The View From The Mountain

It’s been forty two years since the death of legendary master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, but his influence lives on the a new generation of filmmakers. The recently released Watcher, ably directed by Chloe Okuno, is another thriller with a Hitchcockian flair. Julia (Maika Monroe) moves to Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who’s been transferred to the Romanian office by his company. Francis speaks Romanian fluently, having been raised by a Romanian mother, but Julia--who’s still trying to learn the language--is lost at sea. Okuno makes a point of not translating any of the Romanian that’s spoken in the film, making us feel Julia’s isolation and frustration at being left out of conversations and life in general. But life gets even harder for Julia when she starts seeing a shadowy figure watching her from one of the windows in the apartment building across the street. Soon, she starts seeing a strange man who appears to be following her where...

The Orville has long been an entertaining science fiction show that got even better with its third (and possibly final) season. With shooting on the third season getting held up by the pandemic, Seth MacFarlane--who created the series, as well as stars as its Captain, Ed Mercer--seemingly took the added time to rework the scripts. And that was a very good thing. When The Orville first debuted, it was seen as a comedy that offered a funny, satirical view of Star Trek, the classic series from which The Orville was inspired by. The humor was very broad and bombastic, sometimes going a little over the top. But even in the first two seasons, the slapstick humor began to slowly be replaced by earnest storytelling as MacFarlane and his writers fleshed out their characters and the universe they lived in. And by doing this, The Orville only got better. While there’s still humor in the third season, and it’s much welcome (because the humor here is still genuinely fu...