Entering a movie theater with low expectations is a dangerous yet necessary exercise. Two weeks after its release, I finally sat down to watch Mercy, and I couldn’t escape the wave of negative reception that’s been flooding the internet. That said, I’ll confess I held onto a sliver of hope. …
2025 has been a strong year of Stephen King adaptations. These include It: Welcome to Derry, The Running Man, and The Life of Chuck. One of the darkest would have to go to the adaptation of his story The Long Walk directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games franchise). Set …
Filipino genre filmmaker Pedring Lopez world premiered his first English-language film, the neo-noir thriller Shadow Transit, at last year’s QCinema International Film Festival. An independent co-production between the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada, Shadow Transit centers on a chance encounter between a grieving singer-photographer and a drifting DJ, resulting in …
In this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a post-screening reaction surprised tons of cinephiles following the festival’s attendees. Despite premiering after a veteran French filmmaker, Dominik Moll, with his Case 137, the most talked-about film of the second day of the festival was Sirât by the French-Spanish director, Oliver Laxe. In …
Melodrama is a constantly sub-genre appreciated by cinephiles. Historically, filmmakers like Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Pedro Almodovar earned admiration from the lovers of the seventh art, predominantly because their work approaches the structures of the melodramatic conventions. In this sense, another contemporary filmmaker admired for his oeuvre in …
Whenever I see the names of Matt Damon (The Martian) and Ben Affleck (Argo) together on a poster, my attention is captured by a nostalgia that goes back to their earliest successes. The dynamic between the two is one of the most solid pillars of contemporary cinema, and the prospect …
Even in a recent attempt to rewatch the original film, Greenland, hoping to find something I might’ve missed, most of my issues remained unchanged. The exhaustive repetition and manufactured melodrama continued to prevent me from truly connecting with that story. However, cinema has these curious quirks: for some inexplicable reason, …
A mishmash of moods held together by preposterous musical numbers is part of the appeal of most Indian cinema, but Telugu-language The RajaSaab holds together worse than most. There are three movies inside The RajaSaab struggling to get out: a haunted-house horror thriller, a paean to the grandmothers who raised …
The first film of the new year is always an exciting moment. Why this specific movie to kick off 2026? The answer is simple: Daisy Ridley. Despite being familiar with some of the previous work by filmmaker Zak Hilditch (1922), my interest in this feature resided 100% in the lead …
A sweet young girl with a dark past becomes the live-in help for a troubled couple and ends up being exactly what the husband needs to heal his broken heart. Sounds like a classic Hallmark movie, doesn’t it? But turns out this story is closer to Hitchcock than Hallmark because …
I’ve always supported the idea that entering a movie theater without the weight of preconceived expectations is one of the greatest and rarest luxuries. In the case of The Housemaid, I didn’t read the source material, nor did I seek out details about the premise, allowing my interest to be …
Jeff Nichols is one of the best directors that America has to offer and Midnight Special was a delight to revisit for its timely science fiction themes rooted in immigration and fear of a controlling government. A father and son are forced on the run when the father learns his …
This clever no-budget thriller is automatically recommended by me because it’s in the Irish language. Its aspirational depiction of life entirely inside the Irish language, which rarely happens in real life, is just wonderful to see. It is also a heist movie, with three women (two of whom are middle-aged) …
I watched Dust Bunny without much baggage. I read the premise, knew this marked the feature directorial debut of Bryan Fuller, but I don’t carry with me a deep familiarity with his acclaimed television work. Thus, I was motivated solely by curiosity to see a film that attempts to balance …
The year was 2003, one of the most formative years of my life as someone trying to discover their own taste in movies. The Matrix Reloaded overwhelmed the cinema zeitgeist for months. Michael Bay arguably made one of his best action films, Bad Boys II, before throwing himself into the …
Horror films have been one of the most interesting genres to watch in 2025. While not a self-proclaimed horror fan myself, it is hard to deny how enjoyable they have been to watch this year. One of the best films of the year, 28 Years Later (the third film in …
Following its Sundance world premiere in early 2025, The Things You Kill, the third feature from Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami, is set to screen in Philippine theaters as part of the 2025 QCinema International Film Festival. Selected as the Canadian submission for the 2026 Oscar Best International Feature Film category, …
It’s so ordinary nowadays for crime stories to have an absolutely terrific setup leading to a whimper of an ending, so when one plays its cards as well as A Private Life does it should be praised from the rooftops. In the last twenty or so years Jodie Foster has …
Selected as Italy’s official contender for best international feature film at the 2026 Oscars, Francesco Costabile’s sophomore feature Familia carries the thematic preoccupations of their directorial debut Una Femmina: The Code of Silence, a crime drama loosely based on Italian journalist Lirio Abbate’s investigative book, which wrestles with women victims …
The Secret Agent won two major awards at this year’s Cannes film festival, Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, an unusual and enormous compliment. The Secret Agent is a lot like Waiting for Godot, as it is two and a half hours of set-up …