor and horror in precise and effective ways. It’s a quick and easy watch, and it is something that is likely to stick with you long after it’s over.

Milk & Serial is recommended for all horror fans, especially fans of found footage and serial killers. It is currently streaming on YouTube on the “that’s a bad idea” channel.

Milk & Serial Analysis (spoilers)

If you’re still reading, please be aware that I’m about to spoil all of the biggest plot points in Milk & Serial , even the ending. Especially the ending. For me, the final few seconds of the movie tie everything together in a way that elevates everything that came before it from “good” to “great.” But please, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop reading now and go watch it . It deserves to be seen unspoiled, and I’m about to spoil it! So go watch the movie, compile your thoughts, then come back here and compare notes with what I got out of the movie.

Okay, since you’ve seen the movie, I’m just going to jump into why I think it works so well. I’m saving the ending until, well, the end, because I think it’s the best part of the whole experience. It deserves its own section. So, let’s start with the characters.

When Milk & Serial begins, the first thing we learn is that we’re watching a movie about influencers. About online pranksters. On the positive side, using characters obsessed with filming everything for use on social media is a great way to get around one of the common complaints about found footage horror movies which is, “why is everyone still recording when things go wrong?” On the negative side, there are plenty of found footage movies with influencers as leads that fail to connect with a large percentage of the audience, mostly because they can easily come across as annoying or aggravating. Thankfully, Milk & Serial avoids the negative side while adding new layers to the positives.

Seven, as a character, isn’t completely likable at first, but that’s okay. He’s pulling a mean-spirited prank on his friend, but pretty soon Seven becomes completely sympathetic for viewers when Milk’s true nature is revealed. And as a lead character, Milk is enthralling in a way comparable to Frank Zito in Maniac (1980 & 2012) and Jack in The House that Jack Built (2018). He might not be as deeply explored as those characters, but Milk is a villain protagonist cut from a similar cloth. Curry Barker plays the part extremely well, with the delivery of many of his lines—”what do you mean you don’t like it”—being perfectly unsettling. Milk feels uncomfortably real, from his joy at explaining his “prank,” to the panic he exudes when the plan starts to go sideways as a cop approaches his car. Without Curry in the role of Milk, the movie wouldn’t work as well as it does.

Also, having people pull pranks leans to heightened tension through the entirety of Milk & Serial . We first watch as Seven’s prank goes according to plan, but we then realize that Milk was already planning a prank of his own. By establishing both main characters as pranksters, the viewer is kept off-balance throughout the entire movie. How can we believe what we’re seeing if the characters themselves don’t always believe it? We can’t, and waiting for the next twist keeps us on edge. It’s a fine line to tread for the filmmakers. If you make everything unbelievable, then what’s the point? You’ll either end up needing a big information dump towards the end to explain the plot, or you’ll have a movie that is too ambiguous to be compelling. Milk & Serial is always compelling, and the well-executed usage of pranks as part of the plot is a big reason why.

The structure of the movie’s narrative also contributes greatly to the success of Milk & Serial . When referencing the pranks contributing to the tension present in the movie, that’s done through the repeated recontextualization of various events. At first we think Milk is completely in the dark about what is happening in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Later, we are shown that he was already making his own plans, and what we saw before was only partially true. It’s a mid-movie twist that many other films might save until the end, which leads us to believe another twist might be coming at any moment.

Additionally, there are few title cards that clearly mark the different acts of the movie, but the meaning of the text in a couple of those cards is anything but clear. The first title card, shown about ten minutes into the movie, reads, “the day he died.” When it appears, we might have an assumption about who “he” is, but that assumption is likely to change multiple times as events unfold. Then, marking the beginning of the final act is a title that reads, “the day they died.” Now, knowing how the earlier title was misleading, who could “they” be referring to? The ambiguity created by the titles is intriguing, and it leads directly into the last, best part of Milk & Serial : the ending.

Why the Ending of Milk & Serial is the Best (more spoilers)

In the end, it is revealed that Milk intends to become a legendary serial killer . His masterpiece is going to be causing Seven to kill himself through layers of mental manipulation. The meticulous planning, quick thinking, and luck that Milk has documented on video is about to pay off, and we watch as he talks into the camera about how he’s going to end his elaborate “prank.” Suddenly, Seven walks into the room with a gun. We see Seven shoot, and the camera Milk is holding falls to the ground. We don’t see anyone, but we hear a second gunshot and what sounds like a body falling to the ground. Then the credits roll.

