Beyond telling an engaging story, animated children’s features have two goals: captivate the target audience and be clever enough so the parents don’t want to murder themselves on the 58th viewing. By all marks, Warner Brothers Animations’s Scoob! succeeds in… Read More ›
Described as “a lively action flick with a samurai twist,” latest Well Go USA release Samurai Marathon meets that description with a unique vigor. Directed by Bernard Rose (Candyman) and adapted from the novel “The Marathon Samurai: Five Tales of… Read More ›
As I left the theater in early February, I knew instantly that director Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) was not for me. The post-fight margaritas, the bullet-proof bustier, the severity of Black… Read More ›
From Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to The Breakfast Club (1985) to Lady Bird (2017), each generation has its special coming-of-age films that it can claim as its own. These are the movies grounded in a cultural milieu that take… Read More ›
Romance movies typically skew for a certain instead of appealing to all audiences. The great ones (The Fault in Our Stars, Titanic, and The Big Sick) are the ones that can resonate and move a wide variety of people, both male… Read More ›
For her first feature script, Joanne Sarazen (I Came Here Alone) nails the endless pain and difficulty of a parental toxic relationship: the way the parent, an incubus born of weaponized love, cycles through terrible behavior after terrible behavior, pulling… Read More ›
Sometimes, no matter how many strong pieces a story has or how fantastic of a cast and crew, it doesn’t gel as expected. This is the case with The Rhythm Section, a film starring Blake Lively (All I See Is… Read More ›
The horror genre is arguably the most diverse genre in Hollywood when you take into consideration of all the sub-genres that it offers. Slasher, zombies, paranormal, and psychological are all prime examples of sub-genres of horror movies, but one should… Read More ›
The tale of Reine Paradis begins with the story of how the French-born artist came to the United States to pursue her dream of being an artist. After being fired as a photographer’s assistant, she had to make a decision,… Read More ›
Every culture has their notorious outlaws, and in Australia, probably no such figure looms larger than bushranger Ned Kelly, who famously wore a suit made of bulletproof armor during his last standoff with local authorities. While at least 10 movies… Read More ›
If you’ve ever felt lost, unseen, unacknowledged, or just generally without people, chances are that something came into your live and turned all of that around. We’re not getting into something as deep as religion, but, for many, the art… Read More ›
Adapted from Damon Galgut’s 1995 novel of the same name, director Scott Teems’s film The Quarry comes to you as a gritty, grim, and bleak Neo-Western thriller. With a screenplay co-written by Teems and Andrew Brotzman, this feature exemplifies shades… Read More ›
In this brief minisode, hosts Darryl Mansel and Douglas Davidson discuss the challenges that cinema currently faces: theater closures, shifting release dates, and a focus on VOD. If you missed of the last 27 episodes, you can jump right on… Read More ›
Growing up is confusing for the average pre-teen boy, but Brooklyn-born Abe (Noah Schnapp, Stranger Things) has more of a task than most. Born out of a cross-cultural marriage, Abe describes his identity as Palestinian Muslim/Israeli Jewish/American Brooklyn/and Gryffindor. Family… Read More ›
When writer-director Neasa Hardiman originally crafted the new suspense-thriller, creature-feature hybrid Sea Fever, it is highly unlikely that she could have forecasted its remarkable relevance to the current state of the world. With the pandemic of COVID-19 impacting the daily… Read More ›
Published in May 2013, Katherine Center’s novel The Lost Husband is the basis for the second feature film from director Vicky Wight (The Volunteer) and is the latest novel-to-screen adaption to entertain audiences. With a premise focused on a newly-widowed… 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 ›
Considering the entire globe is almost totally under house arrest, the arrival of Vivarium might seem like the worst idea in the world. Focused on a couple whose house-hunting gets them stuck in suburbia, all alone, would be bad enough,… Read More ›
With the right amount of comedy and romance and the vibe of a coming of age tale, Banana Split is a poignant and profoundly resonating story that’s about the struggles of friendships and the overall impact they will have on… Read More ›