Film Reviews & More
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
★★☆☆☆ Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★★★☆ In Alex Garland’s Civil War, a group of journalists embark on a road trip to interview the US President amidst a second American Civil War, while exploring media’s dehumanizing relationship with violence.
★★★★★ Filmmaker Amanda Kramer’s latest is a surreal, erotic, and often romantic vision of nonconformity shot through the lens of classic Hollywood and inspired by the cinema of Kenneth Anger. In politics and the media, opportunistic hate-mongers whip up bigotry against gender non-conformity, while everyone in contemporary cinema is beautiful but no one is horny.
★★★★☆ Putting her talents behind the camera, Chilean actor-turned-director Manuela Martelli’s debut feature is a gripping study of paranoia during the early years of the Pinochet regime. As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.
★★★☆☆ Her first film as director since 2017’s heady study of adolescence, Ava, Léa Mysius’ latest is an oft-gripping magical-realist mystery drama with faint whiffs of horror. While The Five Devils doesn’t quite have the clarity of vision of her previous picture, its emotion, erotically-charged themes and puzzle-box structure leave much to recommend.
★★★☆☆ It’s 1918, and the elderly woman that terrorised the screaming youths of X is still a tender young thing, stuck on her parents’ farm and dreaming of a life of stardom in faraway Hollywood. How far removed from that wizened psychotic killer this cherubic vision now stands.
★★★★☆ One year on from the events of the previous franchise entry, Ghostface is up to their old tricks again, slicing and dicing their way through a new batch of shrieking victims, the action now shifted to New York. With the new generation of Screamers now firmly installed, headed by the Carpenter sisters, can the ghost(face)s of the past be laid to rest?
★★★☆☆ His heavyweight champion status secured, the now-retired Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) spends his days lounging around his Hollywood mansion, having tea parties with daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) and running his gym with coach Little Duke (Wood Harris). But when a long-forgotten figure from Adonis’ past returns, his future is thrown into question.
★★★☆☆ Ant-Man’s (Paul Rudd) third standalone outing confirms his status as among the Marvel machine’s most reliably entertaining, if middling, product lines. Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania may be lacking in any discernible drama or emotional stakes but it is easily one of the most solidly entertaining and spectacular of Marvel’s ‘Phase 4’ run of film and television.
★★★☆☆ As she drives down a narrow, poorly lit road through a forest, a woman is momentarily distracted and veers into the path of an oncoming lorry. Swerving, she avoids catastrophe and stops the car to check on the child on the back seat, still blissfully sleeping. Death is always close in producer-turned-director Cory Choy’s debut feature Esme, My Love, a magical-realist drama that is consistently intriguing but never quite fulsome enough to become compelling.
