The White Lotus breakout
Sydney Sweeney stars in a Rear Window homage that provides a certain kind of lurid, twisty entertainment that’s been missing for so long
Remember sex at the movies? It wasn’t all that long ago – the 90s, maybe even the early aughts – that studios believed in the narrative utility and simple entertainment value of watching professionally good-looking people engaged in acts of intimacy. Decades of chastened blockbuster heroes, their ascent at the expense of the mid-budget character pieces for grownups that have all but gone extinct, have estranged the public from the combination of maturity and libidinous fun that once made the erotic thriller a dominant industry force in
Hollywood. We’re starved for touch, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say we’re thirsty. A dry, flavorless cinema has left viewers with a taste for the lurid parched.
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Netflix action thriller is a non-starter