Trolls Band Together (2023) - Movie Review

This feels like a step backwards for this franchise. After expanding beyond pop music into all sorts of different genres in Trolls World Tour, going back to just pop music feels like it's making the film's world smaller, which isn't ideal if they're going to even bother making another one to begin with. That they likely did it just so that they could cash in on boy band nostalgia, with star Justin Timberlake’s history with NSYNC being both figuratively and literally invoked in this film, doesn’t help.

But hey, my first interaction with this franchise involved plenty of scepticism, and not only did I like the first film, I liked the second one even more so. Well, while I still had fun with this latest entry, I am definitely starting to wonder if this was all that necessary.

Stowaway (2021) - Movie Review

The sophomore feature from Mystery Guitar Man turned budding filmmaker Joe Penna is an amplification of everything that went into his first film Arctic. The main cast has been doubled, the dialogue has increased exponentially, and while the setting is ostensibly far more cramped than the vastness of the Arctic, it serves as ground zero for a survival narrative that delves even further into dissecting human instincts. The result of all this is a film so refined, it retroactively makes Arctic look like splashing around in a kiddie pool by comparison.