That, on its own, would be a completely satisfying ending to what we’ve seen. But that’s not all there is. For one thing, when the first shot rings out and Milk’s camera falls to the ground, on-screen text tells us that the “Time of Death” is 7:12 PM. That brings up a few interesting wrinkles.

We would assume that the time of death is referring to Milk since it is displayed after he is supposedly shot, but what if it doesn’t refer to him? We also assume that Seven shot himself and died, but no time of death is given for him. What if one of them didn’t die? Knowing that the text shown on screen can be misleading, what if the 7:12 PM is referring to Seven’s death and not Milk’s? We don’t actually see either of them get shot. In fact, after the credits are over, the last thing shown is that the camera is picked up off of the floor.

Having the camera be picked up by an unseen hand, in my estimation, is the smartest and best part of the movie. By showing the camera being picked up, but not knowing who does it, it once again recontextualizes the whole film. Was Milk ever telling the truth, even when he was alone with just his camera? Was Seven actually carrying out his own master plan that we didn’t know about? And maybe most importantly, who put the time of death on the video? Who edited the footage that we’re watching, and why? We can make logical assumptions, but we also know how that worked out for us earlier in the movie.

Milk & Serial is a found footage movie, meaning we’re supposed to watch it as if it’s actual footage of real events. Many movies that use this format fail to adhere to the reality of their situations all the way through to the end, and that can be frustrating for found footage sticklers. In fact, while watching Milk & Serial , the viewer might start to question the reality of what they’re watching. Certain moments feel odd. Like, why was the face of the black-market gun seller blurred in one shot but not the next? The blurring was obviously done after the fact, so there was no reason for it if the footage was “found” later on.

But more to the point, the footage was all edited together with a very specific intent. It is meant to be watched as a twisty horror movie. If we’re to suspend our disbelief and accept that Milk & Serial is “real” during the time we’re watching it, then we also have to believe that someone purposefully edited it this way to make it entertaining. Maybe Milk didn’t die, but he made sure to edit his footage in a way that made it appear as if he achieved his goal while ensuring people would think he is dead. Or maybe Milk and Seven’s friends Link and Naomi arrived and picked up the camera. The footage appears to show them far away from the scene of the crime as it happens, but if you look at the time stamps, there is plenty of time for them to get back to the apartment after finding Milk’s secret murder house. Plus, even if Milk is still alive, how did he get the videos that Naomi and Link made on their own? He either killed them too, or he didn’t make the movie we’re watching.

No answers are given, and that’s what makes the ending of Milk & Serial so intriguing. Ambiguous endings, when done well, can be fantastic. This is a fantastic ending. And sure, maybe I’m reading too much into it, and the camera pickup at the end of the movie is just a tiny behind-the-scenes glimpse of the ultra-independent nature of the production. But in a movie filled with misdirections, I believe it was one last intentional misdirection. The literal final second of the movie adds so much to the entire thing, and I love it for that.

Further Reading

• Found Footage Horror Movies
• Dagr Review: There’s a Lot to Like About this Found Footage Chiller
• Frogman Review: A Gloriously Fun Found Footage Creature Feature
• Scary Movies About Social Media and the Internet

Meet The Author

Chris has a degree in film studies at Temple University’s campus in Tokyo, Japan. He is a renowned expert on horror cinema.

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Movie review: provocative, genre-bending ‘a different man’ gets under our skin in unexpected ways.

Imagine you could wake up one morning, stand at the mirror, and literally peel off any part of your looks you don’t like - with only movie-star beauty remaining.

How would it change your life? How SHOULD it change your life?

That’s a question – well, a launching point, really - for Edward , protagonist of Aaron Schimberg’s fascinating, genre-bending, undeniably provocative and occasionally frustrating “A Different Man,” featuring a stellar trio of Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve .

The very title is open to multiple interpretations. Who (and what) is “different”? The original Edward , who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes bulging tumors on his face? Or the man he becomes when he’s able to slip out of that skin? And is he “different” to others, or to himself?

When we meet Edward , a struggling actor in New York (Stan, in elaborate makeup), he’s filming some sort of commercial. We soon learn it’s an instructional video on how to behave around colleagues with deformities. But even there, the director stops him, offering changes. “Wouldn’t want to scare anyone,” he says.

