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