AVClub: Boy soldiers chop heads under the command of a Fagin-like child molester, living like zombies and snorting cocaine cut with gunpowder, convulsing in the fetid standing water of a red clay trench—each horror rendered as a slow-mo shot where the sound gradually drops out or as a long Steadicam take, intense and disturbing only in italics or quotation marks. Here, director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s studied, somber professionalism appears to have gotten the better of him, because though Beasts Of No Nation is a long-in-the-works passion project that Fukunaga wrote, produced, and shot himself, it still plays an awful lot like an impersonal calling-card technical exercise—all unreturned stares and glaciers of Tangerine Dream-esque synth, hedged on viewer identification with a cast of non-professional child actors who don’t do much but give blank looks that can be projected with the trauma of civil war. And yet it doesn’t brush off easily.
If you’ve finished Fallout and are hungering for more fun TV shows based on video games, you’re in luck. These 6 shows will fill your queue while you wait for the next season.
Death Whisperer Review: Nadech Kugimiya makes for a beefy protagonist in this horror movie that any and all thrills!
What Jennifer Did Review: Documentary navigates twists and turns of the story really well.
