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Mariama Diallo ’s “ Master ” does not work as a horror movie. It is not even remotely scary, its story and lore are confusing and underdeveloped, and the real-life microaggressions it throws at its characters are so familiar to viewers of color that they’re nowhere near as shocking nor surprising as the film thinks they are. The African-American characters in the movie are all victims, completely devoid of anything but trauma and fear, and who act toward one another in ways we would not act in White spaces. I cannot help but bring my own experiences into a movie like this, especially when the characters are going through something I have been through as well. And while I don’t expect absolute realism in a film, especially a horror film, this one wants to play both sides of the reality fence. So, I must play along.

When the movie opens, Gail Bishop ( Regina Hall ) is stepping into her role as the first Black “master” of a predominantly White institution in New England. She previously attended the school, and is a tenured professor there as well. Her story is presented in parallel with Jasmine ( Zoe Renee ), a freshman moving into the dorms. When the student handing out room numbers notices what room Jasmine is in, she calls over her other White colleagues and says “guys, she got THE ROOM!” When asked what’s so special about “the room,” the student issues her a snarky welcome and walks away.

“The room,” as Jasmine’s roommate’s boyfriend Tyler ( Will Hochman ) explains, is where a gruesome death occurred. It has something to do with the curse of Margaret Millet, a woman assumed to be a witch who was dispatched not too far from the campus. Since the school is as old as America is, Millet’s ghost haunts it and, at 3:33 on December 3rd, she shows up to kill the student who lives there. “She drags them to Hell,” Tyler says. It just so happens that it’s always a Black student because, I assume, when Maggie wasn’t engaging in black magic, she was doing all sorts of racist things. This ghost story scares the natural curls out of Jasmine’s hair; in the next scene, it looks like she has an Ultra-Perm.

I questioned if Jasmine’s new hairstyle was a means of fitting in, but Diallo’s script never once gives us any insight into who Jasmine is. She’s an enigma who sleepwalks and is prone to visions that are supposed to be terrifying but come off as poorly rendered afterthoughts. The witch is really after her, but it’s nothing compared to real life. Or maybe it’s symbolic of real life? The movie is too much in shambles to clarify. Meanwhile, Jasmine’s White roommate and the other students issue all sorts of microaggressions, from saying she looks like Beyoncé to screaming out rap lyrics containing the N-word (in a party scene that is surreal and brutally effective). Despite the fact that there are a few other Black students on campus, we never see Jasmine interact with one until late in the film; its protracted nature is incredibly frustrating as it’s an intriguing indication of where “Master” might have gone.

At least Gail has a running buddy, her fellow African-American teacher Liv ( Amber Gray ). Liv is up for tenure, but that promotion is threatened when Jasmine files a motion against her for flunking her over a paper. The assignment was to look at The Scarlet Letter  through the prism of race. Jasmine can’t imagine how to frame that, so she gets an F despite her paper being well-written. Her White classmate, however, spun a ridiculous amount of malarkey even she didn’t buy into, and obtained a B+. I started to wonder: Was Liv’s grade an attempt to prove to the tenure committee that she wasn’t giving preferential treatment to one of the school’s only minority students?

I had even more questions about her relationship with Gail. It’s supposed to be friendly, but it’s really icy, even when Liv is offering her a modicum of support. “You feel like a house n---er,” she says at one point, pointing out how Gail is essentially a diversity hire to make the school look good. Her tenure is very likely that as well, but it’s in jeopardy. In satiric fashion, Diallo shoots Gail’s White colleagues on the tenure committee so garishly they look like R. Crumb drawings. When Gail is among them, she looks visually smaller and more realistic.

You may have forgotten about that witch, but the movie sure hasn’t. She’s haunting Gail, too, leading to several scenes where Hall has to act terrified while hearing a bell or seeing a pile of maggots—this movie likes maggots. To her credit, she gives a decent performance despite how poorly her character is written. There’s a missed opportunity for Gail to be a friend to Jasmine, considering she also knows what it’s like to be a rare minority on campus (“there were three of us and we kept getting mistaken for each other,” she tells Jasmine). Instead, for reasons I can’t comprehend, Gail tells Jasmine she should return to the school after she’s nearly killed by supernatural forces. “You can’t escape it,” she tells her, with the “it” being racism. Maybe not, but you shouldn’t go back to the place it definitively resides, either.

That message really bugged me, as the film seemed to be saying “just give up.” Jasmine’s ultimate fate led me to that conclusion. But even worse is the film’s “plot twist,” which is so hilariously miscalculated that any potential message we could glean from it is lost. When a movie makes you think of Rachel Dolezal, it’s not helping itself. Additionally, Gail’s last scene will make you wonder why you sat through “Master.”

Who is this movie for? I know I ask that question often here but it’s a good question. Black folks don’t need the classes in Racism 101 “Master” offers; life gives us PhD’s early on. It’s not for horror fans because it’s a complete failure as a horror movie. Plus the film does not seem knowledgeable about Blacks in academia nor the feeling one gets when you’re in an all-White space and you discover there’s someone else who looks like you. So, is it a lesson for White viewers? I’ll tell you what it’s not: It’s not another “ Get Out ” as many of the reviews coming out of this year's Sundance proclaimed. Black movies always get compared with other well-known Black movies whether they’re similar or not. Now that’s a microaggression that should be murdered by a witch.

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Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Master (2022)

Rated R for language and some drug use.

Regina Hall as Gail Bishop

Zoe Renee as Jasmine Moore

Amber Gray as Liv Beckman

Talia Ryder as Amelia

Talia Balsam as Diandra

Ella Hunt as Cressida

• Mariama Diallo

Cinematographer

• Charlotte Hornsby
• Jennifer Lee
• Maya Maffioli
• Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

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‘Master’ is a horror movie in the shadow of ‘Get Out’: a metaphor for race in America

Regina hall and zoe renee play two black women on an overwhelmingly white college campus..

In “Master,” Regina Hall plays Gail Bishop, the newly appointed dean of students — or master — at a prestigious Massachusetts college called Ancaster. While Gail is moving into her new home, where the walls are covered with ivy, another initiation is occurring across campus, with the arrival of Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), a newly arrived freshman who makes her way to the quad with a familiar mixture of confidence and wariness.

“We’ve got a live one,” an upperclassman chirps when she spies Jasmine, a line delivered with such cheerful malice that the viewer is immediately put on edge. There are moments in “Master,” which marks the promising if uneven feature debut of writer-director Mariama Diallo, when Gail and Jasmine’s parallel but common travails feel like they’re heading into territory already plumbed by such satires as “ Dear White People ” and the Netflix series “ The Chair .” Soon enough, it becomes clear that Diallo’s main reference is “ Get Out ” and other works of elevated horror that have sought to dramatize the displacement and psychic violence so often experienced by Black people navigating historically White spaces.

Those moments of discomfort range from humiliating microaggressions and lazy assumptions (Jasmine’s White roommate and her friends blithely throw her a rag to clean up a mess they made) to outright malevolence. One of “Master’s” most effective scenes features Jasmine at a frat party, dancing expressively to a joyful pop song, only to realize moments later that her White peers are chanting the N-word with gleeful abandon.

Meanwhile, Gail has entered her own crucible: Well-meaning colleagues compare her to former president Barack Obama, and when another woman of color is put up for tenure, she’s confronted with a stark reminder of who belongs at Ancaster and who doesn’t.

Of course, as one character says midway through “Master,” this isn’t about Ancaster. It’s about America. Although Diallo makes some trenchant observations about diversity-equity-inclusion initiatives and cultural appropriation (culminating in a clever third-act reveal), she jams too many plot beats, characters and polemical points into the narrative for all of them to pay off satisfactorily. Although “Master” involves a fair amount of magical realism and dream sequences, too it often lacks credibility. Would it really take Jasmine as long as it does to meet one of the only other Black students on campus?

“Master” is a deeply pessimistic movie, in which both Renee and Hall deliver quietly powerful portrayals of women who come to crucial realizations much too late — about isolation, identity and their own roles within structures and stories that were never created to support them. “Master” might be a horror film, but its scariest elements are off screen, in the form of the persistent social realities that inspired it.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language and some drug use. 91 minutes.

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Amazon’s horror movie Master balances racial politics with an intense ghost story

Support the Girls’ Regina Hall stars in a film that finds more tension in familiar human threats than in supernatural ones

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This review was originally published in conjunction with Master ’s debut screenings at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. It has been updated, reformatted, and republished for the film’s streaming release on Amazon Video.

Allegorical horror has become a popular genre with filmmakers from marginalized groups, and it’s easy to understand why: Horror stories can make difficult topics more approachable, and they find funding and audiences more easily than just about any other genre right now. Emotionally and stylistically, they’re also a perfect canvas for expressing rage and fear. But they’re difficult to get right tonally. If the horror imagery is linked too neatly to the themes, they can come off as rigid and didactic. If the association is too loose, the horror elements can end up looking like grisly set-dressing on a social-issue drama.

Master , the arresting debut feature from writer-director Mariama Diallo, walks this line with confidence, if not quite precision. It’s a tale of racism and exclusion at an Ivy League college, but it’s also a story about a good old-fashioned New England witch haunting. The two strands are tightly intertwined and suggestive of each other, but Diallo makes the connection between them opaque, sometimes to frustrating degrees. The tense, unsettling mood is consistent through every minute of the film. The hauntings are scary, but the microaggressions and twisted racial politics that turn every conversation into a minefield are scarier still.

Master follows two Black women navigating a new academic year at the fictional Ancaster College. Jasmine (Zoe Renee) is a wide-eyed freshman student from faraway Tacoma, shy and coltish in her natural hair and plain clothes. Gail (Regina Hall) is an established faculty member who has just been appointed as the college’s first Black “Master” — the institution’s antiquated term for a head of house, and a word heavy with uncomfortable echoes.

Those echoes can be heard everywhere on Ancaster’s genteel, historic campus. Gail moves with pride into her new digs, a beautiful red-brick lodge, but she does so alone, and finds the drafty house filled with reminders of Black servitude and subjugation. Jasmine, meanwhile, moves into a room that campus legends claim is haunted. A student died in the room decades ago, a death linked to a “curse” placed on the school by Margaret Millett, a woman who was hanged for witchcraft on the site centuries earlier. It’s said that Millett’s ghost shows itself to one freshman every year, and at the moment of her own death at 3:33 a.m., takes the student with her to hell.

Jasmine and Gail both start to see vague but sinister omens: maggots oozing from a rip in a painting, the face of some college grandee in another portrait distorting into a cadaverous scream. These moments of classic horror imagery are chilling and repulsive. But Diallo and cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby glide past these visions, rather than jolting audiences with jump scares. The characters, puzzled and unnerved, slide back into the routine of campus life, but the unease comes with them. Master moves like a cat, stealthy and purposeful, with an even gait. It’s an impressive feat of control from a first-time director.

