Aarcflick

The 2025 Netflix crime thriller documentary, Unknown Number: High School Catfish, is absolutely insane. This true story introduces us to a mother, Kendra Licari, who, for very troubling reasons, began sending disgusting text messages, with explicit descriptions, to her fifteen-year-old daughter, Lauryn, and her ex-boyfriend, Owen McKenny. After watching the documentary, one could only imagine the psychological trauma and emotional torture these kids must have endured.  Through these messages, Kendra began criticizing her own daughter for her looks and attacking her insecurities, causing Lauryn to lose self-confidence and stop participating in extracurricular activities. She even broke up with Owen because that's what the texter wanted. Meanwhile, Owen and his family, especially his mother, Jill McKenny, couldn't understand why this anonymous author was harassing and verbally attacking this young couple. Director: Skye Borgman Stars: Lauryn Licari, Sophie Weber, Macy Johnston Th...

The 2025 Chilean Netflix documentary Millonario tells the story of perhaps the country's unluckiest man, or the failed attempts of an ambitious con man, depending on how you perceive the complex situation. The protagonist is Javier Zapata, a Chilean who won the country's largest lottery, 2.4 billion pesos, but was never able to collect the prize, as authorities claimed his ticket was counterfeit. Although its presentation is a bit chaotic and sometimes strays from the main topic, Millonario is still an intriguing film and can be highly entertaining for fans of non-fiction cinema.  Javier Zapata, a farmer living in a town near Los Angeles in central Chile, led a very normal life until one fateful day in March 2018. Although Javier was never extroverted and therefore not very popular in his neighborhood, he had a good number of close friends and acquaintances who regularly stayed with him or simply said hello when they met. Most neighbors remember seeing Javier participating in f...

AppleTV+ and Megan Thee Stallion are bringing to global television a show where major K-pop artists collaborate with legendary global artists to "Kpopify" their Western music in a fierce competition. Except this isn't really a competition. It's an attempt to introduce K-pop to a global audience that has always been skeptical of it and considers it outsider music. For starters, as a K-pop fan already, I must admit that I'm not the target audience for this show.  It's specifically for those who want to watch legends like Patti LaBelle, the Spice Girls, TLC, Boy George, Boyz II Men, and more. Here's the thing: In some episodes, there's actual competition, as we see two global artists compete against each other, while the K-pop group is split in two. So, for example, we have Megan Thee Stallion with one half of Billie and Patti LaBelle with the other half. However, when it's Boyz II Men or the Spice Girls, the global artists aren't split in two; Th...

The ending of Two Graves revolved around Isabel preventing Rafael Salazar from killing his granddaughter, Veronica, and her lover, Jamila Abdallah. What drove Salazar to commit such a murder? Well, two years before the events of this Netflix miniseries, Veronica and Salazar's daughter, Marta, had gone out partying. They were supposed to return home at 3 a.m., but neither of them returned. An exhaustive search was launched, and authorities found Marta's body in the waters off Frigiliana, Spain. But there was no trace of Veronica. Eventually, Miguel Zaera, the judicial police, Veronica's father, Antonio, and even her sister, Lupe, gave up. Of the two suspects, Jonas Herrera was released due to lack of evidence, and Johannes Witzke, known for his sexual offenses but unrelated to the case, took his own life. That said, just when the case seemed to be going cold, Isabel took a major step forward when she discovered that Beltrán, a mutual friend of the girls, had taken them to a ...

Nora (Taylor Cole) was a rising star at the prominent New York advertising agency H Company before taking a risk and jumping ship with former H Company VP Alexandra (Elisa Donovan) to start their own firm, Rankin Advertising Company. Nora is happy at Rankin. She has a better work-life balance, less stress, and an overall better work environment, free from H Company's cutthroat competition.  The only problem is, Nora now feels the pressure to help this startup thrive in order to support and reassure all the employees who bravely left H Company to start anew alongside her. And after losing her last potential account to H Company, Nora is determined to do everything she can to score a big win that will turn the tide in Rankin's favor. But an after-work dinner with her best friend, Shannon (Jacklyn Collier), might be enough to put Nora on the path to success when she tries a brand of ice cream so good even a sugar hater can enjoy it, giving her an idea of ​​who her next customer mi...

 I'll try not to emotionally wound my fellow millennials by reminding everyone that it's been over 40 years since the original 1984 film, The Toxic Avenger, hit the screens. Lloyd Kaufman's strange and unabashed anti-superhero film hit right in the heart of the 1980s, playing with the subversion of heroes and slasher conventions a little before Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Howard the Duck. Initially compared more to its slasher predecessors, the film became a hit with midnight moviegoers, spawning a slew of sequels and, now, a shiny new remake.  Borrowing more from later subversive superhero films and fewer from earlier horror favorites, this new Toxic Avenger film retains all the midnight movie charm, albeit with less impact. Peter Dinklage stars in this film as Winston Gooze, a down-on-his-luck janitor struggling to raise his stepson, keep his job, and manage a potentially fatal diagnosis. After being fired by his company's eccentric CEO (Kevin Bacon), Goo...

