Reviews
-
Film Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
★★★☆☆ 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.
-
Film Review: Amerikatsi
★★★☆☆ 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.
-
Film Review: No Bears
★★★★★ 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.
-
Film Review: Watcher
★★★★☆ 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.
-
Film Review: Barbarian
★★★☆☆ 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.
-
Film Review: Triangle of Sadness
★★★★★ If there was one criticism of Ruben Östlund’s The Square, it’s that his satire wasn’t so much shooting fish in a barrel as nuking a pod of whales in a glass of water. His new film, Triangle of Sadness, begins with a series of riffs on how vacuous the high fashion world is.
-
Film Review: Bros
★★★★☆ Bros, a ground-breaking new romantic comedy, is the first Hollywood studio-backed picture to feature gay leads playing gay characters, with the supporting cast coming almost entirely from the LGBTQ community. It’s an important moment for representation on screen and surprisingly political in nature.
-
Film Review: Decision to Leave
★★★★☆ Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s new film Decision to Leave is a cinematic psychopath test. Park Hae-il plays Hae-joon a police detective who doesn’t have enough murders to solve in Busan. His wife (Lee Jung-hyun) works in Ipo, a misty seaside town. With his partner (Go Kyung-pyo), Hae-joon finally gets given what looks like an…
-
Film Review: You Won’t Be Alone
★★★★☆ You Won’t Be Alone is the fiercely poet debut of Macedonian-Australian Goran Stolevski. Set in the land of his birth, North Macedonia, at some point in the 19th century, the film follows the unusual and sometimes fraught life of a shape-shifting witch played by various actors over the years.
-
Film Review: Vesper
★★★☆☆ 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.