The point is that feelings of disquiet, alienation, and dread are pervasive for these women in even the most ordinary encounters, as they try to find a place for themselves within a bastion of white supremacy. Much like Jordan Peele’s Get Out , Diallo’s scalpel-sharp screenplay constructs scene after fraught scene of coded racial friction, alive to the many different ways that racism can poison the well — blatant or subtle, malevolent or condescending, inter- or intra-racial. Fraternity bros scream the N-word in aggressive appropriation as they sing along to a rap song at a party. A Black canteen server ingratiates herself to the white students, but regards Jasmine with hostility. Celebrating Gail’s promotion, the white professors ask if they should call her “Barack” now. White students find a casual facility with a Black professor’s critical race theory reading of The Scarlet Letter , while Jasmine challenges it and gets marked down.

That professor, Liv (Amber Gray), becomes an increasingly important figure as Master ’s story broadens and deepens, though she remains strangely ambiguous. She’s a friend and comrade-in-arms to Gail, and she’s fighting for tenure. Jasmine files a complaint against Liv over the failing grade, which complicates Gail’s position as she tries to advocate for her friend and improve the school’s dismal record for diversity. Somehow, the system has turned the three women against each other, or at least enmeshed their fates in a sticky ethical web, when they were only asking for seats at the table. Master is relentlessly on point in its attacks on white privilege, but it’s justified in that targeting. And Diallo’s sophistication and sangfroid as a filmmaker, coupled with her canny use of genre, prevent the film from turning into a diatribe.

Within the film’s surprisingly complex setup, the outright horror of the witch haunting is the bluntest instrument. It’s used to ratchet up the sense of danger as Jasmine burrows deeper into hostile territory, is ostracized by her classmates, and researches the earlier student death in her room. Honestly, the haunting doesn’t always mesh with the real social horrors she faces. But it does allow Hornsby to frame some strikingly creepy shots, breaking up her austere, autumnal compositions with walls of red and slashes of black, embedded in Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s ominous, droning score. Elsewhere, Diallo and Hornsby create layered, metaphorical images that are subtler but no less lingering, like the shadow of a janitor mopping the floor behind Gail and Jasmine as they delicately discuss her complaint against Liv. These Black women are still cleaning up the mess, generations after the maid whose memory haunts Gail’s house.

As Jasmine, Zoe Renee gives Master its naked emotional center. But its anchor is the terrific Regina Hall, as quietly magnetic here as she was in the underseen Support the Girls . With Amber Gray acting as a brittle and unpredictable foil, Hall commands the film. Her steadying presence helps Diallo in her brave choice to complicate rather than resolve her themes during a fascinating, surprising final act.

Is Diallo just using horror as a Trojan horse for the social drama that really preoccupies her? Perhaps, although Master ’s creeping, wintry style suggests she has a real affinity for the genre at its most chilling and Kubrickian. And while the haunting is never explicitly linked to the college’s grotesque enshrinement of privilege and bigotry, they inspire similar dread. Both, after all, are about history reaching into the present and pulling people back into darkness.

Master is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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No show is having more fun than chucky, the walking dead is building to something — but it’s not clear what.

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‘Master’ Review: Regina Hall Stands Atop a Towering and Inventive Shot in the Arm for Black Horror

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Amazon Prime Video releases the film on its streaming platform on Friday, March 18.

A twisting tale that combines elements of “Candyman,” “The Shining,” and “Get Out,” Mariama Diallo’s “Master” isn’t the kind of traumatic horror film that interrogates racism solely as a fright in itself. Diallo is too smart for that. This mesmerizing freak out, a psychologically brutal witch and ghost story, pulls in viewers with smart writing, and even more brilliant performances. It explicates colorism, racial passing, micro-aggressions, and the crushing pressures of Black Excellence not as history-teaching, example-making cudgels, but as illnesses that live and breathe beneath and above the surface of America.

Set in the imposing halls of Ancaster College, a prestigious northeastern institution so exclusive it counts itself above Harvard (even FDR had a hard time getting in), “Master” coats the present-day school in the lingering air of the Salem witch trials. Centuries earlier a woman by the name of Margaret Millett was hanged there for witchcraft. School folklore now says that every year her ghost picks one freshman and, on the anniversary of her death at 3:33am, takes the unlucky soul with her.

The primary specter igniting the ancient fears in “Master” isn’t totally what creaks at night. The racism is so deep in both the past and present of the school that it’s seeped itself into every brick and every portrait of a frightening pale, white college founder adorning the walls. It’s the kind of place where the faces populating the pictures on the diversity package are the only eight people of color currently enrolled. The privileged white folks who attend know they belong. The few Black feel they must prove their worth.

That’s the uneasy situation Gail Bishop ( Regina Hall ), the new — and first — Black Master at the college is entering. The all-white tenured faculty have brought her in to essentially clean up their lack of diversity. Likewise, new freshman Jasmine ( Zoe Renee ), a young bright Black girl and the valedictorian of her high school class, stumbles through the same pressures. Jasmine is assigned the dreaded room 302, with Amelia (Talia Ryder), an affluent, but troubled white girl as her roommate.

Both Gail and Jasmine face a series of micro-aggressions: They’re compared by their white counterparts to Barack Obama, Beyonce, the Williams sisters. Diallo throws these gut punches, which both women must endure without a grimace, with the same dexterity as Jordan Peele with “Get Out,” during the Armitages’ annual get together. It would be a mistake, however, to totally compare the two films. “Master” runs on a different, more overt track: White men leer at Jasmine as an exotic other while she dances during a college house party. When Chop Mui’s “Black AGAVE” blasts over the speakers, the white bros exuberantly dance around a frightened Jasmine, and mouth every word, including the “n-word,” without hesitation.

Nothing comes easy to Jasmine. Even Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), a Black professor who should be on her side, gives her an “F” on a Critical Race Theory paper about “The Scarlet Letter” while awarding her white classmates a passing grade. Liv is fighting against her racist colleagues for tenureship, and is hyper-aware of the ways she feels like she doesn’t belong. Is Liv holding Jasmine to a higher, nearly unattainable Black Excellence standard? Or are there more nefarious reasons for her stringent expectations? An elastic Gray is always purposefully overplaying her hand for a ruminative effect. The other beauty is Diallo’s patient, organic writing, which allows viewers to turn these seemingly disparate clues over, each more innocuous than the last, until they reach their unpredictable ends.

In this aching movie Diallo asks: At what cost should Black folks seek approval gatekeepers? Is the mental anguish that accompanies such trials ever worth it? At one point, Gail implores Jasmine not to quit. She explains how racism is the ghost that’ll never depart, how you can only be erased in this world if you surrender. It’s the kind of grit your teeth philosophy Black women are often pushed to accept if they want to succeed. But it’s advice that Gail soon learns doesn’t hold much weight in the face of your own mental well-being.

There’s a similar rich nimbleness in what initially comes across as a clumsy melding of two ghost stories: The spirit of a Black maid employed by a rich white family who once lived in Gail’s home haunts her, while a mysterious white voice calls the house phone asking for a daughter named “Elizabeth.” Diallo meshes these fascinating threads with Jasmine’s own specters: Recurring red neon nightmares of a dark hooded figure visit the freshman, a noose is mysteriously hung outside her door, a burning cross appears, and the memory of another Black girl — who attended the school in 1965 as its first African-American student but ultimately died by suicide — consumes her. In the vat of this crucible, the legend of the Salem Witch trials serves as a macguffin that Diallo sometimes over-teases.

A gripping Renee as Jasmine (she first broke out in Nijla Mumin’s sweet coming-of-age flick “Jinn”) imbues the frights with gravity, even when the film turns languid. Owing to a reliance on chapter titles, “Master” slows, nearly leaning too often on its scares, which often recall Bernard Rose’s “Candyman,” in DP Charlotte Hornsby’s eerie, red-soaked compositions set in a library and a bathroom. The mythology Diallo carefully built in the first act of the film takes a backseat temporarily, causing friction between the world building and the horror.

By way of Hall’s potent, internal performance (the actress has rarely been better) and Diallo sharpening the edges of her dense, multidimensional script to interrogate race through horror, rather than the scares being the horror itself, “Master” finds its footing again. A testament to this filmmaker’s shrewd craftsmanship: The final twenty minutes, recalling the “The Shining,” loops in Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s ghoulish score, and unpacks so many secrets involving colorism, passing, white paternalism, and so forth, that you wonder how Diallo kept it all together without every frame crumbling in her hands. It’s simply amazing. Detailed and deliberate, assertive but rarely obvious, Diallo’s “Master” is a towering, inventive shot in the arm for Black horror.

“Master” premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Amazon Studios will release it later this year.

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‘Master’ Review: Echoes of Historical Crimes Permeate a Haunted College in This Stylish Horror Film

Led by a daring Regina Hall, Mariama Diallo’s impressive debut memorably studies the intersection of race, class and gender, though it doesn’t always sustain its discipline.

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There is something inherently unsettling about an elite university’s aura of vanity. Few other contemporary locations summon such a sense of reverence, exclusivity and historical angst — especially if the college is somewhere in brisk New England and adorned with the Ivy League distinction. Through an unnerving blend of supernatural horror and psychological drama, fiercely talented writer-director Mariama Diallo’s debut feature “ Master ” reflects on the roots and customs of one such illustrious school of eerily beautiful stone buildings and handsomely dim, wood-heavy chambers. It’s a fictional prototype called Ancaster, erected near where the Salem witch trials were once carried out. Diallo knows exactly what makes the grounds and hallways of these often lily-white institutions spine-tingling as she dissects their historical footprint, real and imagined, through the ghosts of those who left it.

The result is a stylish, sometimes terrifying genre film that shares DNA with Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman,” and likewise has much on its mind around intersectional notions of race, class and gender, with their past and present echoes. Not all of Diallo’s thematic queries land, and at times, she weakens her ideas by over-explaining them. Nevertheless, her fearless interrogation resonates like a penetrating scream you can’t unhear.

The filmmaker establishes Ancaster’s ghostly atmosphere early on, with the arrival of eager, accomplished freshman Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee, memorably haunted and steadfast). Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s chilling score accompanies her when she finds out upon check-in that she’s got “the room.” Uh-oh! But before we can find out why her dorm is labeled with such a cagey, “Shining”-style warning, Jasmine meets her roommate Amelia (the terrific Talia Ryder, of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”), with whom she won’t exactly see eye-to-eye.