On Edward’s way home on the subway, people stare. Back at his small apartment building, he meets a young woman in the hallway, in the midst of moving to the flat next door. She winces visibly when she first sees him, as virtually everyone does.

PHOTOS: Movie Review: Provocative, genre-bending ‘A Different Man’ gets under our skin in unexpected ways

But later, Ingrid (Reinsve) tries to make it up to him, coming over to chat. She is charming and forthright, and tells Edward she’s a budding playwright.

Edward goes for a medical checkup and learns that one of his tumors is slowly progressing over the eye. But he’s also told of an experimental trial he could join. With the possibility - maybe - of a cure.

So Edward , spurred at least partly by frustration at not being able to get closer to Ingrid , joins the trial. These scenes take on the sudden feel of a sci-fi fantasy film - not awkwardly, but somehow quite smoothly shifting genres for a bit.

As for the medication, it starts working even sooner than anyone had hoped. Soon, Edward’s skin is starting to come off in clumps. It’s terrifying. And then he finds himself at the mirror, disintegrating before his eyes. But suddenly, Edward looks like - well, he looks like Sebastian Stan.

Naturally, life changes, and radically. When he goes back to the same bar in which he’d been stared at and left alone, he becomes everyone’s buddy. A woman even wants to have sex with him in the bathroom. He catches his own eye in the mirror, as if to say: “What’s happening to us?”

Edward now makes a momentous choice. He simply disappears from his former life and becomes a “different” person entirely. Now his name is Guy, and he lives in a nicer place. He also has a job as a real estate agent - the ultimate face-forward career, making use of his silky good looks.

But Guy is not, shall we say, comfortable in his own skin. Then one day, he sees Ingrid walking into a theater. She’s holding auditions for the play she’s written - about a man just like Edward . In fact, it IS about Edward . And he becomes obsessed with playing the role.

In the course of auditions, Edward runs into another actor with deformities who says, poignantly, “I was born to play this.” Guy of course cannot say why he disagrees - which is that HE is Edward . Here Schimberg is tapping into the thorny discussion over casting, and whether disabled roles should only be filled by disabled actors, trans roles by trans actors, and so on. Adding layers of complexity to his film, Schimberg does both, in a way.

Or should we say, Ingrid does both. As playwright - and here, the superb Reinsve acquires an edge that her initial, sweeter incarnation of Ingrid lacked - she seems to understand instinctively that Guy, despite his dashing looks, has a connection to the character. She even lets him try rehearsing with a mask of his earlier self.

Enter Oswald.

It’s shame we can’t say too much about Oswald without veering into spoiler territory, because Oswald (Pearson) is the indispensable part of the last act here. Oswald is (as is Pearson) an actor who has neurofibromatosis, but in all other ways he’s extremely different from Edward . He’s outgoing, engaging, brimming with effortless wit - British, too - and interacts with the world in ways Edward could only have dreamed of.

Obviously, this will throw Edward/Guy for a loop. Early scenes exploring the dynamics of this unlikely trio crackle with possibility, discomfort, sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy.

What is Schimberg ultimately trying to say? Here’s where it gets tricky. He throws out some tantalizing questions about authenticity in life and art, not to mention how the way we look charts our destiny. Then, he doesn’t so much answer them as shock us with head-spinning developments that feel, even for these wholly unique circumstances, as if they come out of nowhere.

But it’s an absorbing ride, and Schimberg works with confidence and brio. On top of that his cast is so darned good, you want the story to go on and on - how about a trilogy, with everyone returning for sequels based on Oswald and Ingrid ?

“A Different Man,” an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violent content.” Running time: 112 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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Review & setlist: Isabel LaRosa brings her signature sound off TikTok and onto the Boston stage

“i’m actually in awe of you guys, like, this is insane.”.

By Sanjana Mishra

Isabel LaRosa at Brighton Music Hall, Sept. 17, 2024

Almost two years after releasing her hit song “i’m yours” that became a viral sensation on TikTok , Isabel LaRosa graced Brighton Music Hall on Tuesday night, putting on a show filled with guitar solos, airy vocals, and strobing lights.

Known for her dark and moody electro sound and haunting melodies, the 20-year-old alt-pop singer played all the fan favorites with a rock twist. Her producer and co-writer (and older brother) Thomas LaRosa performed onstage with her, supporting the entire set with his guitar.

