Lauren Vanderveen

Lauren Vanderveen covers news for CinemaBlend, with a heavy emphasis on pop culture trends and streaming titles. She has also written reviews for AllMovie.com.
Featured Image

Minx

The streaming series about the intersection between feminism and smut could endear even the most skeptical. And what it might lack in delicacy, it certainly makes up for in swagger.

Featured Image

Love & Gelato

Love & Gelato is pretty corny but it’s the exact kind of sweetly innocent confection that will melt in your mouth. What’s more, the film offers a slightly more authentic ending than the average rom-com fare.

Featured Image

Becoming Elizabeth

Becoming Elizabeth goes beyond mere court intrigue and makes a testimony to the influence of the powerful over the powerless. It’s assisted majorly by an eager and incredibly telling arrangement of sounds that stitches the lofty narrative together. In short, it’s a bold entry in the arena of historical dramas.

Featured Image

Watercooler Guide: What You Need to Know about The Staircase

Our Watercooler guide to The Staircase will help you jump right into the conversation about HBO Max’s new true-crime series.

Featured Image

Outlander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Assault

It’s no coincidence every major character in Outlander has experienced some form of assault. I’d argue that’s what the whole show is about.

Featured Image

The Adam Project

The Adam Project is one of those movies you go into imagining big explosions and kids hilariously making life-or-death decisions (like Zathura, for example). And, to be sure it throws everything it has at the wall and then some: time-travel jiu jitsu soldiers, a stacked all-star cast, and lots of heart. 

Featured Image

The Alpinist

Joie de vivre never looked so effortless as it does in The Alpinist. While the spectacular cinematography wows the senses, the beautiful character portrait at its core of an eccentric, backwoods mountain climber stirs the humanity in us all.

Featured Image

The Best New Movies and TV Shows in February 2022

Love, history, and choices well off the beaten path are arriving on streaming platforms this month. See our picks in categories you won’t find anywhere else.

Featured Image

The Best New Movies and Shows to Stream in December 2021

This month’s picks include big stars, highly anticipated returns, sci-fi epics, and an international Oscar contender—all for your streaming pleasure!

Lauren Vanderveen

Lauren Vanderveen covers news for CinemaBlend, with a heavy emphasis on pop culture trends and streaming titles. She has also written reviews for AllMovie.com.
Featured Image

You’re the Worst

Through the eyes of two cynics who seem doomed to be alone, You’re the Worst embraces the complexity of modern relationships and the many emotional layers they surface. It’s also an accurate and empathetic portrait of what it’s like to live with clinical depression.

Featured Image

The stars of Manhunt on the history we did not learn

It’s a story that none of us learned in history classes, and it unfolds as a taut, complex conspiracy thriller — one that raises all new questions. Set in 1865, Manhunt focuses on the aftermath of one of America’s most tragic events: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. With all of the biopics, TV shows, and

Read More »
Featured Image

The Iron Claw

A moving and nostalgic homage to the sport of wrestling and one of its most beloved families, Iron Claw will fully immerse you into an era and a world that many misunderstand, ultimately telling a story about the potency of a family’s bonds.

Featured Image

Your Seasonal Mood Lift Movie Watchlist

How to cure your Season Mood funk? These 10 movies and TV series will lift you out of your winter blues and inspire your next vacation.

Featured Image

Transport Me: The Best International Horror Movies

Most horror aficionados have seen the American classics and their derivatives: The Shining, The Exorcist, all the Halloween movies, or the other big franchises. Disturbing in their own ways, American horror often follows predictable patterns and tropes. If you’re ready to explore some new worlds and watch something unexpected, it’s time to head overseas. Each

Read More »
Featured Image

A Conversation Guide to Oscars’ Best Picture Contenders

It’s been nearly 30 years since a blockbuster won the big prize at the Academy Awards. The year Titanic won, in 1998, 57 million people tuned in for the awards show. Compare that to the 10.4 million who watched the 2021 ceremony, the year after Covid sunk the theatrical movie business, and you can see

Read More »
Featured Image

Lisa Frankenstein

A fresh spin on the campy monster comedy that fully embraces the absurdities of its source material, Lisa Frankenstein subverts familiar tropes and charts its own imaginative path, ultimately moving the genre forward.

Featured Image

Navalny

In the wake of his death in a Russian prison, Navalny is a timely, tense real life espionage thriller with a call to action.  

Featured Image

AlRawabi School for Girls

A fun, well-written high school drama, AlRawabi School for Girls brings a fresh perspective to some of the universal challenges facing teenagers today while opening a window into the unique challenges facing Jordanian girls.

2 watercooler-guide-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-staircase
Featured Image

Summer Escape Binges: The Best Series to Transport You

The best escapist shows and movies with travel and exotic settings.

Featured Image

Teen Romance for the Sweltering Summer

There’s a particular teenage feeling of promise to summer for me. School is out, the sun is beating, and the space between June and September seems big enough to live a lifetime in. Even for someone staunchly past teenhood, the tickle of summertime is exciting, Teen Romance For Sweltering Summer and self-transformation– and these are

Read More »
Featured Image

Round the World: Summer Camp Movies for Grownups

Ah, summer camp. Images of wood cabins, elaborate pranks, cringe-y talent show performances, and teens with raging hormones have filled our brains, thanks to what’s become a subgenre of American & Summer Camp Movies.. But summer camp stories take on different depths depending upon the decade and the country where they’re set, and they can

Read More »
Featured Image

What to Watch with your Roommates

It’s difficult to share your home with someone you don’t share anything else with. But one of the easiest inroads to friendship is television, and one of the joys of living with others is introducing them to the shows you love, and vice versa. Watching Carrie meet Big for the first time with my new-to-the-show

Read More »
Featured Image

A Watercooler Watch: Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything

Before social media and podcasts, there was one undeniable truth about news-making interviews: if a story mattered, Barbara Walters would be the one to tell it. Landing a one-on-one with her didn’t just mean publicity, it meant you had become part of a national conversation. But while the interview signified that you had made it,

Read More »
Featured Image

Universal Language

An absurdist dramedy about the clash of two worlds, Universal Language entertains as much as it motivates. Beyond the madness lies an urgent plea for unity, an appeal that resonates with people hoping for a better, more harmonious future.

Featured Image

Industry S1

Industry is a series fueled by greed, drugs, sex, and money, and provides all of these ingredients in Federal Reserve-sized quantities. There’s never a dull moment.

Featured Image

Minx

The streaming series about the intersection between feminism and smut could endear even the most skeptical. And what it might lack in delicacy, it certainly makes up for in swagger.

Featured Image

The Sympathizer

Told through the perspective of a conflicted hero with contradicting loyalties, The Sympathizer is an ambitious examination of a spy who can’t help but sympathize — hence, the title of the series — with the enemy. It might make you rethink everything you were taught about the Vietnam War too.

Scroll to Top