Through thoughtful parallel editing by Jennifer Lee and Maya Maffioli, we also follow seasoned faculty member Gail Bishop ( Regina Hall , commanding with her signature calm resolve), as she unlocks the jammed doors of her new residence elsewhere on campus. It comes with a hellish, squeaky attic of bedsheet-covered dusty artifacts and, as a result, many sleepless nights. Still, having been freshly inaugurated as the first black Master of the college, a role closely in charge of student life, she feels a sense of pride settling in, uncanniness be damned.

Adopted long ago from elite British universities like Oxford and Cambridge, that title is a controversial hot potato in the States, where “Master” carries troubling racist connotations dating back to the slavery era. (Some schools like Harvard belatedly parted ways with the term only a few years ago.) Throughout the film, Diallo smartly plays with and dismantles the word’s ramifications. While Gail wears her hard-earned status on her sleeve, inviting students to see her as a confidante, countless microaggressions are carried out under her nose. For starters, Amelia and her predominantly white crew casually disrespect Jasmine in various prickly episodes — using her room uninvited for nighttime parties, refusing to pay her for the pizza she bought for everyone, racially stereotyping her background, you name it.

Yet the anxious Jasmine tries to claim her place and identity in her new school anyway. Toggling between her natural hair and a straightened ‘do, she strives to both stand out and blend in while navigating frequent nightmares (or are they real?) and freaky sleepwalking incidents. Meanwhile, surrounded by a predominantly white faculty, the growingly alienated Gail doesn’t seem content in her new placement either. Who could, in a school that tries to put on a sham liberal face via deficient initiatives like a cringe-inducing diversity recruitment video? Through various parties and social gatherings alike, we separately observe Gail and Jasmine in situations that look nearly as intolerable as the auction party of “Get Out.”

Amid all this, a third character seizes the story. With her long braids and spirited sartorial choices that embrace African prints, literature professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray) looks like the polar opposite of her friend, the more conservatively styled Gail. But despite her freely outspoken demeanor, Liv doesn’t have it easy either. Slim on published work, secretive about her mysterious background and seeking tenure at the grueling university, she is confronted by a dispute Jasmine files against her due to a failing grade. Is the professor really targeting the straight-A Jasmine for some cryptic grudge, or is Jasmine’s paper on “The Scarlet Letter” and race really that lacking? Are these women haunted simply by the ingrained racism as old as the land they stand on, or is there another menacing force out there?

Embellishing this intriguing, multi-pronged narrative, Diallo elevates the tension through Charlotte Hornsby’s eerily textured cinematography. Images of a gross-out infestation, a witch’s crusty hand emerging from under a bed and colonial-garbed people circling the dark campus all contribute to this escalation. After some time, however, one senses that while the film’s frights are effective on their own, they are perhaps a little detached from the bigger picture, loosening the filmmaker’s disciplined handle on the material. Elsewhere, “Master” seems reluctant to bring the Jasmine-Amelia saga to an articulate close, while a third-act outburst from Gail is unnecessarily obvious in an otherwise sophisticated script. Despite all these blemishes, however, “Master” wields its authority in a soul-crushing ending. Like the grievous past that will eternally follow its women, Diallo’s tale of survival lingers on your conscience.

Reviewed online, Jan. 18, 2022. In Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition). Running time: 91 MIN.

• Production: An Amazon Studios presentation of an Amazon Studios, Animal Kingdom and Big Indie Pictures production. Producers: Joshua Astrachan, Brad Becker-Parton, Andrea Roa. Executive producers: Regina Hall, Mariama Diallo, Sophia Lin, Terence Nance.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Mariama Diallo. Camera: Charlotte Hornsby. Editors: Jennifer Lee, Maya Maffioli. Music: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.
• With: Regina Hall, Zoe Renee, Talia Ryder, Talia Balsam, Amber Gray.

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‘master’: film review | sundance 2022.

Regina Hall stars in Mariama Diallo’s debut feature about a trio of Black women surviving their fall semester at a prestigious, historically white college.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Ancaster College, the picturesque setting of Mariama Diallo’s debut feature Master , boasts an impressive number of white alumni. The fictional alma mater has educated an army of senators and two presidents — they could have had a third, but they rejected him, forcing that future head of state to settle for Harvard. The school’s verdant grounds are punctiliously maintained by a near invisible staff, and its halls vibrate with history. Most of the student body and faculty are white, but occasionally a Black person joins the institution, though they, of course, never quite find their footing.

The last few years have affirmed that the Black American experience is well-suited to the conventions of horror storytelling. Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out inspired a renaissance and re-appreciation: Horror became the preferred lens for investigating the country’s grotesque fascination with and treatment of its Black citizens. Diallo’s movie, a wry slice of horror that follows three Black women trying to call a tony college home, is an assured addition to this recent tradition.

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Release Date: Tuesday, March 18 (Amazon) Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition) Cast: Regina Hall, Zoe Renee, Talia Ryder, Talia Balsam, Amber Gray Director-screenwriter: Mariama Diallo

Master opens at the beginning of Ancaster College’s fall semester. The school is brimming with the youthful energy of a new academic year, and it’s within this context that we meet Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), an exuberant freshman and one of the college’s few Black students. She confidently shuffles around campus in those early days. Nothing can burst the bubble of this young Black suburbanite from Washington state — not even the inconvenient fact that her room, number 302, is haunted.

The entire institution, in fact, is cursed. Jasmine learns about Margaret Millett, a witch who died centuries ago near campus and haunts the area, from her mostly white classmates. They giddily divulge details of the tale over casual dorm room hangs or during raucous fraternity parties. Diallo, whose short film Hair Wolf won a Jury Award at Sundance in 2018, has proven herself to be an adept architect of taut, witty scenes, and she continues to flex that skill in Master. Jasmine’s collegiate experiences — the incompatible friendship, the booze-heavy parties and contrived seminar discussions — are rendered with the precision of someone attuned to the dread and latent horror of these situations. Jasmine struggles to navigate the blunt manner in which her classmates exercise their power and privilege; their audacity perturbs her more than the rumors of the witch who marks one student to die every year.

In a different sphere of campus are two other Black women trying to figure out their place: Gail Bishop, the school’s first Black “Master,” or dean of students, and Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), a literature professor up for tenure. As part of her new role, Gail moves into a near palatial home, furnished with gilded antiques and reminders of the school’s racist history. Liv, on the other hand, struggles to initiate a campus diversity project and to connect with Jasmine, whom she teaches. In their off hours, the two women support each other — convening for gossip sessions and going for long runs through the campus’ winding, deserted woods. Their friendship resembles those born out of necessity and mutual recognition of loneliness.

Master is organized by chapters, each introduced with a title card of text that resurfaces in dialogue later. These tightly conceived vignettes form a fascinating study of the racist undercurrents pulsating through institutions. They also offer Diallo and DP Charlotte Hornsby room to experiment within the genre: A desaturated, almost muted visual language coupled with a liberal use of slow tracking shots add to a sense of relative unease. Some scenes stay with you — like one of Jasmine surrounded by a group of white boys rapping along to a song, their angular faces monstrously contorting as they become emboldened enough to yell “n—er”; or another when Gail celebrates her new position with her peers, their shrill laughs teetering on the delicate line between enthusiasm and mocking.

Despite the strength of these moments, however, Master — rich with cutting jokes akin to the ones in Wolf Hair or even segments Diallo wrote for Terence Nance’s HBO comedy Random Acts of Flyness — doesn’t always satisfyingly cohere. The plot takes peculiar paths as it juggles the perspectives of the three women, whose experiences vary widely. Jasmine begins to have intense nightmares, which further isolates her from her classmates and makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Gail’s efforts to properly settle into her home becomes a maddening exercise — strange sounds ring throughout the residence and maggots infest every crevice. Liv’s greatest stressor remains whether or not the school will grant her tenure despite her “thin” publishing history.

With all these plotlines, the film can sometimes feel like an amalgamation of competing narrative threads. Intriguing moments, like Jasmine not receiving the same enthusiastic greeting as the white students from the dining staff, promise revelations that never come. Character development loses out as a result of the ambitious storytelling; save for Liv, the other women feel unintentionally mysterious. It’s curious, then, that figures like Jasmine’s white roommate Amelia ( Never Rarely Sometimes Always ’ Talia Ryder) are given more heft than warranted.

As Jasmine, Gail and Liv plod through the fall semester, the campus’ strangeness becomes more noticeable. Racist incidents occur, like someone carving the word “LEAVE” onto Jasmine’s door and attaching a noose to the unsavory note. Gail, who emerges as the film’s central character, is unsettled by these instances, and tries her best to crack the mystery. But she’s dealing with her own issues, too — mainly trying to make sure that a grade dispute Jasmine initiated against Liv doesn’t ruin the latter’s chance at tenure. Master often bursts with an exciting tension as the women struggle to make sense of what is happening to them.

The film’s final moments make good on that tension, closing out a third act with several surprising twists. Despite its hiccups and frustrations, Master is inventive in finding fresh ways to package familiar observations about American racism; even the most clichéd sentiments are delivered with a nudge and a wink. As the credits rolled, I couldn’t help but admire, above all else, Diallo’s boldness. I’m already looking forward to her next project.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S.Dramatic Competition) Distributor: Amazon Production companies: Amazon, Big Indie Pictures Cast: Regina Hall, Zoe Renee, Talia Ryder, Talia Balsam, Amber Gray Director-screenwriter: Mariama Diallo Producers: Joshua Astrachan, Brad Becker-Parton, Andrea Roa Executive producers: Regina Hall, Mariama Diallo, Sophia Lin, Terence Nance Director of photography: Charlotte Hornsby Production designer: Tommy Love, Meredith Lippincott Costume designer: Mirren Gordon-Crozier Editors: Jennifer Lee, Maya Maffioli Music: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe Casting director: Jessica Daniels, Daniel Frankel

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Master Review

The horrors of navigating modern america..

Master premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and will arrive on Prime Video on March 18, 2022.

Despite the many horror tropes it employs, Master — director Mariama Diallo’s feature debut — is more dependent on lurking, lingering uncertainties than on startling jump scares. The story of three Black women at a mostly white New England college, the film lures its characters, and us, into an urban legend about a Salem-era gallows beneath the university grounds. However, its slow-burn unfurling reveals an ingenious approach to looming specters and things that go bump in the night, leading to an emotionally charged payoff that cements it as a worthy entry in the modern Black horror canon.