LaRosa’s track “favorite” has now been used in more than 204,000 videos on TikTok, where she has amassed over 1.3 million followers. She often posts close-up videos with a bright flash on her face and snippets of her music, a formula that has proven successful — her account has more than 57 million likes. LaRosa has also recently been posting clips to promote her tour. Her local fanbase responded, coming out in droves to show their support.

“I love you guys!” LaRosa shouted to the young crowd towards the beginning of her set. “I literally think you guys have been the loudest so far on tour.”

As she stepped on stage, she was greeted by red flashing lights, a low synth tune, and an eager crowd. The hum melted into the beginning notes of her song “eyes don’t lie” as a stream of wind dramatically blew her hair back. She fidgeted with the mic for a moment, then motioned for the audience to keep singing throughout the performance, maintaining a smile all the while.

The song ended, and she called out, “I’m sorry, my mic isn’t working!” Before disappearing backstage for a few moments, she also said, “It just proves that I’m singing live,” earning more cheers in response. Just minutes later, LaRosa returned, and the show continued thereon without a hitch.

When LaRosa told the crowd to jump, they jumped. When she told them to scream, they did just that. When she performed several unreleased songs — some of which she’s only sung on tour — the crowd sang along even louder, swaying their arms, turning on their phone flashlights in a sea of white, or jumping until the floor shook.

Review & setlist: beabadoobee and Boston are ‘the perfect pair’ at MGM Music Hall

Tiktok influencer and berklee grad chris olsen to open meghan trainor’s mansfield concert, review & setlist: kacey musgraves showcases her relatability in td garden show.

The show saw no lull in energy. She often kneeled down to interact with fervid fans, and in between songs, the crowd continued to shout, “I love you” and “Marry me!” One called out, “Sing that sh—!” at the beginning of a song, causing LaRosa to giggle into the mic.

Thomas played several guitar solos, including in a cover of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” eliciting ear-splitting cheers as his sister motioned at him. The siblings also performed a cover of Ari Abdul’s viral song “BABYDOLL,” which Thomas produced.

“I’m actually in awe of you guys, like, this is insane,” she said after singing “Heaven.” LaRosa explained that she and her brother had been making music since they were children, and they’d never seen a crowd as loud as this one.

“I want you to sing it as loud as you possibly can, do you understand?” LaRosa yelled. “I said, do you understand?” Hoots and shrieks rang out as she launched into the popular lyrics, “Baby, I’m yours.”

In what seemed to be the end of the show, she ran off stage as the lights dimmed, vanishing under a shroud of black. But the fans were still hungry for more — a chant arose: “Favorite! Favorite! Favorite!”

And LaRosa responded in kind. She appeared once more and shouted, “Are you ready?” She didn’t even need to ask. Fans jumped and screamed as the song’s hard-hitting beats shook the hall, bringing LaRosa’s concert to a powerful end.

Though much of her music features whispery vocals, Tuesday’s live show proved that is not the extent of her skill. Paired with a unique electric sound and striking guitar accompaniments, LaRosa’s voice only added to an already electrifying performance that lingered with the crowd long after she left the stage. As fans filtered out of the venue, excited chatter spilled onto the streets, a hum of energy almost tangible after an unforgettable night.

Setlist for Isabel LaRosa at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Sept. 17, 2024

• eyes don’t lie
• more than friends
• without you
• Home (unreleased)
• Good Girl (unreleased)
• BABYDOLL (cover)
• [unreleased song]
• Poker Face (cover)
• Muse (unreleased)
• i’m yours

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The 10 Best A24 Movie Trailers, Ranked

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With the modern era of social media and the internet allowing for more filmmaking opportunities than ever before, independent film feels more approachable and widely appreciated. One of the biggest names leading the charge in terms of independent film notoriety is A24, which has lent its hand in producing and distributing countless modern-day indie classics, including Everything Everywhere All at Once and Moonlight . Many of these films are widely beloved and have stuck in the memories of film fans, not only because of their memorable plots but also because of their instantly iconic trailers.

Making a memorable and eye-catching trailer is a completely different world from the actual film itself. It's a great skill to show exactly why a film is worth seeing and get people excited without giving the plot away. Sometimes, a trailer can prove to be so memorable and mesmerizing that it sticks with people well after the film has already been released, with the fast-paced editing and striking style leaving a deeply resonating impact. As it turns out, A24 has some of the best movie trailers in recent memory , capturing the essence of their projects while remaining distant and enticing.

