Themes of ‘identity’ and ‘role-playing’ swirl intensely in this decent offering starring the Berlinale award-winning Sebastian Stan, who plays a disfigured man who begins to morph into a normal-looking person after an experimental clinical trial.
New drama/romance/biography, Queer is the latest from Luca Guadagnino, director of this summer’s popular tennis movie Challengers, which starred Zendaya. Daniel Craig is Willam Lee, an outcast American expatriate in 1950s Mexico who develops an infatuation with a younger man named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Based on a 1985 William S. Burroughs novella of the […]
In the battle for the most forgettable film title of the year, Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here (not to be confused with the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary of the same title or the very similar I’m Not Here, Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic) is one of the clear favourites for a podium spot. It’s a relatively […]
A wildly entertaining, gory action-horror-comedy where Nicolas Cage as Dracula is everything you could have imagined. Renfield may seem like the the latest vampire offering from Hollywood, but it’s much more than that. Showcasing a new take on the character of Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and his devoted assistant/familiar R. M. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), this comedy-horror […]
A coming-of-age story told through the lens of a young woman growing up in Silicon Valley, The Book of Jobs intertwines her life to the legacy of Steve Jobs. Victoria Pedretti (Netflix’s You, The Haunting of Hill House) plays the film’s author/narrator, always providing a window of insight to her character’s erratic insecurities. Back in […]
From a young age Nat Turner (Nate Parker) was always told that he was going to be somebody important in life. By the “blessing of God” he had the ability to read words, which allowed for his slave masters to bring him into their home to learn about the word of God. Fast forward to […]
A CLASSIC (YET IMPERFECT) “ONE MAN ARMY” FLICK Within the action film genre, there lies a storied tradition of narrative storytelling that derives from the classic (yet always beloved) “one man army” yarn. There have been many of these films across the many decades of action cinematic history, yet they all roughly remain the […]
The Bikeriders is a 2024 film based on a book of the same name. The book is a collection of photography and interviews from the 1960’s into the 1970’s following the rise and fall of their bike club. From humble and simple beginnings to the seedier underbelly that creeps in as the story progresses, the […]
Nick Frost plays a cabbie with an attitude. This film has an interesting aesthetic but fails to do much more with it than the bog standard. I like the idea of a horror film about a cabbie driving down northern country lanes in the dark worrying about ghosts, however, in […]
I heard the buzz about Woman Of The Hour when it was playing festivals a while back. Now, it has arrived here in the UK on Netflix so I gave Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut a watch. To be honest I did not get the film I was expecting from pre-release hype, I feel that the […]
After Jackie in 2016 and Spencer in 2021, Pablo Larrain now completes his spiritual ‘women in gilded cages’ trilogy with Maria, perhaps the most intellectually interesting but the least immediately emotionally gripping of the three. This biopic of the last week of the life of beyond-legendary opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie), is in constant […]
Mainland Chinese actor Shen Teng/沈騰 is a hot commodity these days. His third film this year, SUCCESSOR/抓娃娃, is currently tearing up the domestic box office, taking in over US$456 million so far and becoming the country’s highest-grossing comedy in summer box office history. Shen is back again with UNTOUCHABLE and this one is a complete […]
Directed by Mel Gibson; Flight Risk is a new action/thriller starring Mark Wahlbeg, Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace. One in which not all parties aboard a very important flight are who they say they are. First came Jason Bateman as a terrorist in Carry-On (2024). Now we have Wahlberg, who’s usually a hero who saves […]
To miss a documentary about 7 time Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher would be the equivalent of skipping a Martin Scorsese film. It might not be as compelling as 2011’s “Senna”, but it’s still a phenomenal look at Schumi’s career, from his time with Benetton in the early 90’s, to his unforgettable years at […]
Although he has no plans to step aside as the head of Waystar Royco, the international media conglomerate controlled by his family, aging patriarch Logan Roy is contemplating what the future holds. He has lingered in the limelight longer than even he thought he would, and now family members want to run the company as […]
Longlegs is a film so obsessed with subtext that it often loses sight of delivering satisfying text. It is understandable why it might have lost some audiences – and critics – on that basis. But the best horror is often found when reading between the lines. The darkest, most impactful moments found in Osgood Perkins’ […]
Another year, another remake of a recent foreign movie. I managed to see the Danish/Dutch original, also titled Speak No Evil (2022), one night before watching this movie. That movie is a masterclass in tension while it touches on many societal themes (emasculation, politeness, power dynamics). Long story short, I enjoyed my time with it, […]
I feel as if In the Mood for Love is just about impossible to write about. A lot of films benefit from a lot of analysis, making what you see on screen that much more clear and powerful, or perhaps even that much more expansive and mysterious in its ideas. I watched In the Mood […]
“But what that Comanche believes, ain’t got no eyes, he can’t enter the spirit-land. Has to wander forever between the winds.” -Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers Paris, Texas is a difficult film, and though I have come to love it by thinking it over the past couple days, I do not think it’s […]
Let me clarify something – I have been rooting for Megalopolis ever since I first learned about it. Written as a passion project by Francis Ford Coppola himself, entirely financed by him, he also directed it… If one of the cinema’s best directors to have ever picked up a camera wants to tell a story […]