The fictitious Ancaster University — an elite, secluded school whose alumni boasts several U.S. presidents — has never seen a Black dean of students until Gail Bishop (Regina Hall). Her new job as “Master” at one of Ancaster’s student houses comes with the perk of on-campus lodging, where previous Masters, most of them white men, have lived over the centuries. Their portraits remain on the walls. Their dark secrets remain hidden in boxes in the attic, in memories evoked by bells in the servants’ quarters, which ring unprompted, and in corners filled with maggot-infested rot, which have long been left unattended. Gail’s only ally on campus is her old friend Liv Beckman (Amber Grey), a mixed-race Black literature professor, whose attempts to stake her claim within the largely white Ancaster system — and whose opportunism, as she fights to be granted tenure — creates an uneasy dynamic with Gail, and with an incoming Black student, Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee).

The 13 Best Horror Movies of 2021

Jasmine is one of the only non-white kids in the class of 2023. When she arrives for her first semester, the room she moves into — number 302 — is revealed to have a dark history of its own, about which the older students snicker. They eventually tell her tales of previous tragedies that have befallen 302’s residents, and of a witch who appears before one freshman each year, precisely at 3:33 in the morning, though it’s unclear how much of this story is true and how much is being spun to prank her. It certainly doesn’t help that Jasmine sleepwalks, and is already prone to seeing things that may or may not exist.

This uncertainty, about what may or may not be, is the movie’s visual and thematic backbone, but it isn’t limited to the way spooky stories might physically manifest. At first, it takes subdued form, like a classroom assignment Liv gives Jasmine, which involves applying a critical racial lens to The Scarlet Letter, a reading Jasmine believes can’t be found in the text. However, their disagreement not only emanates outward in the plot (Jasmine files a dispute, which puts Liv’s tenure in jeopardy), but it unlocks the film’s approach to racial tension. At its core, Master is not only about the resurgence of overt racist horrors swept under the rug, but about trying to discern the meaning behind minor interactions, when they may — or may not — have ulterior motives.

What's your favorite Regina Hall movie?

Where a film like Get Out was dependent on clarity of intent — the perturbed responses of its protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) drew a straight and knowing line between well-intentioned statements and their underlying meaning — Master instead obfuscates these answers. Statements, accusations, and even compliments are often uncanny, with shots lingering on the speaker, as if the camera were trying to suss out their meaning. These are met with reaction shots from Jasmine, Gail, and Liv that are far less certain. They don’t know, but some part of them always suspects, forcing them into a constant state of guarded-ness. They’re always on edge. To those who might levy accusations (at this film, or at any film, or at people in general) about reading racism into too many scenarios, Master responds in exacting fashion, as if to frame these very readings, even supposedly “unnecessary” ones, as a means to navigate the world — as mechanisms to survive an America where you can never truly be sure.

Many scenes are likely to conjure distinct memories for non-white students who attended mostly white universities; several, of course, apply to Black women in particular, like when Jasmine begins straightening her hair to fit in, or the way even white foreigners seem to find acceptance much more quickly than she does. Diallo crafts not only realistic moments that inject the characters’ outlooks with paranoia — like Jasmine walking into her dorm room to find her roommate Amelia (Talia Ryder) seated with a large group of all-white strangers, most of whom already know each other, and all of whom turn to stare at Jasmine — but she also draws on these images and turns them into heightened visions later on when Jasmine sleepwalks, and she begins hearing whispers in the air.

The lines between dream and reality blur once Jasmine begins to feel the pressure of her new surroundings, allowing cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby to let loose and have fun. In these moments, scenes begin to take on a stylistic bent more typical of studio horror; the warm nighttime palette is replaced by dark shadows and flickering lights that envelope the screen, as washes of red pour through nearby windows. It’s all overt and obvious, but Jasmine’s white peers don’t seem to notice. It’s something only she can see. The college experience is a horror movie only to her. In Master, terror is deeply personal, even when it takes sweeping visual form, like snaking Steadicam shots that mirror Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining , as Jasmine runs though the campus grounds to evade shapeless forms that may or may not be out to get her. The film piles on trope after trope, from strange events that occur at a specific time on the clock, to scenes of analog research in an empty library, to poring through old diaries to find clues that might solve the riddles of the past. But unlike most other movies that use these ideas, the unseen horrors in Master are not something that can be out-researched, out-smarted, or out-run. They certainly can’t be defeated by rhetoric, as implied by a hilarious hard cut from an apparent hate crime to the impotent platitudes of a campus diversity video made in response (the film frequently has a sense of humor about its heavy subject matter).

Ultimately, the Kubrick influence is key. For one thing, composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe creates an eerie soundscape that not only incorporates the bells which Gail seems to constantly hear, and the whispers which haunt Jasmine, but he does so in a way that evokes the harsh, unsettling sounds of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “ Utrenja ,” a composition which Kubrick used in The Shining. The visual evocations of Kubrick may be limited to only a handful of scenes, but the two films share thematic connections — The Shining’s Overlook Hotel was similarly built on cursed ground with its own history of racial horrors — so Master also draws from Kubrick’s imagery to craft its surprising conclusion, which, though it takes its time arriving, helps punctuate the movie’s point about how the past still manifests in the present, but in a way that feels unexpectedly moving.

While the dialogue often comes right out and states the underlying themes, these scenes come across less as preaching, and more as cries be understood, thanks to the performances at hand. Hall in particular laces her role with exhaustion and despondency, which injects even the most on-the-nose interactions with heartbreaking desperation. After a while, any sense of “message” or “statement” ends up buried beneath a grueling, pervading pessimism about the state of things.

Whatever prevalent issues Master is about, it harbors an awareness that simply being about them, as a single piece of art, is unlikely to make a dent to the vast machinery of white supremacy, and the new forms it continues to take. All it can do is try to put words to unspoken experiences. All it can do is create lasting images out of intimate horrors that live both in the shadows and out in the open, in glances that linger just a little too long.

The 31 Best Modern Horror Movies

Director Mariama Diallo explores the creeping horrors of America’s past in Master, her New England-set feature debut about three Black women navigating a mostly white college built atop a Salem-era gallows. With a layered performance by Regina Hall as the university’s first Black dean of students, the film plays with familiar tropes and images from American horror, but re-fashions them into an unexpected, subdued story with a chilling emotional payoff.

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Review: Terrifying racism-in-academia is trapped in the far less frightening horror of ‘Master’

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Six minutes into Mariama Diallo’s “Master,” before anything has even slightly gone bump in the night, the film is as scary as it is going to get. But it’s not so much fear of as fear for: Hopeful, excited freshman Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) is starting the fall semester as one of the only Black students at Ancaster College, a fictional bastion of white, Ivy League privilege. And she’s so sympathetically drawn by Diallo (whose own Yale experiences inform the story) and so appealingly played by Renee that instantly, given the gently ominous cues of camera and score, we know to be scared for her. The exact nature of what lies in store is almost immaterial; the dimming of her bright, eager, take-on-the-world optimism is a looming tragedy in itself.

There have already been a couple of odd occurrences. Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), a tenured Ancaster professor, discovers an unexplained muddy footprint when moving in to the big old house that is one of the perks of being ordained the new master of Belleville Hall — a kind of adviser-chaperone-guardian to the girls living there. Jasmine’s orientation adviser lets out a little yelp of surprise when she sees that Jasmine has been assigned “that room” but won’t explain further. No matter: A cleverly intercut opening draws a parallel between the two characters, separated by a generation but united in evident, well-earned pride at getting to open doors to a future to which few Black women have had access.

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Jasmine meets her roommate, Amelia (Talia Ryder), who is already part of a crew. They make space for the newcomer — not effusively but not grudgingly — once Jasmine reveals herself as the funny, friendly, cool girl that she is. But the room they share has an unhappy history: The first-ever Black Ancaster student hanged herself here in the ‘60s, and rumors of it being haunted, possibly by a witch who was burned nearby in Pilgrim times, have abounded since.

Simultaneously, Gail is networking by throwing a housewarming soirée for her (predominantly white) colleagues, during which she discovers a racist figurine stashed under the sink. It is disturbing, but not nearly as much as the unconscious condescension with which she’s treated by her peers. Gail’s gracious, practiced responses to their blithe biases suggest how much pride she’s had to swallow to get where she is. But they also reinforce her complicity, her tacit agreement to be so grateful to be here at all that she won’t struggle as the engulfing ivy of the institution’s inherently conservative traditions gradually chokes the life — and the fire and the protest — out of her.

Even as anodyne a greeting as “Welcome to the club!” sounds loaded when it’s deployed by an old white guy in ostensible congratulations to a Black woman, while, when she hears Gail described as a possible future president, the dean (Talia Balsam) quips, “Should I call you ‘Barack’?”

“Your parents must be so proud,” the librarian tells Jasmine with saccharine sincerity before checking her bag for stolen books. And it’s not just the white staff who treat Jasmine differently: The Black cafeteria worker code-switches into frosty mode around her, and her literature professor Liv (Amber Gray) — a social justice activist in long braids who is Gail’s best friend — dismisses her input while lavishing praise (“Brilliant, Cressida!”) on her classmates. Each microaggression chips at Jasmine and Gail’s resolve and enthusiasm to macro effect, giving “Master” its heartbreakingly pessimistic undertow.

But despite this incisive dramatic perspective, Diallo is determined to make a horror film, and soon these well observed moments are engulfed in a deluge of supernatural hokum that paradoxically makes “Master” much more mundane.

Jasmine falls out with Amelia over a boy and starts to have nightmares, waking up with mysterious scratches on her body. Gail is constantly distracted by the tinkling of a bell in the old servants’ quarters of her house. A nearby community of Puritan holdouts supplies some eerie nighttime-ritual backdrop, and a hooded figure begins hanging out in Jasmine’s peripheral vision, even before she gets her dead predecessor’s diary, to be read in the library at 3 a.m. under inevitably flickering lights. None of these ho-hum scare tactics has half the queasy charge of a roomful of fratty white guys leaping around Jasmine braying the N-word along to a rap song. None has the uncanny prickle of Gail being invited to “add flavor” to a roomful of white academics swilling wine and listening to Christopher Cross.

As if the film itself were unconvinced by its horror-movie trappings, the last third is almost entirely devoid of supernatural elements. Instead, it focuses on late-breaking colorism and passing issues, on racial tokenism in academia and the limits of one individual’s power to effect institutional change. These are interesting and knotty topics, treated intelligently and with insight, and along with a subplot about a potential rape and myriad other motifs that go nowhere, they warrant more than the cursory screen time they get here.

“It’s not ghosts, it’s not supernatural. It’s America, and it’s everywhere,” Gail tells Jasmine. Though delivered with grave elegance by a committed and convincing Hall, it’s an unusually clunky, on-the-nose line that also points out the central flaw in Diallo’s stylistically promising but narratively undisciplined debut. The ghosts of Ancaster’s racist past are not half as terrifying as its solid, flesh-and-blood manifestations in the present day, because history repeats itself not just in metaphors and spectral whispers, but loudly and overtly, for those who didn’t hear it the first time around.

