While anyone can insert their influences into their art, it’s something else entirely when the creation stands on its own. Writer/director Kirill Sokolov is open about his fondness for directors Sergio Leone (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly), Martin… Read More ›
The path to release has been a difficult one for director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) latest film The Current War. Itself a dramatization of the struggle for control over the burgeoning birth of electricity throughout… Read More ›
There’s an elegance and simplicity to writer/director Hoon-jung Park’s The Witch: Subversion that all begins with the opening. Via photo montage with intense tonal scoring, The Witch sets up a mysterious cabal performing medical experiments on children: iron lungs, tubes… Read More ›
There are a handful of video games who proved so resilient, they seemed to transcend their release date and extend into generations of play. We’re talking Nintendo’s Super Mario franchise, Sega’s Sonic, Capcom’s Street Fighter, and, the series that just… Read More ›
In June of 1987, Walter “Johnny D” McMillian was arrested by Sherriff Tom Tate of Monroeville, Alabama, for the murder of eighteen-year-old Ronda Morrison. The case had been unsolved for a year and Tate was keen to close it. Placed… Read More ›
Inspired by real life martial artist Yip Man, the Ip Man series of films conveys not just the man, but his impact on his community. Beginning in 2008 with the first film, Ip Man starred Donnie Yen (Rogue One: A… Read More ›
The art we engage with critically shapes who we become as adults. It molds how we view and engage with the world. It shapes our perspective, often subconsciously guiding us through the choices we make. For this review, it was… Read More ›
Writer/director Dustin Feneley’s feature film debut, Stray, is a bold swing. An exercise in minimalism, the dialogue is scant, pans are few, scoring is largely absent, and narrative points are inferred more than directly stated. Aspects of this does translate… Read More ›
If Céline Sciamma’s recently-released Portrait of a Lady on Fire paints a picture of female community and camaraderie at its best, honing in on the lives of women as they create space for each other outside of patriarchal society, then… Read More ›
Excluding television programs, there are 14 films and one holiday special that are considered canon within the Star Wars universe. Each one adds new perspectives to the larger universe, but all of them are connected by a single storyline explored… Read More ›
The Civil War is a time period that doesn’t get explored in most movies. Sure, we love to see our World War II movies, whether it’s Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, or Hacksaw Ridge, but the Civil War is full of… Read More ›
Of the films to drop in 2019, none impressed this reviewer more from a technical perspective than Sam Mendes’s 1917. Designed, shot, and edited to create a seamless one-take feel, 1917 became one of the year’s most immersive experiences without… Read More ›
When it comes to provocative storytelling, there really is no one else like writer/director Spike Lee. More than any modern artist, Lee minces no words with his films, cutting straight through the bullshit each and every time. In his 2015… Read More ›
When the world seems literally about to fall apart, what we need is to remember that we’re all in this together. That, perhaps, the way we’ve been doing things hasn’t been the right way all along. As humans, we tend… Read More ›
In 1996, during the Summer Olympic games, a bomb went off in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, killing one and hurting many others. Though it was security guard Richard Jewell who found and alerted police to a suspicious package at the… Read More ›
In all aspects of films, the trickiest part is categorizing it. What genre does it fall into? Who does it target? To whom does the film speak? It’s easy to do with most superhero films, while prestige pictures more often… Read More ›
There’s something about first love that can be hard to quantify, even when looking back on it. The simultaneous excitement of being attracted to someone else, the endless internal questions trying to figure out what it means, the unyielding terror… Read More ›
In the last decade or so, steelbook variants have become their very own subculture for cinematic home releases. In the beginning, it was the packaging that stood out, the sturdy material being a touch more protective than the typical blue… Read More ›
When the teaser for Frozen II first dropped, if you’d told me that that film would become one of my favorites of 2019, that I’d find myself revisiting it frequently, its songs on repeat willingly and purposefully, I’d have likely… Read More ›
If you’ve ever dabbled in the morbid or macabre, then chances are you’ve come across the works of H.P. Lovecraft. His tales of the strange, the weird, the supernatural, and the horrific have lingered in the cultural zeitgeist with the… Read More ›