Even in the relatively regulated world of the contemporary internet, you never know what the person next to you is looking at on their phone: Fascist propaganda? Extreme pornography? Photos of a church picnic? So the drab, drab office building that gives its name to "American Sweatshop" looks like anything. The only sign that something's amiss is the on-site consultant and employees vomiting, crying, and throwing tantrums at their desks. Content moderation is a well-documented phenomenon, first publicized in Adrian Chen's 2014 "Wired" article, "The Workers Keeping Dick Pics and Decapitations Off Your Facebook Feed." The headline says it all: around the world, a silent army of low-wage workers manually reviews flagged content on social media to determine whether or not it violates the site's terms of service. In practice, this means being exposed to a constant stream of child sexual abuse, murder, and sexual content for hours every day, with all...

Richard Osman's debut novel, published in 2020, was more than a bestseller: it turned the cozy detective genre into a publishing phenomenon, offering readers the comfort of Agatha Christie-style puzzles wrapped in humor and warmth. It was smart, timely, and hugely popular, sparking a wave of sequels and famous imitators. Now, Netflix is ​​bringing Richard's creation to the big screen with Chris Columbus at the helm and a cast packed with names like Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie. The adaptation, while undeniably entertaining, rarely rises above the level of gentle distraction. The film is set in Coopers Chase, a retirement home that feels more like a grand English estate than a care facility. This is where four residents have formed what they call the Thursday Murder Club: Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), a former intelligence chief; Ron (Pierce Brosnan), a former union leader; Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), a retired psychiatrist; and Joyce (Celia Imrie), a nurs...

Two of the finest actors of their generation, plus a hilarious script from "The Favourite" screenwriter Tony McNamara, aren't enough to fix the lack of chemistry between an English couple at war. It's been 36 years, approximately 40 million divorces, and a radical cultural shift (or several) since Danny DeVito's dark romantic comedy "The Wars of the Roses" pitted Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas against each other, but that film's marketing pitch still makes me laugh. Director: Jay Roach Writers: Warren Adler, Tony McNamara Stars: Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate McKinnon "Once in a lifetime, a movie comes along that makes you feel like you're falling in love again," the tagline joked. "This isn't that movie." Bringing fresh wit and 21st-century gender politics to Warren Adler's scathingly anti-rom-com novel, "The Fockers" director Jay Roach has removed the "war" from "The Wars of t...

 This review offers a thoughtful and electrifying summary of Caught Stealing (2025), a genre-bending crime thriller that combines dark humor, suspense, and quirky charm. This piece offers a thoughtful and captivating look at Darren Aronofsky's bold shift from an intense psychological drama to a fast-paced, chaotic adventure set in late 1990s New York. Director: Darren Aronofsky Writer: Charlie Huston Stars: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz Caught Stealing introduces Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), a former high school baseball player whose life took a tragic turn. Now tending bar and dating a caring paramedic (Zoë Kravitz), Hank's everyday world unravels when he agrees to cat-sit for his punk-rock neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith). A mistaken identity plunges him into a dangerous underworld inhabited by Russian, Jewish, and Puerto Rican gangsters, all eager to conquer him for reasons still unknown. Through a peculiar series of escalating encounters, thrilling action sequences, ...

 The ending of The Balconettes is a reminder that the only thing women truly crave is freedom. This film uses the potent power of grotesque imagery to make us feel repulsed by what's happening on screen, while still wanting to know how things end. The film opens with a man telling his wife to stop being dramatic during a heat wave in Marseille, France. Denise then "throws a tantrum," smacks the man's head, and suffocates him by sitting on his face (woo!). But soon after, the film begins to show you a beautiful, picturesque French street with pretty, colorful balconies and beautiful women.  The film's protagonists are three dramatically different protagonists who are also best friends. This is the first thing that struck me as most realistic about the film: women don't run in cliques; they can be friends even if they're as different as the sun and the moon. The Balconettes begins almost as if it's a male fantasy; There's nudity, sex, and lots of att...

Who would have thought a love letter to swimming pools could keep you hooked for ninety-nine minutes! At the heart of Sam Hayes's feature debut are swimming pools, those shimmering blue beauties with an undercurrent of class politics. In the sweltering Chicago heat, a group of college kids decide to go pool-hopping through the posh neighborhoods of their college town. They were willing to risk arrest to experience the joy of diving into one; the risk was worth it for the momentary relief from the summer heat that had briefly paralyzed their lives. The group was mostly made up of students who barely knew each other, and over the course of the film, they forged an unlikely friendship, one you'll remember for a lifetime. As a coming-of-age dramedy, Pools is refreshingly original. Not the laugh-out-loud kind, but a lighthearted, warm, and heartwarming drama. Identity is always at the heart of the coming-of-age genre, as people navigate the difficult path of becoming adults, and Poo...

Netflix's Italian mystery comedy-drama, Fantasy Football Ruined Our Lives, is about a group of friends united by their passion for fantasy football. They ran into trouble when one of their friends, Gianni, disappeared after his bachelor party. On his wedding day, Gianni was nowhere to be seen. His bride-to-be tried to contact him but couldn't; his best friends had no idea where he was, and it was almost as if he had simply vanished. His friends, fantasy football fans, were more concerned about the fact that Gianni hadn't turned in his fantasy team by the deadline. The police arrived at the wedding venue and arrested Giani's best friends: Simone, Federico, Nicola, Jacopo, and Francesco. Federico, a lawyer, had agreed to represent his friends when the case came before a judge. In addition to thoroughly searching the venue where Gianni held his bachelor party, the police suspected something bloody had happened the night before. There was blood on the floor, and because Sim...