And so “Master” ends up a genre film in which the outlandish generic elements — the witches and the maggots, the fizzing bulbs and out-of-sync shadows — are far less frightening than its portrayal of this real, everyday world in which racism isn’t a long-dead bogeyman; it’s alive, breathing, banal.

'Master'

Rated: R, for language and some drug use Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes Playing: starts March 18, Alamo Drafthouse, downtown Los Angeles; the Landmark, West Los Angeles; also available on Amazon Prime Video

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‘Master’: In overstuffed horror film, the supernatural isn’t as scary as the real

Themes of race and social justice are at the core of the movie set at an elite new england college..

Incoming freshman Jasmine (Zoe Renee) feels less than welcome at Ancaster College in “Master.”

Amazon Studios

You want ghosts? Check. How about doors inexplicably opening and closing, creepy moaning in dark corners, and sudden sickening swarms of maggots? Check, check and check.

But “Master,” a new horror film by Mariama Diallo with themes of race and social justice at its core, is most frightening when dealing not with the supernatural, but with the real — the depressingly real, as in the indignities that three Black women face while trying to fit into an overwhelmingly white academic institution.

Diallo, who proves a talent to watch with this compelling if overpacked debut film, has said that “Master,” featuring a trio of terrific performances from Regina Hall, Zoe Renee and Amber Gray, stems partly from her own experiences as a Black student at Yale. The title, for example: It refers to the heads of residential colleges at Yale, called “masters” until the school finally dropped the term in 2016. Diallo realized only a few years after graduating how strange it was that she called a white man “master.”

But in her film, it is a Black woman, faculty member Gail Bishop, who has achieved the honor — the first Black “master” at Ancaster College, an elite school in Salem, Massachusetts, home of course to the historic witch trials. (The imposing 19th-century campus of Vassar College in New York, with its Gothic-style library, serves nicely here.) Portraits of masters past line the walls, but now Gail — impeccably played by Hall in a poignant, sometimes heartbreaking performance — is having her own portrait painted. Even at Ancaster, a school so elite that it rejected FDR when he applied, change is in the air.

Or is it? Gail is one of only a handful of Black professors — and there are only eight Black students, for that matter. One is Jasmine, an incoming freshman (Renee, appealing and thoughtful) who seems confident and enthusiastic and ready to take on life at Ancaster.

On the very first day, Jasmine finds out from a (white) student welcoming committee that she’s been assigned to “the room.” It’s the room believed to be haunted. Back in the ’60s, the first Black female student at Ancaster came to a tragic end in that room. Also, there’s a sinister connection to the Salem witch trials, and legend holds that a woman executed for witchcraft still haunts the place.

But ghosts exist only on one level of “Master,” despite its categorization as a horror film. The other level is the daily microaggressions of being a Black student in lily-white environment.

Jasmine is not welcomed by fellow students. Her white roommate, Amelia, wears a “Hamptons” sweatshirt and fills the room with her own friends, who seem to regard Jasmine as a curiosity at best (they call her Beyoncé). These entitled kids talk about the “sick after-prom” they had in tony beach houses or joke about fellow New York City private school kids. Worse, the white girls treat Jasmine with disdain. One of them tosses her a rag to clean up a spill they made. When she buys everyone a pizza and asks to be paid their share of the $20, they ignore her.

At a campus party, the white kids get in while Jasmine is stopped by the collegiate bouncer and told the event is “at capacity.” Once she makes it inside, she starts to dance with the others, enjoying it until she realizes they’re happily singing a hip-hop song filled with racial epithets.

Meanwhile, Gail is fighting her own battle, removing dust and grime from the musty old house she’s so proud to occupy, discovering doors opening and closing by themselves and sickening swarms of maggots popping up in the worst places. On campus she is subjected to subtle disdain from fellow faculty members. One describes her as like Barack Obama.

It comes to head at a tenure meeting, where Gail is called upon to judge the tenure of Liv Beckman (a note-perfect Amber Gray), a friend and fellow Black teacher with a complicated family history and a contentious way of teaching. One white faculty member opines that Liv, because of her race, is the perfect tenure applicant “for right now.” Another argues Liv hasn’t proven her publishing prowess. “Gail, can you be impartial?” this teacher asks.

Complicating matters is that one of Liv’s students has filed an appeal of a failing grade on a paper about “The Scarlet Letter”; Liv insists a critical race analysis be applied. The student says the book isn’t about race. And yes — the student is Jasmine.

The horror gets more, well, horrible — a shocking sight appears one day where Jasmine lives, with the message she should leave. Yet Jasmine stays – even opting to remain on an isolated campus during Thanksgiving break. And things get even worse.

It is two-thirds of the way into the movie that Jasmine meets another Black student and is told about a Black affinity group. How it could have taken three months for this to happen is one of the odder wrinkles of a plot that seems to get overcrowded late in the film.

“Master” ultimately suffers the fate of many promising films with many good ideas and not enough time to develop them — some paring down would have improved the latter part of the film. As Gail says to a new character who emerges late in the movie: “This is a lot.”

But the most poignant line comes deep into the film when a character tries to sum up what is happening. It’s not ghosts, this person says. It’s America.

In Diallo’s compelling tale, turns out the scariest ghosts are not the ones that go bump in the night. They’re the ones that haunt a nation’s history.

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this movie is a masterpiece that the movies I've watched. Lokesh Kanakaraju was the best director

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Extraordinary performance and it's super movie and it's all time blockbuster

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Common sense media reviewers.

Horror/thriller addresses racism; violence, language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Movie explores institutional racism.

Movie centers on two Black women. One is an incomi

Movie centers on Black women trying to exist and t

Suicide by hanging. Talk of past suicides at the s

Talk of hooking up.

Strong language throughout. In one scene, White co

College students drink booze and smoke weed in the

Parents need to know that Master is a 2022 drama-horror in which two Black women -- an incoming freshman and an administrator -- contend with ghost stories and institutional racism. Characters commit suicide by hanging. Stories of past suicides attributed to ghostly legends that pervade in one of the oldest…

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

Movie centers on two Black women. One is an incoming freshman attending a prestigious college that's almost entirely White, and she faces condescension, microaggressions, and outright racism. Another is an alumnus of the school, a professor, and is now starting as the first Black woman to be the master of a venerable house in the college. She also endures many instances of microaggressions and institutional racism.

Diverse Representations

Movie centers on Black women trying to exist and thrive in an overwhelmingly White space as the movie effectively shows the many insidious forms racism can take.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Suicide by hanging. Talk of past suicides at the school, by hanging and by jumping out of a window. Student found sexually assaulted in the nearby woods. Student has cut marks on her arms. Student is a victim of hate crimes -- "LEAVE" written on her door as a noose hangs from the doorknob, her picture on her dorm room door is defaced, a burning cross left in the grass in front of the building. Lead character, while drinking at a party, is coerced into kissing her roommate's boyfriend. Some gross shots of close-ups of maggots.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language throughout. In one scene, White college students aggressively sing along to a song that often includes the "N" word. "N" word used once in conversation by Black woman. Also: "motherf--kin'," "f--k," "s--t," "bitch," "damn," "pissed," "hell."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

College students drink booze and smoke weed in their dorm rooms and at a party. Professors drink wine at a faculty/administration party. Song talks about mixing Adderall and wine.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Master is a 2022 drama-horror in which two Black women -- an incoming freshman and an administrator -- contend with ghost stories and institutional racism. Characters commit suicide by hanging. Stories of past suicides attributed to ghostly legends that pervade in one of the oldest and most prestigious (and overwhelmingly White) universities in the northeastern United States. In addition to the many microaggressions the lead characters face, the incoming freshman is soon the victim of hate crimes -- she comes home and finds a noose on her doorknob with the word "LEAVE" written across the door, her picture on the door is defaced, a burning cross is set aflame outside her dorm building. Lead character has cut marks on her arms. Strong language throughout, including the "N" word and "motherf--kin'," "f--k," "s--t," "bitch," "damn," "pissed," and "hell." At parties and in the dorm room, college students drink booze and smoke weed. Wine drinking at parties with college professors and administrators. It shouldn't take long for viewers to see that the real scares aren't the ones involving witch legends or even old houses in need of fumigation (some gross shots of close-ups of maggots discovered by one of the lead characters), but the scares concerning the long history and insidious forms of racism. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In MASTER, Jasmine (Zoe Renee) is an incoming Black freshman at Ancaster College, a prestigious centuries-old school in the northeastern United States. Upon arriving on a campus that's overwhelmingly White, she learns that her dorm room is the source of one of the school's mysterious legends. Meanwhile, Gail Bishop ( Regina Hall ) is starting her new position as Master of Belleville House, overseeing Jasmine's dorm, and the first Black woman to serve in this capacity. As Jasmine struggles to find her footing in this new environment, Gail, an alumnus of the school and longtime professor, voices her frustrations with an institution still mired in racism to her Black colleague Liv, who is applying for tenure at the school. While Jasmine learns from other students about the legend of a witch who has taken lives from the school, always at 3:33am, she also learns of what actually happened to the first Black student to attend Ancaster in the 1960s. Jasmine's struggles to fit in take a horrific turn when her dorm room is vandalized with racist graffiti and symbolism. As she tries to help Jasmine, Gail must confront some shocking truths about those around her as she struggles to accept what she has known all along about her colleagues and Ancaster

Is It Any Good?

This is an effective if not quite successful use of horror movie conventions to make an old New England university a symbol of institutional racism in the United States. It doesn't take long to realize that the scariest and most cringe-worthy moments in Master don't involve maggots infesting the dark corners of an old house or legends of murderous witches. Arguably the most horrific scene involves Jasmine, an incoming Black freshman in a school that we soon learn is about 99% White. She goes to a party, is subtly coerced into making out with her roommate's boyfriend, and then shortly after sees a group of White frat bros aggressively yelling along to the "N" words in a hip-hop song. The realness is what makes it as unpleasant as any horror movie scene with its oblivious racism and entitlement.

Therein lies the problem with Master . The head fakes of witchcraft and maggoty symbolism don't work, and one can't help but think that if they weren't there, there would be no need for Regina Hall's character to dispense with all subtlety by spelling it all out for everyone near the end of the movie. The hypocrisy and oblivious bad behavior of privilege, particularly in many institutions of higher learning, is enough, and any uses of The Scarlet Letter or the Puritans who still dress like Puritans in the village near the college come across as superfluous. It manages to hold on to the end, barely, but there's a lingering sense of the movie trying to cover too much ground in both story and subject matter, leaving some of these topics that are worthy of much more being handled in a hamfisted way.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how racism is shown and discussed in Master. How does the movie show overt racism as well as condescension and microaggression? Have you experienced or witnessed any of the moments shown in the movie, or something similar?

