Unlike the experience I had yesterday with Mercy, I walked into the theater to watch Send Help with considerably high expectations. Not just because of the positive reception circulating among most of my colleagues and the general public, but because the prospect of seeing a master like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) …
Entering a movie theater with low expectations is a dangerous yet necessary exercise. Two weeks after its release, I finally sat down to watch Mercy, and I couldn’t escape the wave of negative reception that’s been flooding the internet. That said, I’ll confess I held onto a sliver of hope. …
2025 has been a strong year of Stephen King adaptations. These include It: Welcome to Derry, The Running Man, and The Life of Chuck. One of the darkest would have to go to the adaptation of his story The Long Walk directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games franchise). Set …
The representation of queerness in the past decade on TV has found itself on an uptick. Shows like Heartstopper, Queer Eye, Modern Family, and Schitt’s Creek have led the charge in normalising the existence of queer people on television, and therefore in life. Despite the challenges the queer characters face …
The legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty made history with his documentary Nanook of the North, a pioneering film, considered the first non-fiction work. Despite the controversies and claims of its stagings, it establishes the medium’s interest in the study of the human organization and the different cultures. A century later, we …
It’s only January but Scottish documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street is a very serious contender for best documentary of the year. It’s rare to feel a documentary so firmly plant the seed of possibility in the mind of its audience. But there are three things audiences need to know in …
In 2022, the Academy-nominated documentary Filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) impressed the audiences with a sonic experiment in his 32 Sounds. Mixed as an experiment to watch at the theater and scenes where the sound echoes differently in each soundbar, it illustrates how, underneath the technical experimentation, Green’s films …
The young Canadian director Ben Proudfoot is one of the most prominent names in the documentary short film community. Through his Breakwater Studios, Proudfoot releases two shorts each year, which premiere in major festival venues such as the Tribeca Film Festival or Telluride Film Festival. In 2021, he won his …
It wouldn’t be a lie to say it’s been a fairly tumultuous year for one of the BBC’s flagship franchises Doctor Who. Not only was the second series of Russell T Davies’ soft reboot of the show met with low ratings, both critically and in viewership, but Ncuti Gatwa the …
Filipino genre filmmaker Pedring Lopez world premiered his first English-language film, the neo-noir thriller Shadow Transit, at last year’s QCinema International Film Festival. An independent co-production between the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada, Shadow Transit centers on a chance encounter between a grieving singer-photographer and a drifting DJ, resulting in …
Already the second film adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 coming-of-age novel of the same name, Bonjour Tristesse, a debut feature by Canadian director Durga Chew-Bose, offers a modern, feminist spin on the original material, which was an overnight sensation written by the French novelist at age 18. Remakes can become …
In this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a post-screening reaction surprised tons of cinephiles following the festival’s attendees. Despite premiering after a veteran French filmmaker, Dominik Moll, with his Case 137, the most talked-about film of the second day of the festival was Sirât by the French-Spanish director, Oliver Laxe. In …
Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Yunan begins with the exasperated breaths of its protagonist, Munir (Georges Khabbaz), who, in the doctor’s office, is getting his lungs examined. Nothing is wrong with them, yet Munir consistently has difficulty catching his breath or even breathing normally. His doctor believes it might be psychological and …
Even if it sounds ironic, nepotism might be a burden. It is one of the topics of grief shown in Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. Arguably one of the most popular names in mainstream comedy in the last three decades, Ben Stiller comes from a royal family in comedy. …
Whereas Kelly Reichardt’s latest indie fare The Mastermind, a character study of an arguably decent criminal shot 1970s-style, starring the brilliant and now ubiquitous Josh O’Connor, tersely eviscerates our notion of a crime/heist movie — though the resulting picture feels rather coiled — Gus Van Sant’s comeback feature Dead Man’s …
In the early 1950s, the legendary French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma popularized a new manner of analyzing cinema. Hence, the politique des auteurs (auteur theory) became their central thesis, in which film criticism analyzed films through the lens of the whole and the filmmaker’s style. Thus, in a subsequent consequence …
Children under age seven, in Japanese culture, are considered “of the gods,” which means they have the purest connection with the divine, until they inevitably transition into the mortal realm, taking their first few steps into adulthood. Such is the case for the titular protagonist of Little Amélie or the …
Political filmmaking goes beyond documenting political movements and principally records the individuals who make the choices. A classic example of that is Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk, a groundbreaking documentary that immortalized Milk’s work and brutal murder. In this sense, these sub-genres of docs crystallize the life of …
After making its premiere in the Orizzonti competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Ali Asgari’s latest feature Divine Comedy is set to make its Philippine debut as part of the 13th edition of the QCinema International Film Festival, running November 14 to 23. The film, which takes a metatextual …
The best thing about Girls & Boys is one of the main characters is trans and absolutely no one blinks an eye at this. This is not something that could be said when I ran around Dublin, back when just being a member of the gay student clubs was an …