10 'Beau is Afraid' (2023)

Directed by ari aster.

The third feature film from acclaimed director Ari Aster , Beau is Afraid combined the director's signature flair of psychological and symbolic horror with a twist of hilarious dark comedy, a mixture greatly felt in the film's trailer. The film follows the titular neurotic Beau ( Joaquin Phoenix ), who can't go a single day without struggling with his crippling anxiety. However, when he suddenly hears news of his mother's death, Beau must embark on an expansive journey back home.

Beau is Afraid is equal parts terrifying and hilarious , employing a manic and chaotic energy that doesn't let up for its entire 3-hour runtime. The trailer successfully replicated it, albeit showing only bits and hints as to the wild and beautiful ride that Beau embarks on. The usage of Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger" further adds to the energy, getting audiences entranced and intrigued by what mysteries and twists the film has in store.

Watch on Hulu

9 'Marcel the Shell With Shoes On' (2021)

Directed by dean fleischer camp.

While A24 as a studio is more commonly recognized for its hard-hitting dramas and experimental horror films, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On shows a gentler and more heartwarming side of the distributor. The film follows amateur documentarian Dean as he begins delving into the life of Marcel, a small one-inch-tall shell living in an Airbnb home with his grandmother, Connie. Dean decides to help Marcel find his large extended family that he and his grandmother were separated from, going beyond the confines of the home and exploring the vast open world.

Just from the trailer alone, it's easy to pick up on the cozy vibes and feel-good energy that Marcel the Shell with Shoes On places into the world. Both the film and the trailer have this quirky, hyper-positive outlook on life , that no matter how small one may be, their hopes and dreams can still be as massive as anyone else's. The trailer's usage of "Take Me Home" by Phil Collins further amplifies these thematic elements and immediately helps connect audiences with the adorable one-inch shell .

Watch on Max

8 'X' (2022)

Directed by ti west.

With so many different horror films from A24, the trailers have to do a great job of setting themselves apart, not just from other horror films but from the studio's friendly fire. A distinctive sense of individuality made the X trailer such a standout experience, with the film's focus on style and imbued '70s energy coming across in full force. The film is the first in Ti West 's modern horror trilogy and follows a ragtag group of young filmmakers making an adult film in rural Texas before the elderly hosts of their shooting location attempt to murder them.

X 's trailer does a great job of setting up its classic slasher plot while not revealing too much about its underlying secrets and kills, keeping the experience filled with scares and excitement. While many other horror trailers provide an aura of high tension and fear, X leans much more into the inherent excitement and debauchery of an erotic horror experience , playing out like an old exploration film. It also has a perfect closing line, with a policeman saying, "One goddamn f***d up horror picture," the perfect way to end the trailer.

Rent on Amazon

7 'Civil War' (2024)

Directed by alex garland.

One of the most expensive and high-effort films that A24 has released so far is Civil War , and the trailer goes to great lengths to show off the budget and large-scale storytelling. The film takes place in a terrifying alternate future where America has entered another Civil War , with bloodshed and destruction laying waste to the countryside as warfare rages on. As the war seems to be coming to its final chapter, a group of war journalists travel to Washington, DC, to get an exclusive interview with the president.

Action thrillers are rarely tackled by A24, yet the trailer for Civil War doesn't let up in its exhilarating yet terrifying wartime visuals and depiction of battle. Especially in a time when people are more and more divided than ever before, the film's very concept and energy strike a powerful chord with audiences. The Civil War trailer is a thunderous reminder of the true dangers of combat . Line readings like Jesse Plemons saying, "What kind of American are you," still leave an undeniable impact, elevating the film as a must-watch experience.

6 'Hot Summer Nights' (2017)

Directed by elijah bynum.

While trailers are usually treated as just the appetizer and sneak preview of all the excitement and greatness to come, some do such a great job that they overshadow the film itself. Hot Summer Nights ' trailer was so electrifying and thrilling that there was simply no way for the film to live up to the same level of high-quality crime comedy style. The film follows sheltered teenager Daniel Middleton, who has the ultimate summer as he learns to get rich by selling pot to gangsters.