How does the movie use classic elements of horror movies to convey messages on racism? Does it work? Why or why not?

What are some of the other issues that the movie addresses?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : March 18, 2022
• Cast : Regina Hall , Zoe Renee , Amber Gray
• Director : Mariama Diallo
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Black directors, Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Amazon
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 98 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : Language and some drug use.
• Last updated : October 12, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Critic’s pick

‘The Beast’ Review: Master of Puppets

Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers in three different eras, is an audacious sci-fi romance.

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By Beatrice Loayza

Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one. This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.

The prologue shows a green-screen shoot in which Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) takes directions from a presence off camera and, with expert professionalism, braces herself to confront an imaginary monster. The effect is uncanny, wryly funny, weirdly sensual and very sad. Bonello sustains this unsettling tone throughout the film, although the individual parts are less consistent. This is the toll of shifting time periods, from a costume drama to a modern mockery of incel culture.

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With computer-generated imagery, any opponent — and any era — can materialize in the background. What does this mean for actors? The feeling that great forces move us like puppets runs through Bonello’s genre-bending work (in his 2017 film, “ Nocturama ,” a gang of teenage terrorists hide in a shopping mall and see themselves reflected in the consumerist sprawl).

“The Beast” follows Gabrielle and Louis (George MacKay), who are lovers, in three incarnations, through three timelines: Paris circa 1910, when the city flooded; Los Angeles in the 2010s; and Paris in 2044, a near-future in which artificial intelligence has almost overtaken the work force.

In 2044, Gabrielle is struggling to get a job. A disembodied voice at an eerily vacant employment agency tells her that her emotions make her unsuited to work, and a purification process that scrubs people of their pesky feelings is recommended. “All of them?” Gabrielle asks nervously. She is a pianist and an actor in earlier timelines, so she values her capacity to be moved and react authentically.

Gabrielle opts for a less intrusive process, envisioned as a bath in black goo and a needle prick in the ear, which involves scanning her past lives to reckon with the source of her sorrows.

Bonello was loosely inspired by “The Beast in the Jungle,” a Henry James novella about a man who is convinced his life will be defined by tragedy. The film’s early, belle epoque strand veers closest to this drama, with Gabrielle and Louis in an unconsummated affair, engaging in breathy conversations inflected with philosophy. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle is house-sitting in a glass mansion; Louis, an incel modeled after Elliot Rodger , fixates on her.

The Los Angeles section has the vibe of a surveillance-style slasher flick. Gabrielle’s laptop is infected by a virus that spawns dozens of nasty pop-ups, including one with a fortune teller. All the film’s talk about dreams and the people who exist within them add to this ambient menace.

Bonello has never been shy about showcasing his influences. Here, David Lynch is a lodestar. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle’s blond bob recalls Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive,” and she also sheds a tear while listening to a Roy Orbison cover. Then there’s the ending, a red-curtain climax that lands on a screeching revelation not unlike the finale of “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

The horror that hits in the final moments of “The Beast” tears open a fresh wound. What does the future hold if everything can be determined by the past? If new films are rehashes of old ones? If we’re condemned to the traumas of our previous lives? The film connects this to the emergence of artificial intelligence, which imitates but never truly creates. “Fulfillment lies in the lack of passion,” Louis tells Gabrielle. Is fulfillment what lies ahead?

The Beast Not Rated. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.

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Master of the plot twist: Every M. Night Shyamalan movie, ranked

Filmmaker frequently uses faith, violence, family and ghosts as themes.

PHILADELPHIA — For Philadelphians, perhaps there is no director more divisive than M. Night Shyamalan, the horror filmmaker who grew up in Wynnewood and lives in Willistown Township. Some of us love him (“The Sixth Sense” ranked third on our Best Philly Movies list) but others haven’t forgiven him for white-washing “The Last Airbender.” But regardless of how Philly feels about Shyamalan, it’s clear that he loves the city and this region, since the majority of his work was filmed and set here.

Whether you’re a die-hard fan or a frustrated hater, Shyamalan is arguably the most famous Philly filmmaker. Incorporating feedback from The Inquirer staffers, we took a look back through his career to revisit the twist endings, jump scares, big reveals, and even bigger disappointments over the last couple decades. (Spoilers ahead!)

15. ‘After Earth’ (2013)

Humanity no longer calls Earth home in this universe, but Jaden Smith calls Will Smith dad in an uneven accent. The father is a fearless fighter in a literal sense because he can hide from the space monsters that hunt humans by smelling their fear-omones; the son is a cadet trying to prove himself. When they crash land on the now-contaminated Earth, dad breaks his legs and son has to traverse many miles to the tail of the ship, which holds their distress beacon. For its big budget and slick wrapping, this perilous journey is a forgettable, cliché snooze. It felt easier to root for the kid to fail than actually care about whether he’d overcome his fears and make pop proud. (Predictably, he does.)

14. ‘Praying with Anger’ (1992)

Shyamalan’s debut, a low-budget semi-autobiographical film that he self-financed while a student at NYU, would probably be at No. 15, but a young debutante filmmaker deserves our grace. An Americanized Indian kid studies abroad in India and works through culture shock, anger management and grief over his father’s death. Foreshadowing a career of acting in his own movies, the director stars in this slow-moving, almost anthropological exploration of cultural differences geared toward white, mainstream audiences in the U.S. The film’s sepia world is rife with stereotypes and reductive observations: “Indians are the most passionate people. When they’re praying, they’re devout. When they’re angry, they’re furious.” Still, some cleverness sprouts as he lays the foundations for signature motifs in his subsequent work — faith, violence, family and ghosts.

13. ‘Lady in the Water’ (2006)

It’s not meant to be a comedy, but the film sure feels like a parody: Nymphs called Narfs need to reconnect with humans, but they’re chased by Scrunts, scary green wolf-like creatures, even though the fantasy law enforcement body the Tartutic should stop them. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Story, a once-in-a-generation Madam Narf, who has to be seen by some man before she can be free; a process that somehow also involves an eagle. Shyamalan plays a writer, the chosen man, because he’s penning a book that will influence a future president, but also get him killed for his political beliefs. Paul Giamatti carries the film (impressive given the sprawling, goofy script) as the stuttering superintendent trying to solve the puzzle. He’s the only reason the film is not dead last.

12. ‘The Last Airbender’ (2010)

Understandably called Shyamalan’s worst by some Inquirer staff, his widely panned live-action adaptation of the beloved cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender” departs from the rich original in ways that make little sense, and even the elaborate sets and fight scenes can’t salvage the botched storytelling and paltry acting. The baffling choice to cast white actors in the main roles for Aang (the East Asian monk who controls all four elements) and his pals Sokka and Katara (based on indigenous Arctic communities like the Inuit) while South Asian actors played the villainous Fire Nation left fans yearning for better representation. The show’s inherent playfulness was stripped for dull seriousness with little depth despite themes — like children’s trauma, fear and grief — that the director has expertly handled before. (Netflix’s recently released live-action series notably differs.)

11. ‘Wide Awake’ (1998)

Between his student film “Praying with Anger” and his blockbuster “The Sixth Sense,” Shyamalan wrote and directed a kooky family comedy. It’s a heartwarming look at a Catholic schoolkid’s quest to find God after his dear grandpa dies. Rosie O’Donnell plays a Phillies-obsessed nun at Waldron Mercy Academy, Shyamalan’s old school where he partially filmed, who tries to help Joshua (Joseph Cross) as he tries various methods to ask God if grandpa’s alright. There are sweet moments and plenty of laughs until Josh’s resolve shakes. The final reveal is touching, if a bit saccharine: God was there all along, and Josh gets the reassurance he needed.

10. ‘Glass’ (2019)

The last installment of Shyamalan’s cerebral superhero trilogy — following “Unbreakable” (2000) and “Split” (2016) — “Glass” falls flat. There was so much potential in finally uniting the mastermind Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), the hero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and the evil Horde (James McAvoy playing 24 different personalities) after a 19-year buildup, but the plot gets unwieldy. All three are captured by a doctor (Sarah Paulson) who calls them delusional. When they escape from the institution — a transformed Allentown State Hospital — the promised-to-be-epic showdown between good and bad doesn’t even leave the parking lot. The strongman drowns in a puddle, the genius shatters for the last time, and the villain is shot as his victim (Anya Taylor-Joy) comforts him in a warped, Stockholm syndrome relationship.

9. ‘The Visit’ (2015)

Old people are scary. That’s the basic premise for this horror flick set in Philly suburbs, where a single mom (Kathryn Hahn) sends her kids to stay with her estranged parents, to whom she hasn’t spoken in decades. Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) and Nana (Deanna Dunagan)’s creepy antics seem harmless, but soon devolve into unhinged, occasionally naked outbursts. Still processing trauma from their parents’ split, the terrified siblings (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) capture all the weirdness on camera. Everything becomes clear when Hahn delivers the scariest line as calmly as she can: “Those are not your grandparents.” It’s chilling, tense and disturbing — but don’t worry, the kids get out of there alive.

8. ‘The Happening’ (2008)

Hundreds of people suddenly begin killing themselves in Rittenhouse Square Park one sunny day. Mass suicides are reported throughout the Northeast in what’s considered a biological terrorist attack, leading a high school science teacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez) to escape the city on Amtrak. But the train crew loses contact with everyone. They split up and try to find somewhere safe but by the time the couple gives up hope and is ready to die together — the little girl’s future be damned — the air is no longer toxic. Months later, Alma is pregnant because nothing says I survived a near-apocalypse like fixing your marriage with a baby.

7. ‘Knock at the Cabin’ (2023)

Shyamalan’s latest psychological thriller, based on a Paul Tremblay novel, is a slow burn that questions our sense of reality. Four armed strangers break into a cabin rental in rural Pennsylvania where two dads (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) are vacationing with their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui). The family faces an unbelievable dilemma: save humanity by sacrificing one of the three, or watch the world end, supposedly. Touching performances from a solid cast make it work, though the emotional ending falls into the bury your gays trope.

6. ‘Split’ (2016)

“We look at people who have been shattered and different as less than. What if they’re more than us?” posits a therapist who studies dissociative identity disorder. Her patient is Philadelphia Zoo employee Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) and his various identities, like the 9-year-old Hedwig and flamboyant fashion designer Barry. McAvoy’s compelling, precise transformations align with that theory, especially when the Horde, a rogue group, takes charge of Kevin and abducts three teens (including a then-unknown Taylor-Joy) who will be sacrificed to a still-unseen new identity, the superhuman Beast. It’s thrilling to watch McAvoy pivot at any given moment — and even more exciting when a final scene connects the story to the “Unbreakable” universe.

