On the occasion of two movie releases we’ve covered in the last week, I caught up with the feature film debuts of filmmakers Bong Joon Ho and Rungano Nyoni. Bong’s Barking Dogs Never Bite is a characteristically offbeat dark comedy about an unemployed professor who begins killing the loud dogs in his neighborhood. (I’ve half-joked that I’m more than willing to “go John Wick” on anyone who’d harm my beloved dogs, but Bong’s storytelling is so compelling even I could enjoy this movie. It’s streaming on Tubi, though I was able to watch it sans ads through my local library’s Kanopy account, so check there, too.)
And Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch, streaming on Tubi and Prime Video, is a sharp and funny critique of real-life “witch camps,” and features a great performance from its young lead Maggie Mulubwa.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the current music industry trend of the deluxe album rollout, and one of our astute music critics, Sheldon Pearce, helped me sort out some of my conflicted feelings on the subject.
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