Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Everyone’s always a suspect in any slasher movie worth its salt and that’s true up until the very last moments in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. The film, which stars a slew of established and rising talent in the form of Maria Bakalova, Lee Pace, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Peter Davidson, and a scene-stealing Rachel Sennott, cleverly subverts what we know of the genre trappings and what we – perhaps falsely? – assume to be true. Read More
When out-of-tower Hamish (Cosmo Jarvis) gets in a head-on-collision with Irish teenagers Callum and Evan (Rhys Mannion), only the later survives. Reeling from the fallout, the unscathed Evan and banged up Hamish wind up in a complicated dance, caught somewhere between trauma bonding and flirtation in a film that’s slow to reveal its hand. Their relationship becomes bizarrely intimate but undercut with a simmering level of foreboding in actress-turned-first-time-director Antonia Campbell Hughes‘ introspective thriller It Is In Us All. Read More
Jim Gaffigan stars as astronomer and public television personality Cameron Edwin in Colin West’s science fiction-tinged festival dramedy Linoleum. A bodega-version Bill Nye, Cameron leads the failing daily children’s show ‘Above & Beyond’ which after years of existing in obscurity has been picked up by a major network. The rub? Cameron will be replaced as the show’s host by his straight-laced doppelgänger Kent Armstrong (also played by Gaffigan), a more successful, better looking version of himself whose arrival signals a series of enigmatic occurrences. Not everything is as it seems. Read More
Bullied as a child, Sissy (Aisha Dee) thought she left behind her childhood name. She‘s Cecilia now and she’s a self-help influencer. Popular on social media under the handle “Sincerely Cecilia”, the trendy twenty-something shares glossy selfie videos about mindfulness and self-love, topics she actually knows nearly nothing about. Deep down, she’s a traumatized child; projecting security, suppressing scars. Her 200k followers see Sincerely Cecilia™ but they don’t see Cecilia sincerely. They don’t know the true Sissy who lurks beneath. Read More
Everything Everywhere All At Once truly is the multiverse of madness that we deserve. Hilarious, utterly singular, and weirdly profound, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheiner (aka “The Daniels”) have cooked up something wholly original with their martial-arts multiversal science-fiction story about a Chinese family that owns a laundry mat. A genius-level explosion of creativity that blends Wuxia sci-fi with the vast endlessness that is literally the spectrum of onscreen possibility, there’s is a film that borders on the insane and is never anything less than wowing. To say I had a smile plastered on my face the entire time would be to overlook that fact that everyone around me did as well. Read More
Maria Bakalova is a star. The Borat Subsequent Moviefilm breakout not only captured national attention as Borat’s fictional daughter Tutar Sagdiyev in the 2020 mockumentary but she earned an Academy Award nomination for her efforts. Complete with uncomplimentary prosthetics and raggedy apparel, Bakalova fearlessly faced down judgmental southern debutants and, later, Rudy Giuliani’s roaming hands. But to hear her tell it, fear has always been central to her work and career. Read More
We’ve seen the man become the bat plenty of times. In Matt Reeves’ The Batman, we see the bat become a man again. The Batman, a singularly gloomy noir caper that feels stylistically more akin to Se7en than The Dark Knight, presents one of the most distinctive versions of the iconic “superhero” (that term is used very loosely here) to ever grace the screen. Reeves’ vision is a far cry from the rinse-repeat superhero fare that so frequently pummels their way through the multiplexes. There’s sparse humor or frivolity and even less charm. As much as Batman can be grounded, stripped down to his essence as a character, and seen for the disturbed outsider that he truly is, this is what Reeves seeks to accomplish. And he largely does just that. Read More
A black hole of charm, Sony’s Uncharted is the opposite of inspired. Everything about this lazy, expensive, haphazard adaptation of the popular Playstation exclusive reeks of assembly-line blockbuster manufacturing. For a wannabe franchise-launching starting block, one that clocks in with an aggressive $120 million dollar budget, Uncharted feels little more than a hack pastiche of adventure movie tropes, airlifted in from better treasure hunter films and spackled with a coat of snide Mark Wahlberg one-liners. It’s painful by virtue of just how adamantly risk-averse and paint-by-numbers just about everything on screen ends up being. Read More
Death on the Nile begins with the origin story of Hercule Poirot’s (Kenneth Branagh) ridiculous mustache. His face was half-blown off in WWI you see, this facial deformity informing his older self’s reclusive and fussy nature. The overly coiffed, quadruple-pronged mustache was a cover up all along. A way to throw people off the scent of his great trauma and deep-seated pain. The detective, it seems, is indeed human after all. Surmising why the world-famous detective became who he is proves the best material in this sequel to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express, a murder mystery that is otherwise haunted by an almost total lack of mystery. Read More
The master of disaster is back to ruin the world again with Moonfall, a shamelessly bonkers sci-fi disaster movie where the moon is suddenly on a collision course with earth. A select few suspect aliens are involved. Following a string of disappointments, director Roland Emmerich’s latest is a bit of a return to form, or at least whatever form best suits Emmerich. Moonfall is an uncompromisingly ridiculous disaster epic where the scale is as massive as the plot-holes and the human element is consistently overshadowed by destruction special effects. It’s big, it’s loud, it’s dumb, and by the time the whole thing takes shape, it’s almost too much fun to deny its simple pleasures. Almost. Read More