5. ‘Old’ (2021)

Families at a wellness resort enjoy a private beach, but tranquility becomes terror when they begin rapidly aging. Some parts veer into absurdity, but Shyamalan’s camera provides stomach-churning tension as the most vulnerable — two 6-year-olds and a tween — experience sudden puberty and even an ill-fated pregnancy. (Notably, no one talks about periods, although by movie math they’d be experiencing 24 every hour.) The body count rises until there’s just two siblings left, and they miraculously escape, discover the twist and expose the villains. It’s a return to Shyamalan form with a smart reveal that doubles as a social critique.

4. ‘The Village’ (2004)

In a remote, bucolic valley lies a village thriving in isolation. Gripped by fear of the scary beasts in the surrounding woods, they never leave their borders. Things go awry when youths provoke them and enter the forbidden woods. Amid the chaos, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) fall in love, and the latter asks the elders permission to visit “the towns” to retrieve advanced medicines. Once Noah (Adrien Brody), an unpredictable man with a developmental disability, learns of their coupling, he stabs Lucius in confused jealousy. Ivy, who’s blind, resolves to brave the journey herself to save her betrothed. There is the revealing of a maddening truth about Ivy’s father (William Hurt) and there are some annoyingly unanswered questions by the end. But “The Village” remains one of Shyamalan’s best works.

3. ‘Signs’ (2002)

Aliens have arrived, and they do not come in peace. Crop circles and UFOs suddenly appear around the world, including in former priest Graham Hess (Mel Gibson)’s Doylestown cornfield. The stellar ensemble cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Abigail Breslin and Rory Culkin) provides a genuine portrayal of how a family struggles to survive under extraordinary circumstances with moments of grief and levity. There’s tension built into every door creak and wind chime as they try to make sense of the incomprehensible and the aliens come knocking. It’s an exhilarating watch, even if the visual effects don’t hold up today, and the finale only falters in its odd reveal. The Hess family overcomes, and dad, with faith restored, goes back to being Father. Shyamalan excels in taking what could have been a silly premise and making it feel chillingly real.

2. ‘Unbreakable’ (2000)

Shyamalan’s grounded take on a superhero story is riveting from start to finish. Security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is the sole survivor of a catastrophic train derailment, and comic book collector Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) says he knows why. Seeing comics as true tales of humanity’s superpowers, Price insists that Dunn is special even though the reluctant, quiet dad barely believes it himself. His son (Spencer Treat Clark) is so convinced that, in one astonishing scene, he points a gun at Dunn to prove it. The truth is almost incidental when Dunn realizes it was Price (aka Mr. Glass) who derailed the train and orchestrated terrorist attacks in his restless search for a hero — truly a gasp-worthy moment. The film is gut-wrenching, surprising and unforgettable.

1. ‘The Sixth Sense’ (1999)

This ranking does not have a twist ending: It comes as no surprise that this film is Shyamalan’s greatest. Precise performances, remarkable scares and a whopping reveal cemented this superb thriller as an undeniable classic that earned six Oscar nods, including best picture, best original screenplay and best director. Child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) treats Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), who says the iconic line: “I see dead people.” Ghosts are everywhere, blurring the line of reality and leading the kid into dangerous situations as Crowe struggles to help and worries about his own marriage. It’s a master class in storytelling that soars beyond predictable ghost narratives with cinematography that renders even the most mundane shots terrifying. The film is Shyamalan’s crowning achievement

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Screen Rant

Ripley review: netflix's adaptation of the classic crime thriller hits all the right notes.

Ripley differs from The Talented Mr. Ripley in some regards, with the new Netflix series presenting a different way of enjoying a classic.

• Ripley succeeds by being a fresh take on the classic story.
• The black and white filming choice sets a gloomy tone, enhancing the noir feel of the show.
• Andrew Scott's performance as Tom Ripley is award-worthy, while Dakota Fanning shines as Marge Sherwood.

Ripley might not be the first adaptation of the classic novel it is based on, but the Netflix series sure makes you feel like it's the first time you have been transported into Thomas Ripley's world of lies. As someone who loved 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley movie, which starred Matt Damon as the title character, I'm happy to say that I had a great time with Netflix and Showtime's new spin on the classic story.

Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, Ripley is a drama-thriller written and created by Steven Zaillian. Set in the 1960s, the series follows Tom Ripley, who is hired to attempt to coax a wealthy man's son to come home - but this job is just the first part of a lengthy and dangerous complex web of lies.

• The choice to film in black and white helps establish a gloomy atmosphere
• Andrew Scott's Tom Ripley is an award-worthy performance
• Johnny Flynn's Dickie Greenleaf falls short of Jude Law's version of the character from the 1999 movie

Ripley is based on Patricia Highsmith's award-winning 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley , the first of a series of books focused on the character Tom Ripley. While there were a few adaptations of Highsmith's book prior to the Netflix show, Ripley succeeds by trying to be something different from what came before. With a strong story, the show needed to find the perfect cast, and Ripley 's trio of leads proved mostly perfect fits for their characters.

Ripley's Tone Keeps Viewers On Edge

Ripley stars Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf, and Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood. Like the 1999 movie and the novel it is based on, the eight-episode limited series tells the story of Tom Ripley, who is hired by an industrialist to travel to Italy to try to get his son, Dickie, to come back home after a long stint overseas. After he accepts the job, Tom's life turns into a tale of lies, darkness, and murder.

The noir feel of the show is a perfect fit for its story about lies and murder, serving to elevate the tension of the series as the plot progresses.

The limited series was created, written, and directed by Steven Zaillian. The creative has been nominated and won several awards over his long career, which includes a Best Adapted Screenplay win for his work on the critically acclaimed Schindler's List , one of the best and most impactful movies I have ever watched. Knowing this, and how Zaillian was behind the screenplays of classics like Moneyball and Hannibal , I went into Ripley with high expectations, and the series was able to meet them at every turn.

Adding to a carefully crafted story that extended the contents of what had been told in a movie, Ripley lets its events breathe. There are prolonged scenes with little to no dialogue that serve to let characters — and viewers — catch their breath and collect their thoughts after nerve-wracking events. All of that is paired with the aesthetic choice to film Ripley entirely in black and white. The noir feel of the show is a perfect fit for its story about lies and murder, serving to elevate the tension of the series as the plot progresses.

Andrew Scott Is Impressive As Tom Ripley

Dakota fanning is another standout among the cast.

Andrew Scott delivers a worthy performance as the series' lead character. In the many moments where Ripley chooses to present as little dialogue as possible so that we can be transported into the characters' state of mind, Scott particularly excels as Ripley. Communicating a character's feelings and inner thoughts through only facial expressions and body language is no easy task, but the actor rises to the occasion, adding a sense of urgency to any scene with a mere look, making Ripley a character to be watched at all times.

Fanning marvelously brings to life all the different layers of Marge, changing and adapting to the confusing events that start to happen all around her.

Dakota Fanning is also great in the series. Fanning's Marge sees her life completely change when Tom Ripley gets in the middle of her Italian life with Dickie. Marge is a good foe for Ripley, ever wary of what his true intentions might be while Dickie connects with his friend. Fanning marvelously brings to life all the different layers of Marge, changing and adapting to the confusing events that start to happen all around her.

While Johnny Flynn is far from a bad pick for Dickie Greenleaf, with the actor delivering a solid turn in the role, I can't help but compare his performance to that of Jude Law in 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley . Law ended up being nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards for his performance as Dickie. The actor simply presented a level of magnetic charisma that was lacking in the new version of the story, and while that takes the series down a notch, Ripley is still an exciting adaptation of the classic novel.

All 8 episodes of Ripley are now available to stream on Netflix.

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

2003, Adventure/Drama, 2h 19m

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Critics Consensus

Russell Crowe's rough charm is put to good use in this masterful adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's novel. Read critic reviews

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Master and commander: the far side of the world videos, master and commander: the far side of the world   photos.

In 1805, aboard the H.M.S. Surprise, the brash Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his trusted friend, the ship's scholarly surgeon, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), are ordered to hunt down and capture a powerful French vessel off the South American coast. Though Napoleon is winning the war and the men and their crew face an onslaught of obstacles, including their own internal battles, "Lucky Jack" is determined that nothing will stop the Surprise from completing its mission.

Rating: PG-13

Genre: Adventure, Drama, War

Original Language: English

Director: Peter Weir

Producer: Samuel Goldwyn Jr. , Duncan Henderson , Peter Weir

Writer: Peter Weir , John Collee , Patrick O'Brian

Release Date (Theaters): Nov 14, 2003  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Mar 1, 2013

Box Office (Gross USA): $93.9M

Runtime: 2h 19m

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Production Co: Samuel Goldwyn Films, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Miramax Films

Sound Mix: Surround, DTS, Dolby EX

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Russell Crowe

Jack "Lucky" Aubrey

Paul Bettany

Dr. Stephen Maturin

Coxswain Barrett Bonden

James D'Arcy

Thomas Pullings

Lee Ingleby

George Innes

Mark Lewis Jones

Chris Larkin

Royal Marines Captain Howard

Richard McCabe

Mr. Higgins

Robert Pugh

David Threlfall

Lord Blakeney

Edward Woodall

2nd Lt. William Mowett

Peter Calamy

Joseph Nagle

Screenwriter

John Collee

Patrick O'Brian

Samuel Goldwyn Jr.

Duncan Henderson

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Critic Reviews for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Audience reviews for master and commander: the far side of the world.

Epic in scope but also personal in it's ideas, Master and Commander is a smart and visually amazing that never forgets the humanity in it's center - while also delivering stellar action set-pieces.

