Musicians have a long history of migrating from recording albums to acting in pictures. We could appoint Cher in Moonstruck (1987), which gave her an Academy Award, Barbra Streisand with Funny Girl (1968), which also gave her the Academy Award, and Eminem with 8 Mile (2003). It is a media …
Tiger Stripes can be described as Carrie meets Turning Red, which unfairly minimizes the courageous central performance from young Zafreen Zairzal. But even with a fresh setting – an all-girls’ middle school in the Malaysian jungle – there’s regrettably no freshness in the plot. That makes this only a frustrating …
In the 20th century, Dr. Erich Lindemann changed the medical understanding of loss through his Grief Work theory. In this theory, he stated that the way of overcoming the death of a loved one and regaining oneself is the emancipation from the bondage of the deceased, readjustment of the environment …
With Twisters around the corner, what better time to revisit the 1996 original? Twister feels like an ancient relic in the modern day of cinema. The ’90s were stormed with disaster movies of all types, and sometimes, they had competing films releasing at once—for example, Deep Impact and Armageddon or …
No filmmaker is more unconcerned about the audience than Quentin Dupieux. His previous movie, Yannick, was an hour-long dark comedy that tiptoed around in circles as its titular character (played with pitch-perfect timing by Raphaël Quenard) turns a grating complaint about the play he’s watching into a total nightmare for …
Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the latest project from the versatile filmmaker. It’s hard to keep track of what projects Guy Ritchie is currently working on, as one gets seemingly announced every week. And while most on Film Twitter spheres have complained about Ritchie pumping out two …
What is the purpose of a prequel? You might say it is to further deepen the lore of a character, or to add context to the world that the prior film built. Perhaps it’s a supplement, a new adventure with fresh, exciting characters that feed into and enhance that next …
Grief is not a finite resource. It is used in abundance as a base for art as it is an emotion that is universally felt and resonates with the populous. It affects even the hardest of souls. The grief that is usually picked apart by art is often reserved for …
An ode to family, loss, and the beauty of stories, director and writer Patrick Dickinson’s Cottontail is a quiet meditation on what it means to be part of the world after someone you love has died. Dickinson’s narrative feature debut, the film follows Kenzaburo, played by Lily Franky, a sixty-something …
In 2022, CNN and HBO came together to tell us the story about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Navalny. His story, complete with poison, jail, and more, shocked the world and informed us about what was happening in Russia. But Navalny was just a story about one man, and …
Comedy is one of the great cultural forces. It is, in many ways, the great equalizer. In the hands of a talented performer, comedy speaks truth to power, whether that means mocking our leaders or finding commonality in the human experience. It’s the latter of these that filmmaker Neil Berkeley’s …
There is a reason you’ve probably never heard the name Linda Perry. The singer/songwriter has spent her life hiding from the spotlight, hiding from shame and her perfectionism, but mostly hiding from herself. She is best known for being behind the vocals of 4 Non Blondes and their 1992 mega-hit …
The coming-of-age genre has always explored teenage sexuality. More often than not, it is a genre filled with thoughtful ideas, discussing topics about teenage sexuality that are held taboo in society. Nicholas Colia’s feature debut, Griffin in Summer, an awkward and staid comedy, covers the topic of inappropriate sexual crushes …
When you’re a superhero, it seems like the world is always in danger. Be it villains attempting to take over the world, a comet headed straight to Earth promising global catastrophe, or an Alien race swoops in to establish global dominance. Sounds exhausting if I’m being honest, but I guess …
If there is a more reliable setup for a thriller these days than “young woman trapped in a place with a man,” I don’t know what it is. It’s incredibly versatile, whether you start out with the man being sweet and progressing to darker places, or have him be malevolent …
Horror is one of the most difficult genres to tap into. It’s really challenging to keep viewers at the edge of their seats with genuinely scary elements. However, every once in a while, we get to see a movie that truly captures the essence of the genre and takes us …
Meeting with Pol Pot is very loosely based on a memoir by an American journalist named Elizabeth Becker, who was at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival. It must have been a very strange feeling to see a fictionalized version of some of the most important events in …
Roberto Minervini shared the best director prize in the Un Certain Regard strand of this year’s Cannes Film Festival for this mumblecore-style film about soldiers in the Wild West during the American Civil War. It’s the flipside to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (reviewed separately), which has broadly the …
There was one movie at this year’s Cannes Film Festival which was a passion project for the director that got all the attention: Megalopolis. But there was another movie, a passion project for the director, that also played Cannes, albeit not in competition: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1. This …
2022’s Venice Film Festival opened with the Noah Baumbach directed White Noise, a quirky and chaotic genre-mash up. It is a visually enrapturing film about a family surviving a toxic event while grappling with the feeling of impending doom and the mundane cataclysm of their lives. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s …