While Hot Summer Nights is only now remembered as the often-forgotten film from early in Chalamet's career , the trailer makes it feel as if it would be the defining coming-of-age film of the 2010s. It has an infectious energy of passion, young love, and increasingly high-stakes crime , finding a way to effectively balance various tonal shifts and excitement as the film slowly reveals its true intentions. Hot Summer Nights may be forgotten nowadays, but the trailer made a massive splash upon release and remains the most-viewed trailer on A24's YouTube channel .

5 'The Witch' (2015)

Directed by robert eggers.

Long before other films would further cement A24's status as a juggernaut in the independent horror scene, The Witch helped put the studio on the map as a dominating force in horror, with the striking trailer playing a major part. The film follows a lonesome family who relocates to a remote plot of land away from the village during the 1630s. The adjustment to their new lives takes a strange turn once numerous mysterious, paranormal occurrences turn them all against one another.

While it certainly plays into some of the trends and conventions of horror trailers during the early 2010s, The Witch 's trailer tells the story with pinpoint precision and precise timing . It knows exactly how to deeply unnerve the audience while also keeping them at the edge of their seat and intrigued. The use of the harrowing and striking score, as well as the unsettling dialogue, further adds to these elements, setting up The Witch as a quintessential horror experience.

4 'Uncut Gems' (2019)

Directed by josh and benny safdie.

Uncut Gems is a deeply entrancing and anxiety-inducing cinematic experience , so it would only make sense that the film's exceptional trailer would tap into this similar style of heightened high-octane energy. The film follows charismatic New York jeweler Howard Ratner ( Adam Sandler ), who seemingly always has himself deep into various bets and gambles while trying to earn the next big score. Soon, he is wrapped up in a wild and dangerous bet that could end up setting him up forever, yet all the lies, deception, and dangerous balancing required prove to drive him to the brink of madness.

Uncut Gems' s trailer does an exceptional job of getting you wrapped up in its chaotic, high-stakes underground world while only showing enough bits and pieces to cement its deadly serious stakes. The trailer also highlights the biggest positives of the film, such as the exceptional lead performance by Sandler, the colorful and vibrant New York visuals, and the film's ever-building tension that feels like a rush of adrenaline.

3 'Hereditary' (2018)

When people think of horror movies released by A24, Hereditary usually comes to mind, thanks not just to the exceptional quality of the film but also to the undeniable impact the trailer had. The film follows a dysfunctional family as they attempt to deal with a wave of sadness following the death of their grandmother. Soon, several deadly and terrifying secrets find themselves bubbling to the surface as the entire family's safety is threatened by the actions of the deceased woman.

The sign of a great horror trailer is much more than its ability to scare and frighten an audience; instead, its ability to intrigue an audience to where they simply need to know the answers and payoff to the issuing terror. While Hereditary 's trailer does a great job of setting up the basis for its premise, it also provides just enough of a sneak peek at what the film has to offer, amplifying its sinister undertones and inviting audiences to join in the horrors .

2 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (2022)

Directed by daniel scheinert and daniel kwan.

One of the biggest successes and most iconic films of A24's entire filmography, Everything Everywhere All at Once is largely defined by its excess creativity and limitless possibilities, two aspects directly showcased in the trailer. The film follows Chinese immigrant Evelyn Wang ( Michelle Yeoh ), who, on an already stressful day of dealing with a tax audit, finds herself as the core central figure in an ongoing battle across the multiverse. Evelyn is soon taught how to tap into versions of herself from parallel universes, using their skills and abilities to defeat enemies and hopefully save the multiverse.

All the wild creativity and manic energy of Everything Everywhere All at Once is present within the trailer, which only scratches the surface of the film's limitless content and imagination. For what is already an abstract plot to get a handle on, the trailer does a great job of succinctly explaining what you need to know before showing you colorful action and mesmerizing visuals. Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the best maximalist movies ever made, and the trailer effortlessly captures its essence, getting audiences immediately hooked.

1 'The Iron Claw' (2023)

Directed by sean durkin.

Music plays a major factor when it comes to modern-day trailers. Finding the perfect, often recognizable song that not only resonates with viewers but also perfectly fits with the themes and story is no easy task. Music can make all the difference in elevating an already great trailer into one of the best of all time and plays just a key part in making The Iron Claw 's trailer so striking and instantly memorable. The film follows the unbelievable true story of the Von Erich brothers , during their rise to fame in the world of professional wrestling, to the constant heartbreak and tragedies faced by the seemingly cursed family.

