In February 2024, a wildfire in Chile was initiated by a firefighter and a forestry worker in the Valparaíso region, around seventy-five miles (a hundred and twenty-two kilometers) from Santiago, the country’s capital. It went on to kill around a hundred and thirty-seven people, and it is one of the …
Inside the entertainment business, industries switch. When we look back at the phonographic market, it is changing. For example, independent artists, a small percentage of the pool then, could live throughout their CD sales and concerts at small gigs. It is a reality that changed completely. Today, streamers’ royalties do …
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 …
Primavera Sound Barcelona was my first solo international travel experience and my first international festival – and what a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime experience it was. Two birds with one stone, and what a way to start things off when it’s a 6-6 festival, with the music sometimes starting as early as …
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 …
In the mid-1980s, Andrew McCarthy starred in a number of highly successful teen films. You’ve probably heard of at least two of them: St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink. He and several other young actors were positioned at exactly the right time and place to create a cultural moment. …
In the first minutes of They’re Here, we meet Cookie, a sympathetic old lady from New York who enthusiastically talks about her past experiences with Unknown Flying Objects (UFOs). She answers the directors, Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez, saying she was taken fourteen times, only in her current home. Cookie …
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 …
Wide shots of roads with purplish skies over them. We see that mainly during the sunsets, as Nesa Azimi’s cameras portray. She takes us on a journey throughout the United States railroads and gas stations alongside the female truckers in business. In the first minute of DRIVER, the director introduces …
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 …
Never in my wildest dreams did I think we would still be talking about Bad Boys after all these years, and yet here we are. It’s mindboggling that the franchise is legally old enough to drink, with the first film coming out back in 1003, and that it’s still bringing …
Author Andy Weir knows how to walk the line between keeping his readers engaged and disinterested, with fascinating characters and plots, but heaps of science jargon that is mind-numbing to the common reader. Even so, he found great success with a film adaptation of The Martian, which received equal acclaim with Matt …
Some TV shows and films are part of our formative process as children. Those programs that mothers would put the TV on for their kids to watch while they have to do something else, but those media pieces worked almost as nannies for them. The most prominent example of this …
Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo is kind of the ur-text for the modern adventure story. Published in 1844, it has it all: treachery, sword-fighting, injustice, long cons, false identities requiring elaborate disguises, secret children, hidden treasure, beautiful ladies, villains becoming heroes, heroes becoming villains, and revenge served …