Amazon’s ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is a haunting portrait of womanhood

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For a long time, reboots were the plague of an entertainment industry that refused to let original ideas and perspectives flourish. But Amazon’s reimagining of Peter Weir’s seminal 1979 film Picnic at Hanging Rock flies in the face of this presumption, reading instead like a reclaiming of the iconic touchstone that explores girlhood through women’s perspectives.

The six-part miniseries, while deferential to Weir, is more of a return to the original source material: The famous novel by Joan Lindsay set in 1900 Australia follows the unexplained disappearances of three ladies from a finishing school. Starring Game of Thrones‘ Natalie Dormer as the impenetrable headmistress of Appleyard College, it subsumes viewers in not only the surreal mystery of its story, but also the unreality of women’s lives during the Victorian era (and now). Read more…

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‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2 struggles with depicting trauma

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The good news is that Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 eventually does start to recapture some of the  poignancy that made Season 1 an unprecedented phenomenon. 

The bad news is that it takes about half of the season to start getting there.

To be fair, the near-flawless Emmy and Golden Globe-award winning Season 1 casts a very long shadow. The problem with creating a series that fundamentally changes what we think is possible for a popular TV show (streaming or otherwise) is that you then have to follow it up with a Season 2. And now, audience expectation is at an impossibly high bar.

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