Sirât is the rare movie that should be seen absolutely cold. I mean it, stop reading this review right now until after you have seen it, then come back for when you need someone to hold your hand afterwards. For Sirât manages to deliver one of the greatest shocks ever …
Everybody knows the greatest thing about Wes Anderson’s movies is their sense of style. Style is the tool he uses to bring lightness to dark and complex subjects such as grief, the creeping threat of fascism and being an insufferable young person. The staging and blocking, the centering of images, …
For his next trick – not his follow-up to Anora, since he did not direct – Sean Baker has co-written, edited and co-produced this Taiwanese movie about a family of three women trying to make it in Taipei. The director (and co-writer) is Shih-Ching Tsou, who has worked with Mr. …
Caravan (Karavan) is the debut feature by Zuzana Kichnerová and is another selection of the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film narrates the story of Ester (Anna Geislerová), a forty-five-year-old woman who spends most of her time caring for her special needs son, David (David …
Everyone wants to root for a sports comeback story. The Last Rodeo, from director Jon Avnet with a script by Avnet, Derek Presley, and star Neal McDonough, sits well within this well-known and well-loved subgenre. McDonough stars as Joe Wainright, a former rodeo champion bull rider who settled down to …
Stories about colonization seldom humanize the colonizers, and for good reason. Focusing on the victims of abuse should always be the priority. However, there is value in examining a colonizer’s motivations. In his film The New Boy, writer and director Warwick Thornton examines some of those motivations through the lens of …
We meet Devon (Meghan Fahy) on her way out of jail, on her way home to her father, who is suffering from dementia. There is a fruit basket on her Buffalo stoop, a lavish gift in a very unlavish part of town. Devon suspects it’s from her sister Simone (Milly …
The Un Certain Regard section is the second most significant section of the Cannes Film Festival. It presents rising directors who already have a presence in world cinema. It is the case of Un Poeta (A Poet), directed by Simón Mesa Soto. The Colombian filmmaker presented his last film, Amparo, …
The ripped-from-the-headlines Case 137 (Dossier 137) combines two genres everybody loves. The first is the detailed bureaucracy of justice and how much easier it is to find objective truth since we all started carrying recording devices (our mobile phones) around at all times. Think Anatomy of a Fall and Saint …
The Portuguese director Pedro Pinho presents his latest film, O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest in the Storm), at the Un Certain Regard section in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The author’s last full-length feature, A Fábrica de Nada, had its premiere at the Quinzaine des Cineastes in …
In French director Emmanuel Courcol’s comedy drama, The Marching Band (En fanfare), the celebrated orchestra conductor, Thibaut Desormeaux (Benjamin Lavernhe) is diagnosed with leukemia. To his surprise, the tests to identify a bone marrow donor reveal that he was adopted. The search for his brother leads him to Jimmy (Pierre Lottin), …
My optimism about the direction of season 4 of Hacks was up with episode 4, but it immediately dropped again while watching episode 5, Clickable Face. I have a little bit of sunk cost going on here, but goodness, this season is feeling like a slog, and that’s a serious disappointment for a …
Alex Garland, known for his thought-provoking storytelling in films like Ex Machina and Civil War, joins forces with war veteran Ray Mendoza to create one of his most ambitious projects to date. Co-written by the two filmmakers, Warfare aims to depict a military surveillance mission with the utmost realism – …
The opening episodes of season 4 of Hacks left this critic feeling a bit cold, but episode 4, I Love LA, is the first time that I’ve felt a bit of hope for the remainder of the season. Hacks has been one of my favorite comedies since it premiered four …
The grand Austrian director Michael Haneke famously stated, to paraphrase, that a film is 24 lies per second in service of the attempt to find the truth. In this sense, cinema is a mere representation of the reality. This conceptualization allows multiple directors to experiment with the understanding of the …
When it comes to the Indian film industry, there are only a few actors who don’t need to do extravagant promotional events to sell tickets. One such actor is Suriya, and fans go berserk whenever he announces his next movie. However, some of his previous films haven’t turned out to …
Italian director Yuri Ancarani declares in his Venice Film Festival statement that “Atlantide is a film that began without a screenplay.” It could very well be said that it still hasn’t got one. There are, perhaps, 15 lines of dialogue in Ancarani’s ridiculous and amateurish film about Daniele, (Daniele Barison) …
Edgar Wright, acclaimed cult director of Baby Driver and Hot Fuzz fame, directs Last Night In Soho with a breezy smoothness, but this vibrant, pulpy horror is disappointingly toothless. In contemporary Cornwall, naive and fresh faced 18 year old Eloise ‘Ellie’ Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) is standing in her room. Fashion …
In recent years, there has been a massive influx of movies and TV series that showcase the reality of the entertainment industry and how youngsters navigate the world of showbiz. Most importantly, these titles exhibit how young people navigate through life while trying to achieve something, which makes them raw …
Hacks season 4 continues to underwhelm as it comes on with episode 3, What Happens in Vegas. Despite two absolutely electric leads and a primary story that has the ability to highlight some of the inequities in late-night television, specifically, and women in entertainment more broadly, it continues to pit Ava …