The fictional epic sea yarns of Captain Jack Aubrey during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800's. This movie is an adaptation of a series of sea naval novels by Patrick O' Brian. The plot and characters being comprised of various segments from various novels in the Maturin series, the main two being obviously [i]Master and Commander[/i] and [i]HMS Surprise[/i] (there are 20 novels in the series). The story starts of seeing Aubrey (Russell Crowe) of the HMS Surprise under attack from the French vessel (Privateer) Acheron, the very vessel Aubrey is under orders to seek and destroy basically. The French ship is stronger and faster leaving the Surprise heavily damaged, nevertheless Aubrey carries on with the hunt. The British follow the ship to hell and back through savage storms and freezing weather conditions trying to stop the French from attacking British whaling ships. Eventually whilst docked within the Galapagos Islands they stumble across the French and see an opportunity for attack, but in order to secure victory Aubrey must come up with something devilishly cunning in order to get in close to the French vessel. Now admittedly this plot might seem dull if you think about it, blokes on old galleons, old fashioned Euro politics, period costumes, stiff upper lips everywhere etc...but you'd be wrong. The movie starts with a bang as Aubrey must fend off the French frigate that appears out of a thick sea fog like a ghost. The flash of multiple cannons is seen in the fog and the Surprise is hit seconds later in an explosion of timber. Men and boys scurry for their lives as various wooden features across the ships main deck are torn apart by the blast, showering everyone in splinters. The frigate emerges from its advantageous position to the shock and annoyance of Aubrey, hundreds of men toil feverishly to get the ships guns primed and ready before the frigate can come about for another attack. Aubrey remains cool and collected as he prepares himself, [i]sharp shooters to the top Mr Howard[/i], [i]stand tall on the quarter deck son, all of us[/i], [i]Mr Boyle, run up the colours[/i], [i]note for the log Mr Watt[/i]...as he is handed his tricorne. The Surprise is hit again and again, men are blown inwards by the shells, cut to pieces by the shrapnel. Those that are still alive are dragged down below for the ships doctor Maturin (Paul Bettany) to try and keep alive in his blood soaked quarters. The two warships are now virtually on top of each other, the Surprise heavily damaged with a smashed rudder. In desperation boats are dropped full of men to tow the lame Surprise as the French Acheron closes in. With luck the Surprise is pulled into another fog bank and manages to evade the French frigate, all is calm. From this one sequence you can see how much of a rip-roaring epic this movie is gonna be, it also highlights the immense levels of realism and authenticity on display. So lets talk about that, the realism. Well for starters most the of scenes were filmed on a huge full scale replica of the HMS Rose (later renamed Surprise in honour of this film), a ship based on a 17th century 20 gun frigate. Now admittedly you can tell this, or I could, by the way the camera always pans around the hull of the ship and never drops below to actually show the sea, but apart from that this large set on gimbals is amazingly realistic looking from bow to stern. At other times the cast were shot on-board the real HMS Rose to capture some awe-inspiring panoramic shots at sea. Sure I don't exactly know how an 18th century vessel would look, but I have a rough idea like many people would, and what we see here is really impressive right down to the tiniest details. The main deck is a mass of ropes, rope ladders and knots, draped, hanging and looping all over the place. Everything is of course made of wood which naturally seems very fragile but rigid (the fear of splinters plays on ones mind), the doctor uses sand on the blood soaked floor to get a better grip when dealing with injuries, hourglasses are used as a measure of time, and everything is generally very dim because only candles light the way. Its not all about battles and blood though, much of what we see is simply natural life on-board ship as they sail from point to point. The officers quarters are, as you would expect, spic-and-span with a grand but not overly lavish trim. The ships top gentry may enjoy a fine drink in the Captains quarters whilst discussing their next move, or they dine together whilst surrounded by their lower ranking officers, or the Captain and the doctor might engage in some classical music renditions utilising cello and violin. This one aspect shows their upbringing, their well-rounded, cultural backgrounds, as does their boardroom-esque arguments which often swing from strategy to philosophy again displaying the wealth of knowledge both men have. On the flips side the lower sections of the ship are a much darker, bleaker affair where the grunts sleep in hammocks, space is limited, the air is probably pungent and where sickness most probably spreads very easily, although the top decks wouldn't escape that either. Yet despite this its clear to see that Aubrey is a decent man, a well-rounded, genuine, good Captain who cares for his crew no matter which station. He is of course stern but fair, displaying strength and leadership when needed to keep his men in line and loyal to him, but the crew clearly show they are happy to follow their Captain. Overall on a visual standpoint this film is damn near perfect as far as I'm concerned. The sets and props are all faultless, the costumes are authentic, every actors hairstyle looks actually genuine, the workings of an old 18th century ship seem spot on, the knowledge of the day medically and universally, and distance shots of the Surprise at sea at various times of the day are breathtaking. The fact they managed to film on the Galapagos Islands was also a notch on the movies belt for sure, the film is chock full of money shots.The film also teaches and informs you along the way too. Its amazing to think so many men managed to all cram on-board a ship like this, that there was actually enough room for them, enough food and water etc...It also shows you how strong men must have been back then, when you see the pitch battle between vessels, wood being blown into millions of deadly splinters, bodies flying, blood, limbs, smoke, the noise etc...How on earth did the Captain manage to keep control?! its incredible how every man knew what to do, each and every one of them all very important cogs and gears in a large machine. It also gets you thinking about the little things, like what did they do with wet clothes? did they have other spare clothes or were they often wet? Did they really manage to rebuild parts of their damaged ship as we see in the film? At the start the Surprise is hit hard and badly damaged, yet the men toil like worker ants and get it all shipshape again, is that accurate? I did also wonder about the whaling ships too, like why were the French so obsessed with sinking British whaling ships? I'm guessing because they were carrying precious blubber which would later be transformed into oil? Did these ships really have many young, high ranking boys on them? You see a good historical film makes you want to know more. Director Weir definitely captures the essence of a long period at sea, the loneliness, desperation, boredom etc...But this is alleviated by the addition of subplots which allow us to get to know the various crew members better. This being another of the films plus points, the fact that all the characters are well fleshed out, we see small story arcs , we care about them, from the bottom of the barrel, to the officers. On one hand we have the situation where one of the young officers is having real problems instilling discipline amongst the men, he is weak willed and at times shy, the men do not respond to him and refer to him as a 'Jonah'. Then we have a situation where the good doctor is accidentally shot by the Marine officer (who was trying to shoot an Albatross), and must undergo surgery, performed by his own hand with the help of his friend Aubrey. We also see the doctor performing major surgery on an elderly sailor whom we follow throughout, and we see the conflict between Aubrey and Maturin as one wants to defeat the French, and the other wants to push science. [i]'I command a King's ship, not a private yacht, we do not have time for your damned hobbies, Sir!'[/i]. Finally there is the young officer Blakeney who comes under the tutelage of Maturin and Aubrey but for very different things. The young boy shares a passion for biology which Maturin is happy to encourage, where as Aubrey is slowly instilling a sense of authority and honour into the boy, so he can himself, one day, captain a ship. Both main leads show their true character with this development whilst at the same time showing how they play off each other and the crew. It may sound a tad boring to just follow this band of men around the seas on-board an old galleon, especially as the movie does have that strong vibe of passing time, but this passage is so thoroughly engaging I fail to see how anyone could not get caught up in the adventure. Especially seeing as the producers even went as far as to change the setting from the 1813 Anglo-American war to the 1805 Napoleonic wars so as not to offend any American audiences (ugh!). Nevertheless this film has pretty much everything you could want, its virtually perfect in every field from visuals to acting to score. A rousing high seas adventure with tense, realistic, heart-pounding action. Grand in scope, and deep on human character.

A good old naval battle film that's good in the action but lack of any real story as it's just mostly 2 ships hunting each other until the final showdown which was brilliant and very entertaining, Russell Crowe was brilliant as he always is and he makes the film go by smoother, The film tries to make us care about the cast more than we would like and it does make for slow watching at times but it's still entertaining with some great acting and very well shot battle scenes, Yet another movie I waited too long to see, Don't do the same as me, It's worth a view.

My goodness, this film is boring. The fact that so many people give this the thumbs up is really alarming. I have seen educational films with more engaging moments than this. Throughout the film, all we are given is nice visuals to just a bunch of actors talking in butchered accents and never once do we have a formulated story. Just bloodshed, madness, and a few semi-likable singing and music scenes. From the cover of the DVD case, I was expecting to be thrilled, but minutes after I saw the end credits, I am still waiting. To me, this was an extreme failure on Crowe's part.

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On the Waterfront review – Marlon Brando’s wounded masculinity rains punches down

Rereleased for its 70th anniversary, Elia Kazan’s classic exploration of corruption and whether or not to squeal is made all the more viscerally powerful by his own Huac testimony

‘T he Romans found out what a handful could do, if it’s the right handful,” says Karl Malden’s priest Father Pete Barry to the crowd of sullen, nervous New Jersey longshoremen he’s persuaded to come to his church, like the early Christians hiding in caves; they are wondering whether to stand up to the crooked union mob boss Johnny Friendly, played by Lee J Cobb. Meanwhile, ex-boxer Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando , sits at the back of the church, smirking and eavesdropping; midway between Judas and Jesus, he is the washed-up fighter who gets cushy dockworker jobs from Johnny in return for shameful dirty work, his stevedore’s hook hitched over his shoulder. It’s same kind of hook that Johnny will use to crucify his consigliere, Terry’s brother Charley, in a back alley; Charley, who betrayed poor Terry at a vital moment in his boxing career, just as he was going to be a contender.

Elia Kazan’s viscerally powerful tragedy from 1954 is now rereleased for its 70th anniversary; it was written for the screen by Budd Schulberg, inspired by Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer-winning journalism about postwar US dockyard corruption, and with a clamorous, brass-heavy musical score by Leonard Bernstein . Its raw passion and wounded masculinity rain down punches on its audience, creating a myth revived and recreated 26 years later in a series of visual and verbal echoes by Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull.

Brando’s face as Terry has the bruised and wounded look of someone who is only just recovering from a catastrophic defeat in the ring. He is still fit and alert physically, but aimless and depressed; as the drama starts, the truth about what he has become has only just started to dawn on him. Some years earlier, Terry sacrificed his title shot in return for deliberately losing against an inferior fighter, having been persuaded to do so by his brother (Rod Steiger) to allow Charley’s employer Johnny to make a fortune betting against Terry. Now the dazed Terry does odd jobs for Johnny, including luring a certain worker to his death because the man was threatening to testify to the authorities about corrupt union officials. Now poor hopeless Terry wonders if he can reclaim his dignity by doing the same thing while tending to his pigeons – who have a piquant consider-the-lilies innocence, as well as being metaphors for the hated stool pigeons and the terrible taboo of talking to the cops. It is all because Terry has fallen in love with the dead man’s sister; a dignified, delicate performance from Eva Marie Saint.

Is it noble or ignoble to squeal? No one watching or working on the movie could have been unaware of Kazan’s testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, which put him on the wrong side of history – although perhaps the same side as George Orwell whose own “red list” was revealed in 1996 . Yet Kazan’s decision to testify, his lack of hindsight-benefit, is part of what drives the agony, the turmoil, the indecision in Terry’s heart. Snitch or martyr; which is it? The performances in the film have a magnificent intelligence and strength, shaped and guided incomparably by Kazan, a master of Broadway and Hollywood.

• Marlon Brando
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