The Iron Claw 's trailer masterfully transports the viewer back to the 1980s , with every aspect, from the visuals to the music choice to the pacing, adding to this feeling of reminiscence. While many other trailers only use a singular song to establish their themes and pacing, The Iron Claw makes exceptional use of two equally iconic songs, "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult and "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, to set up its heartbreaking and powerful story. Just like the film itself, the trailer uses this music to set apart the two aspects and arcs of the story, both the glorious and loving early days and the painful and tear-jerking inevitability of tragedy .

NEXT: The 10 Best Trailers of the Last 5 Years, Ranked

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'The Substance' review: Demi Moore shines in bold, boundary-pushing psycho horror shocker

In-your-face satire is not for the squeamish or weak of stomach..

Wickedly audacious and boldly over-the-top, "The Substance" is a biting, hilarious and stomach-churningly disgusting satire of modern beauty standards and Hollywood's obsession with youth, staged as a deranged midnight movie freak-out.

In her second film, French writer-director Coralie Fargeat (2017's "Revenge") calls on boundary pushers such as Gaspar Noé, Nicolas Winding Refn and Davids Lynch and Cronenberg in her raging body horror sci-fi nightmare. She's in league with those renegade auteurs, and "The Substance" is on the shortlist of the wildest, most daring movies to be released (unleashed?) into theaters in the last 25 years.

Demi Moore, in her best and most vital work in decades, stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading star who is being pushed out of her position as host of a hugely popular aerobics TV show. This is part of Fargeat's cracked portrait of the entertainment industry: An aerobics show is the top of the ladder, because it's all leering at women with no pretense of art or anything else. It's selling sex, plain and simple. And Sparkle's stock is waning.

She knows it, even before she's handed her walking papers by a cartoonishly grotesque exec, played by Dennis Quaid and named — in what might as well be a flashing neon light above his head — Harvey. He wants someone younger, someone prettier, someone happier , and he goes about finding her replacement.

Sparkle wants to be younger, prettier and happier, too, and she hears about an experimental procedure dubbed "The Substance," where she'll essentially birth a more perfect version of herself. This will in essence split her into two bodies — the matrix and the other self — and they'll live separate lives but remain one being, trading off consciousness every seven days. And if they don't swap back after exactly one week, there will be consequences.

Don't get caught up in the particulars of transformation. Just know it's staged in vividly gory detail, and the second self emerges as Sue, who is played by Margaret Qualley as a kind of blank, vapid but perpetually smiling young ingenue.

Sue immediately wins over the town — and Harvey, of course — and she becomes the hot new starlet, immediately replacing Sparkle on the newly branded aerobics show "Pump It Up." The only hitch to her sudden fame is those weekly body swaps, and Sparkle quickly grows resentful of Sue, which sets up a sort of "All About Eve" against her alternate self.

It's an absurd, outlandish premise, but Fargeat is never less than all-in, so she makes it easy to go along for the ride. And she has such a striking visual sensibility — she shoots long, imposing, static hallways like they're the spaceship corridors in "2001" — that it feels like you're in the hands of a master craftsperson, someone with a resolute vision who, to her great credit, is completely in on her own joke.

There are social media parallels to this parable, and our quest to constantly present the "best" version of ourselves to the world. The villain in the story is vanity, and Fargeat takes it to its extreme.

As "The Substance" keeps pushing and pushing — boundaries, limits, good taste — it builds to a go-for-broke climax that not even Troma could pull off. Say this for Fargeat, she doesn't pull any punches. She pulls off a shocker of a film that will leave viewers feeling dizzy, dazed and delirious, and feeling like they've just been split in two. It leaves a scar in the form of a beauty mark.

'The Substance'

Rated R: for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language

Running time: 140 minutes

In theaters

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Common Sense Media Review

Dark crime drama from villain's POV is tense, violent.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Penguin is a crime drama about the infamous Batman villain (Colin Farrell). Set in Matt Reeves' The Batman 's Gotham City, this series has the same dark tone and mature content. Language is strong, with frequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," a--hole," "bitch," …

Why Age 15+?

Frequent and intense violence. Guns, fist fighting, a character is hit by a bus.

