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.
★★★☆☆ King T’Challa is dead, but the Kingdom of Wakanda must live on. After the tragic death of franchise star Chadwick Boseman, so too must the Marvel machine roll on and so, somehow, the Black Panther series must continue without its lead.
★★★☆☆ Actor Michael A. Goorjian may be best-known as Neve Campbell’s love interest in Party of Five, but he has been directing independent features since 1997. His paternal grandparents survived the Armenian genocide, and so his latest film Amerikatsi is a deeply personal film.
★★★★★ Jafar Panahi’s sentence of six years in prison this July is the latest instance of harassment that the director has received from Iranian authorities, stretching back as far as 2010. Panahi has made a film about escaping Iran – in which he plays himself making a film about escaping Iran.
★★★★☆ Julia (It Follows’ Maika Monroe) has moved with husband Francis (Karl Glusman) from New York City for a new marketing job in Bucharest. Spending her days alone and struggling with the language barrier, Julia starts to feel that she is being spied on from the apartment opposite theirs.
★★★☆☆ Director Zach Cregger’s third feature is a tight, claustrophobic horror that starts strongly but descends into schlock and regrettable cliché in its final third. With surprises, compelling performances and strong visuals across the board, Barbarian warrants recommendation but with serious caveats.
★★★☆☆ In the post-climate apocalypse, society has reverted to a form of feudalism where most people eke out survival in the wasteland while elites, living in Citadels, control the food supply. Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s fourth collaboration is a sci-fi fairytale whose aesthetics and performances aren’t quite matched by a run-of-the mill story.
★★★★☆ David Gordon Green rounds out his trilogy with a definitive ending for the long-running horror series. An absurd, baroque, and jaw-droppingly ambitious capper to a franchise that has been defined by wild variations in quality, Halloween Ends’ reach may well exceed its grasp, but nevertheless offers a fearless and deranged vision in horror.
★★☆☆☆ Dutch theatre and television producer Robin de Levita turns his hand to feature filmmaking with Lost Cos. Sadly, despite some cultish potential this aptly-titled debut feature is indeed a lost cause: an incoherent, undisciplined and tedious mess with little about it to truly recommend.
