The most anticipated film of the Venice Biennale this year was the epic Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, which landed with something of a whimper instead of the bang it truly deserves. Kevin Costner’s project, the first part of which had its world premiere in Cannes this past …
There is a disturbing edge to Yudhra that is only slightly explained by the plot. It is clear from how action director Federico Cueva, cinematographer Jay Oza and director Ravi Udyawar staged and filmed the brutal fight scenes that they really enjoyed going so hard. The (superb) night-time gunfight on …
Among all streaming services, Apple TV+ is the one that comes closest to the motto “quality over quantity.” Compared to Netflix, Max, Disney+, or Prime Video, the “apple network” doesn’t produce as much content – ugh, hate that word – but the average quality of its films and series is …
Personally, all it takes is an interesting cast to convince me to sit down in a theater or on my couch at home to watch a movie without feeling the need to look up any further information about it. Killer Heat fits into this “category”, featuring a trio of leads …
The title of writer-director Daisy-May Hudson’s latest feature, Lollipop, hearkens to a sticky-sweet childhood candy and its colorful, innocent connotations. Yet this film opens with a collect phone call playing over the BFI funding title card, notifying the recipient that it is from a British prison and how to decline …
It may be unrealistic to suggest that zombies will rise from graves or aliens will flood the sky, but a lot of films and TV shows, like War of the Worlds and The Walking Dead, provide an insight into what might happen in those situations. They beg the question: what …
This movie contains an entire wedding party being taken hostage, but the violence within Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam is largely cartoonish and unthreatening. At one point, heavily armed henchmen break into a house and are easily trounced by a group of middle-aged women armed only with heavy sticks. Let’s repeat …
Reality Winner (yes, that is her real name) is a veteran of the United States Air Force, but she’s best known for leaking classified government documents to the media. Those documents regarded Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. It was a story that dominated talk shows and news stations …
The A24 studio has become exponentially popular over the last decade, particularly within the horror genre, by offering opportunities to inexperienced filmmakers to venture into the field with original stories that are less accessible to mainstream audiences. But before A24, there was IFC Films and its secondary label, IFC Midnight, …
Stories of young adulthood’s unique growing pains are familiar fodder for feature films, and writer, director, and film editor Axel Cheb Terrab’s first feature Gala & Kiwi is a startling, rough-around-the-edges look at a friendship gone awry in these turbulent years. This time of life immediately after leaving one’s family …
After opening with a quote from Herman Hesse’s famous novel of social and spiritual isolation, Steppenwolf – the latest from director Adilkhan Yerzhanov – moves away from the German-Swiss author’s work that shares its name into another interpretation of “a wolf of the steppes.” This takes the form of an …
All cinephiles have certain filmmakers or actors whose names alone are enough to make us sit in any theater or couch without knowing anything else about the film. Elizabeth Olsen (Captain America: Civil War) is that celebrity for me, as I consider her one of the best actresses of her …
I often state that I don’t have a least favorite genre. I enjoy all kinds of filmmaking and storytelling styles, but that doesn’t mean I have the same knowledge and experience with every genre. Westerns, for example, perhaps due to the lower number of annual new releases, aren’t films one …
Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing opens from the wings of a theatre. The camera moves hazily through sparkling streamers hanging from the stage ceiling before emerging on John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rapturous applause breaks out, and the entire cast joins …
The empty nest is notoriously difficult for parents to deal with, but My Everything (Mon Inséparable) has taken a fresh angle to this ordinary dilemma: the adult son who’s ready to flee the coop has an intellectual disability. Joël (Charles Peccia Galletto) is in his late twenties/early thirties and lives …
One of the quintessential members of the newest Brazilian cinema, the movement of authors, was the renovation of filmmakers working with diverse topics and smaller budgets. Karim Aïnouz built a reputation for himself. His melodramatic tropes resembling Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder added to his decisive colors and narrative construction of …
Although only a few short films manage to capture the depth of human emotion, Danielle Baynes’ latest film The Dog does that work impeccably. The short movie takes the viewers on an emotional ride and talks about a subject that is not tackled frequently in conventional cinema. It recently screened …
It’s a difficult thing to create and maintain dread in a narrative. Horror takes many shapes and approaches, but the best of horror films can dig in under your skin, and take hold of a part of you. Cuckoo is a film like this, that slowly but surely digs into …
In mega-popular franchises like Alien, it’s common to have a primary filmmaker whose role can either be to continue as a director or to shift into a producer role, serving as a sort of supervisor of the original vision of the saga. Ridley Scott is that person, starting in 1979 …
About two weeks ago, Netflix released yet another original flick titled The Union. In my review of that film, I mentioned that it exemplified the worst characteristics often associated with the term “Netflix flick,” which carries a rather negative connotation, at least in the online world. This problem isn’t exclusive …