You can tell this film was made by a director void of culture, who comes from the desolate artistic strip mall of cable television. You can tell by its art direction, music cues, and costume and hair choices. It’s shot like an episode of Riverdale without the aesthetic cohesion, littered with mass-market detritus that screams “consumer-edgy”, inside a vacuum-sealed ambience that reads less as world-building than a poor facsimile of reality on a budget. Maybe these things were out of…

If the film suffers from anything, it’s its utter conventionality. Following films like Into the Wild (directed by Wright’s ex-husband, Sean Penn), Wild, Call of the Wild, and other movies with “wild” in the title, the trope of someone running from their past into untamed nature has congealed into a kind of schmaltzy minigenre, and in a year where Nomadland achieves much the same with a greater artistic point of view, Land could be in danger of getting… well… lost…

The only thing more depressing than a cynical, retrogressive, failingly unlikely, gummed together attempt to mimic a conventional Hallmark Channel holiday movie with an idpol twist is accomplishing that very thing without a shred of humor nor an ounce of nerve. There’s truly no accounting for lack of vision. Hulu has rejected brilliant projects that I’m aware of and it’s a slap in the face they gave this turkey the go ahead. 50 years of unfortunate queer assimilation politics and…