Packaged in unsuspecting monochrome and monotone, Babak Jalali embeds Fremont with a cunning, melancholic charm.
Category: Movie Review
Posted inFilm
Review: Landscape with Invisible Hand
Once you get past the aliens’ appearances, it’s easy to be mesmerized by the film at large, which is a sweeping and heartfelt examination of colonization, voyeurism, capitalism, and humanity.
Posted inFilm
Review: Perpetrator
A girl walking home alone is such a classic beginning for a horror film that it’s a trope (and title) in itself. This particular opening lends itself to endless continuations and explorations, and when you have a director like Jennifer Reeder, an old story can get retold like no other.
Posted inFilm
Review: Red, White & Royal Blue
Those who desire mere fluff will be satisfied, but the reason the book became a sensation in the first place was its real awareness of the risks it took to truly build a better world. This groundbreaking love story deserved better.
Posted inFilm
Review: BAM!
There’s a refreshingly casual diversity that ensures BAM! isn’t only a love letter to Chicago, with many landmarks only natives will recognize, but also one of the best examples of what talented artists can achieve when they refuse to take making art itself for granted.
Posted inFilm
Review: Strays
Director Josh Greenbaum and writer Dan Perrault team up for neither of their best work with Strays, a lackluster crude dog comedy whose blessedly short run time is its most redeeming feature.
Posted inFilm
Review: Passages
Passages, New York-based filmmaker Ira Sachs’s tempestuous love-triangle drama, feels like a precious anomaly within the landscape of contemporary American cinema.
Posted inFilm
Review: Blue Beetle
There is a recent idiosyncratic, smart superhero movie about family and togetherness. It’s called Encanto. I’d suggest watching it and skipping Blue Beetle entirely.
Posted inFilm
Review: The Unknown Country
A solitary figure in a car traversing the American West in a movie can be as iconic as it is innocuous: a placeholder for every kind of journey, be it spiritual or material; a seeking of or a fleeing from.
Posted inFilm
Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
These turtles are animated in an electric style that resembles clay splashed with vibrant colors and rough sketch lines. It’s enough to power this loving, if somewhat tame, reboot.
Posted inFilm
Review: Meg 2: The Trench
It’s a clumsy action movie with the occasional spurt of fun monster conflict amidst a sea of flat characters and a tiresome plot of corporate espionage.
Posted inFilm
Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal directed this predictable, gruesome, but unscary horror tale, which is inspired by chapter seven of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, known as “The Captain’s Log.”
Posted inFilm
Review: Amanda
For her debut feature, Cavalli’s character study of a sardonic protagonist offers a unique voice to coming-of-age anxiety.
Posted inFilm
Review: H.I.M.
Anthony Bawn’s H.I.M. follows Damien (Brandon Karson), a heartbroken college student, and his cousin, Kendall (Rahim Brazil), who finds a romance with a church boy, rocking his relationship with his mother. The film opens with a harsh conversation between Kendall and his friend—two Black gay men in the closet—where Kendall challenges his sexuality and experience […]
Posted inFilm
Review: Wolfkin
A note from the author: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist. Most monstrous puberty and coming-of-age movies, like Ginger Snaps and The Lost Boys, center on the experiences of the tween or […]