Melissa Barrera

Scream VI

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  • Title: Scream VI
  • IMDb: link

The sixth entry in the Scream franchise follows Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega) to college. The film opens in the expected way with a woman (Samara Weaving) being stalked on the phone and then killed, although we do get a twist with the killer (Tony Revolori) immediately being revealed and then himself stalked and killed by a different Ghostface killer out to frame Sam for his crimes and punish the sisters for what he believes are their crimes.

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Scream

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  • Title: Scream (2022)
  • IMDb: link

Released 26 years after the original Scream, the confusingly-titled fifth film in the horror franchise that had devolved into a parody of itself captures a bit of the old magic with a “requel” introducing a new cast of potential victims and/or killers (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Sonia Ammar, and Jack Quaid) while returning the familiar faces of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Dewey Riley (David Arquette), and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) back to Woodsboro.

The new Scream is certainly derivative, but (like the original) it plays with the characters’ understanding of both horror movies and experiences with previous attacks. The results are better than expected, although for me things fall apart in the final act with the reveal who is under the Ghostface mask and the reasons why (to be fair, not all that dissimilar to problems I had with the original Scream).

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In the Heights

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  • Title: In the Heights
  • IMDb: link

Adapted from the stage musical, In the Heights follows the lives of several characters in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood. In a reverse of an immigrant chasing the American dream, our main character is a bodega owner (Anthony Ramos) saving his money to leave New York and return to the the Dominican Republic to restart his father’s beach-front business. Other characters include his crush (Melissa Barrera), Olga Merediz as the neighborhood’s matriarch, and the neighborhood’s brightest star (Leslie Grace) returning in failure from Stanford who can’t articulate her problems to her father (Jimmy Smits).

In the Heights is a story about dreamers. Each character is chasing a dream or trying to help others achieve their own. The eclectic neighborhood of Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other nationalities is punctuated by vibrant musical numbers around dreams, love, and everyday life.

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