Not sure what to watch next? begins with one of the biggest life dilemmas of our modern age: Is it okay to eat Chick-fil-A? Or should we all avoid the fast food restaurant like the plague? A drunken Clare Pierce (Kathryn Hahn) debates this with herself, as she rides in the passenger seat of her husband Danny’s (Quentin Plair) car. She’s already chomping on a greasy fried chicken sandwich, lathered in honey mustard sauce and paired with crisp waffle fries, so perhaps the decision has already been made. But Clare is upset with herself for ordering from such a rancid corporation, grappling with her embarrassment as she shoves more bites of juicy chicken into her mouth.
Though she’s right that Chick-fil-A is a harrowing business run by the allegedly racist, homophobic Dan Cathy—I, myself, never opt to dine there, though I’ll go along with others if they insist—it’s hard to deny how delectable those damn sandwiches and fries are. Suggest Popeyes, McDonald’s, and KFC all you want; nothing will top the unfettered deliciousness of a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. Though it goes much deeper than deliberating on fast food chains—like divorce, death, and life’s many woes—Tiny Beautiful Things treats each dilemma with the same earnestness, never rendering a single impasse as something black and white.”
Skip: Tetris
Tetris is a scatterbrained biopic that takes a puzzling (pun intended) approach to the famous video game. Is this a criticism of Soviet-era politics, or a love letter to the ’80s that skirts the game’s origin story to ride on nostalgia? All of these pieces just don’t fit.
Here’s Allegra Frank’s take:
“There are few joys as pure as playing Tetris, which has single-handedly accounted for millions, if not billions, of hours of lost time. The game’s impossible-to-put-down nature is such that one apocryphal tale claims a Moscovian medical lab banned it for distracting its workers. Outlawing fun? That’s the kind of schoolmarm behavior that American media loves to shock us with when talking about foreign countries, as if we’re expected to forget about our own teachers snatching away our Pokémon cards during elementary school.
Watching Tetris (March 31 on Apple TV+), a film that translates the game’s time-suck quality into something way too literal, it’s impossible to come away without thinking that the USSR was uniquely anti-fun. It was a place where the heads of Nintendo of America (fun personified!) are thrust into a getaway car, chased down by the KGB. It was a place where the mere existence of a game like Tetris could be cause for an international incident.”
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