Fairy tales have always dealt with heavy topics. Children still need to know about complex issues, and sometimes, couching those issues in a fantastical world can make them easier to understand. That remains true for adults. High fantasy stories can cause us to engage with topics that we might otherwise …
The animated world of Batman is growing, with the latest series, Batman: Caped Crusader, that recently hit Prime Video. The ten-episode series from showrunner Bruce Timm, written by Greg Rucka (Harley Quinn, The Old Guard), delivers a new grounded animated series with Hamish Linklater voicing Batman/Bruce Wayne. Does the animated world …
An uninspired plot and several phoned in performances makes Borderlands a huge misfire. Adapting a story from one medium to another is tough. Whether the source material is a novel or a comic or a twitter thread or a game, there are many choices that need to made because while …
Musical biopics consistently earn a reputation as a simple path to awards seasons and other accolades. In recent years, there have been examples in Bohemian Rapsody, Maestro, Elvis, and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, among others. It is a genre that has been repeating itself constantly and delivering mediocre …
This inspired by true events biopic is crowd-pleasing cinema at its best. An ordinary Joe goes toe to toe with heartless billionaires, conniving moneylenders and unfair bureaucracy all in an attempt to make life better and easier for people like him. Will he succeed?? The set-up answers its own question, …
In 2020, director Lee Isaac Chung made Minari, the story of an immigrant family in Arkansas with dialogue almost entirely in Korean. An extremely insulting debate sprang up about whether the movie was American, only possible because the immigrants weren’t white and not speaking English. Mr. Chung has now responded …
Scarlett Johansson co-produced this movie as a vehicle for herself, which should automatically mean it’s worth watching. She has largely focused her career on how someone with a body like hers navigates the world, but here, her body is not the center of attention. Instead it’s her mind, specifically her …
Welcome to Manchester, let’s be having you. For three days a collection of metal, prog rock, jazz and other genres including unique geeza-core were assembled in the 02 Victoria Warehouse, a few minutes’ walk away from the iconic Old Trafford Stadium, for a two-stage weekender of chaos inside a sweltering …
Bruce Springsteen walks up on stage at Wembley Stadium and goes straight into song. There is no introduction because there needs no introduction, he is the Boss, and the Boss is magic – over fifty years of making some of the foremost rock and roll music, he comes out and debuts …
For fans of horror films, at times, it feels like the classic monster tropes are done to death. Made famous in Hollywood thanks to the classic Universal films, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, and The Mummy have been produced and reproduced by almost every studio. You would think that over the …
Radar Festival is an award-winning, prog-rock festival based out of Manchester, United Kingdom, spanning three nights. Across the Friday-Saturday-Sunday weekend for the heavy fans, there’s a treat to be had here no matter where you look – situated in the heart of the northern city, it’s a fixture to be …
Not since 1999’s The Blair Witch Project has a horror campaign been quite as effective as the one Neon have instigated for Oswald Perkins’ horror Longlegs. The campaign that tore the internet apart at the turn of the millennium was based on the idea that the titular Blair Witch was …
Not much is known about Josef Mysliveček – the 18th-century composer at the center of writer and director Petr Václav’s lavish historical biopic The Bohemian – in the English-speaking musical world. It is known he was on good terms with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the two composers vied for recognition …
In Napkins – the sixth episode of the third season of The Bear, a flashback centering around Tina’s journey to The Beef – Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Michael (Jon Bernthal) have a heart-to-heart. They discuss life, work, and most importantly, of course, food. It’s Michael who ponders to Tina, “If …
In 2022, audiences were introduced to the world of the X trilogy with X and its prequel Pearl, both of which were produced and filmed at a record time and managed to come out in the same year. Only two years later, the working relationship between A24, director Ti West, …
There is a milestone in every cinephile’s journey that turns the table from a hobby to an obsession. A specific film ignites a fire within the individual, leading to an almost unexplainable passion. One of the world’s biggest cinephiles, the legendary director Martin Scorsese, not only invested in restorations but …
It is always, always a delight to see a movie that should not exist. Whether the artistic ambition is implausible or the plot is incredible, it’s always a pleasure to see the impossible, especially when it’s so determined to entertain us. Hundreds of Beavers is a mixed-media (part live-action, part …
And we have the ending of The Acolyte, in a style that mostly worked I think. The big mysteries were revealed in the penultimate episode so there wasn’t much left for the show to wrap up other than complete the changing of the guard, Mae to the Jedi and Osha …
2000trees is a small, award winning 15,000 capacity music festival in Cotsworld Hills, England. 3 nights of a camping-only music festival with no signal across the entire site, no WiFi provided, meant a truly communal experience – I only attended the Saturday, the final day of the event, but still …
To this day, Apollo 11’s successful landing on the moon is one of humanity’s greatest feats – an inspiring amalgamation of ingenuity, ambition, and cooperation. Fly Me to the Moon, to this critic’s knowledge, is the first to use this mission for a romantic comedy setting. It’s certainly an unorthodox …