Strong, frequent language includes "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," a--hole," "bitch," "

A character is stripped naked and tied to a chair; no private parts are shown. P

The main plot revolves around drug dealing, specifically of "drops," a drug take

Part of the DC Universe, which includes Batman and has a lot of associated merch

Any Positive Content?

Most characters are White and male; Vic presents as Latino (the actor who plays

Family is important and worth fighting for, though no one in this series does th

Cobb is driven by greed and a need for power, but he loves his mother and is kin

Violence & Scariness

Frequent and intense violence. Guns, fist fighting, a character is hit by a bus. Multiple people are shot point-blank in the head, including a teenager. A character is tortured with wire. A person's heart is ripped from their chest.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong, frequent language includes "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," a--hole," "bitch," "douchebag," "prick," "goddamn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A character is stripped naked and tied to a chair; no private parts are shown. Photos of a couple in bed together are shown. Characters kiss and make out; it's implied that they have sex. Sex workers talk about camming, domination, and kink.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The main plot revolves around drug dealing, specifically of "drops," a drug taken like eye drops. Production of a new, more addictive drug is discussed; there are scenes in a drug processing facility. Characters drink alcohol frequently; some have alcoholism.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Part of the DC Universe, which includes Batman and has a lot of associated merchandise.

Diverse Representations

Most characters are White and male; Vic presents as Latino (the actor who plays him is Dominican). Cobb speaks Spanish. The Penguin has facial differences like a cleft lip and scars; he also walks with a limp and wears a metal brace on one leg. His protege, Vic, has a stutter. It's difficult to see what this series has to say about disability besides the longstanding cliche that disabled people become villains. The series' showrunner is female and has Latino heritage.

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Positive Messages

Family is important and worth fighting for, though no one in this series does that in aboveboard ways.

Positive Role Models

Cobb is driven by greed and a need for power, but he loves his mother and is kind to his new protege, Vic.

Parents need to know that The Penguin is a crime drama about the infamous Batman villain ( Colin Farrell ). Set in Matt Reeves' The Batman 's Gotham City, this series has the same dark tone and mature content. Language is strong, with frequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," a--hole," "bitch," "douchebag," "prick," "goddamn," and more. Violence is also intense: Expect to see lots of guns, fist fighting, and death (including a character hit by a bus). Multiple people, including a teenager, are shot point-blank in the head, a character is tortured with wire, and a person's heart is ripped from their chest. A character is stripped naked and tied to a chair; nothing explicit is shown. Characters kiss and make out, and it's implied that they have sex. Sex workers talk about camming, domination, and kink. The Penguin and his protege both have disabilities, which plays into the longstanding cliche that disabled people become villains.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

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What's the Story?

In THE PENGUIN, Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) is a mid-level crime boss working for the Falcone family. When its patriarch and his son die, Cobb sees an opening for him to gain more power. He ropes in a fresh face, Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), to be his driver and to teach him the ways of Gotham City's underbelly. Cobb hopes to introduce a new drug to Gotham, even more menacing than the current crop of "drops," an addictive substance people use like eye drops. Meanwhile, the remaining Falcone sibling, Sofia (Cristin Milioti), is fresh out of Arkham Asylum and has doubts about exactly how her brother died. Cobb also has to deal with his beloved mother who suffers from dementia but still pushes her baby to make it to the big time. Will The Penguin come out on top?

Is It Any Good?

There's no rooting for good guys in this underworld drama, which is a challenge. But The Penguin 's Cobb is a compelling underdog, and despite his nature, you hope he gets a win. The addition of some dark humor to Gotham's notoriously dreary world helps (turns out The Penguin is a cilantro hater but loves a good slushie). Under all the prosthetics, Farrell shines through and brings a striking vulnerability to his power-hungry but perpetually downtrodden character. Legendary character actors like Clancy Brown, Mark Strong, and Michael Kelly pop up as The Penguin's shady cohort, and Milioti brings a steely but unhinged resolve to Sofia Falcone.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why The Penguin is the way he is. How has trauma affected him and his choices? Is there ever any excuse for violence?

What do you think about dark reboots of what were once comics for kids?

• Premiere date : September 19, 2024
• Cast : Colin Farrell , Cristin Milioti , Theo Rossi
• Network : Max
• Genre : Drama
• TV rating : TV-MA
• Last updated : September 18, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.