Sian Heder
Little America’s Second Season Offers a Much-Needed Dose of Optimism: Review
The Pitch: It’s often very difficult to feel optimistic about the general state of things in this country. For people who have grown up and lived through crisis after crisis, the many who were thrust into unsteady job markets and a Sisyphean uphill battle of debt and financial instability, the elusive American Dream sounds like just that — a dream. For the particularly vulnerable, like people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community who face a rapid increase in life-threatening rhetoric, there’s an intersectionality to the frustration and fear that can accompany everyday life in the US. While film and television aren’t an immediate salve for wide-reaching systemic issues, stories do matter, as does representation. Little America, the Apple TV+ anthology series developed by Le...
CODA Hits All The Right Notes: Sundance 2021 Review
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: 17-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) doesn’t have your typical adolescence: the child of a Massachusetts fishing family, she splits her time between the awkwardness of high school and helping her family out on the boat, doing her best to help her family keep the business afloat amid union disputes and predatory fish buyers who try to take advantage of them. There’s another complication: Ruby is the only hearing member of her family, the rest of whom — father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) — are deaf. This places added pressure on her as the one person who can translate ASL to the world around them; she’s inexplicably tethered to them. Of course, Ruby soon discovers she has dreams o...
