This was clearly inspired by a real case (albeit one that didn’t involve a drug kingpin):

The promos, etc. for this episode had all emphasized the Wall Street references for Veronica’s future, so words could not fully convey my delight when it turned into a riff on Uncut Gems.

It’s funny that Maisie was the most common fancast for this role half a decade ago.

Sure, Promising Young Woman got four nominations. But let’s be honest: That’s about as glossy and Hollywood of a take on the revenge genre as you’re going to get.

It’s hard to know what the end of Season 4 would have looked like had it been allowed to proceed without the intervention of the coronavirus, but the returned episodes have all had the feeling of a somewhat rushed deck-clearing exercise as they prepare for the time jump — I suspect the original plan would have felt at…

I would have thought the Trump years would have put paid to the idea that these people will just go away if we ignore them.

Randall Park’s Jimmy Woo transitioned from the pure comedy in Ant-Man and the Wasp to a somewhat more serious role here; somewhat outside Park’s usual range as an actor, though he’s not bad by any means.

“Ease the trauma of the survivors” would be meddling with people’s minds in an unethical manner.

Cheryl’s blasé reaction to her mother killing their entire extended family is the sort of moment that makes the show worthwhile.

The film version of Cats, if nothing else, gave us this wonderful junior ice dance program:

The revelations about Jules’ mother add a lot to understanding her dynamic with Rue in the first season.

It will be interesting to see what they do there, since they’d either have to incorporate the pandemic or make some pretty major unexplained changes to how the show looks and feels aesthetically, because crowds featured a lot in the first season.

All the subsequent cinematic iterations of Spider-Man have been in dialogue with Raimi’s to some extent — in the case of the MCU, most pointedly by consciously focusing on elements of the Spidey mythos and aesthetic that didn’t make it into Raimi’s version. The Webb films are extremely obvious in attempting to copy a…

I can confirm it went over well in Canada at the time.

The sequel has many problems, but it’s definitely not “unambitious”.  It has big ambitions, it just comes up way short of them.

(even if it was a Christmas movie inexplicably released in August)

I don’t think it’s about money per se, though it probably would have been harder to finance this had Sia wanted to use an autistic actor. But Ziegler is a longstanding creative collaborator of hers, and I doubt very much she ever actually considered using anybody else.

No. Pottermania was already a global phenomenon when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out the previous year. The books were so huge that the filmmakers frequently just assumed the audience had read them and could supplement the onscreen plotting. Now, obviously some more people saw the movies who never read…

The books were already a world-dominating cultural phenomenon by the time this came out.

The Harry Potter films were an important part of developing my understanding of what a director could bring to a property, because of how dramatic the difference between Columbus and Cuarón was. Though it was perhaps a sign of things to come in franchise world that Cuarón’s was the lowest-grossing entry in the series…