Critical Darlings

Critical Darlings is going LIVE at The Savannah Film Festival!

In our first live podcast recording, we’re doing an awards season kickoff at 2pm on Tuesday October 29th at The Gutstein Gallery in Savannah Georgia.

We’ll be talking about the year’s awards narratives, the big races, and more. For more information and tickets, visit: ⁠https://filmfest.scad.edu/schedule/critical-darlings-awards-season-kickoff-live⁠

The Social Reckoning is Aaron Sorkin's semi-sequel to the Oscar-winning The Social Network. It updates the story of Silicon Valley boy-king Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook to the near-present. Despite a more tech-skeptical public, critics and audiences seem to have rejected the film. Thankfully, we have an expert to help unpack it: former Facebook employee George Civeris of Straightiolab!

Despite much of the press and promotional focus around the movie, Zuckerberg, now embodied by Jeremy Strong, ends up playing a supporting role to Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White's characters, Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, and Jeff Horwitz a journalist trying to expose Facebook's growth-at-any-cost mindset.

We get into the inevitable comparisons to The Social Network, the lead performances (plus Betty Gilpin), and the mythology of Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed in both films.
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🚨🚨🚨 Big News! 🚨🚨🚨

Critical Darlings is going LIVE at The Savannah Film Festival!

In our first live podcast recording, we’re doing an awards season kickoff at 2pm on Tuesday October 29th at The Gutstein Gallery in Savannah Georgia.

We’ll be talking about the year’s awards narratives, the big races, and more. For more information and tickets, visit: https://filmfest.scad.edu/schedule/critical-darlings-awards-season-kickoff-live

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Digger may be exhausting to watch, but it sure is fun to talk about!

This week, we’re joined by Dana Stevens, Slate critic and author of Camera Man, to discuss Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s big-budget, big-swing meta-satire about climate, gerontocracy, art, and who knows what else. It may have flopped at the box office, but we’re (sort of) split on what to make of the movie and its knotty, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes clumsy presentation.

Next week, we’re reckoning with The Social Reckoning.

Email us! CriticalDarlingsMailbag@gmail.com
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Heads up to listeners, this episode includes sensitive discussions of abuse due to the nature of the film.

It's Primetime! The new Robert Pattinson vehicle is a neon-lit, morally murky movie about ratings and perversions of justice that serves as an astonishing acting showcase for Pattinson and costars Merritt Weaver and Skyler Gisondo . It's also a hit, and yet another feather in Pattinson's cap, after The Drama succeeded earlier this year, and with Dune III on the horizon.

We're joined by the incredibly well-traveled Jessica Kiang of Variety and The Berlin Film Festival to discuss. We discuss the film, its unintended documentary companion piece Predators, the phenomenon of To Catch A Predator, and how all of that is filtered through this very slick film, the first narrative feature from director Lance Oppenheim.

Next week, we'll be having a very measured discussion of the normal-looking film "Digger".

Email us: CriticalDarlingsMailbag@gmail.com
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In this bonus episode: After a month of festival hopping, we're back in the studio to discuss the fall festival season, its big premieres, and paint a very rough picture of how award season is shaping up. But first, we take a question from the mailbag to demystify the fall festival circuit and how these giant star-studded events actually work.

Email us! CriticalDarlingsMailbag@gmail.com
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Conflict of interest disclosure:

Critical Darlings is a fully owned subsidiary of The Umbrella Corporation.

Today we're joined by David Sims of Blank Check and "friend of" one of this film's featured performers (Critical Darlings' Executive Producer) Griffin Newman, to discuss Zach Cregger's adaptation of the Resident Evil video game series.

Resident Evil is Cregger's third triumph in a row, after Barbarian and Weapons, and captures the game series' campy but grotesque sensibility in a completely fresh way that's resonating with audiences, critics, and even the vast majority of gamers.

We go deep on Resident Evil lore, whether Resident Evil 4 is the greatest game of all time, and how the movie's bullet-counting, rummaging-through-drawers set pieces manage to evoke the series without introducing any classic Resident Evil lore. We also get into the history of the Resident Evil film series, different approaches to video game adaptations, and whether this movie will usher in a new age of less literal game adaptations.

Next week, it's lights, camera, Pattinson, with Primetime!

Email us! CriticalDarlingsMailbag@gmail.com
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