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Reviews
A Ghost Story (2017)
Shocked by just how much hate this film gets
This is not a film to watch with a big bowl of popcorn snuggled up looking for something to entertain you on a Tuesday night. It's probably best that you know what you're getting yourself into...
It's a film that challenges you to empathize with a faceless, voiceless entity that you only get to know briefly. It weaponizes boredom and hazy, cold cinematography to put the viewer in a similar situation as the titular ghost. You are a distant, helpless observer to a world that relentlessly moves forward without you. Characters come and go without much introduction or resolution, and all you can do is watch as time goes on... and on... and on...
A Ghost Story is intentionally divisive, but if you immerse yourself in its bold and and chilling atmosphere, you will experience a film that is deeply moving and sticks with you for a long, long time.
American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020)
Riveting Documentary with Questionable Conclusions
First off as others have said, the format of this documentary is incredible. You don't just hear someone telling you the story, you see the exact moments. Practically everything other than the murders themselves are presented on screen. It is a truly devastating experience.
That being said, Netflix is starting to become questionable with the honesty of their storytelling (i.e. Tiger King). The film leads you to believe Shanann is an emotionally abusive wife and that Chris is just conflicted by the emasculation he feels, which feels ethically wrong and disingenuous by the end. As another reviewer mentioned, information presented is incomplete: no acknowledgment of some very important details of the case that are just a Google search or scroll away. There are no explorations into WHY this happened, or where this monster came from either. In that sense, it fails in the most basic metric of documentary storytelling.
The film is finally transparent in its conclusion at the very end, which beyond being insulting, is painfully lazy. Men. That's why. Just men. Chris isn't the only one, men do this because they're men and they're bad. Really? That's the takeaway here?