When I clicked on Amazon’s latest original movie, I thought I was tuning into an odd romantic comedy that also somehow involved parallel dimensions. The cast certainly looked promising, as did the titillating first trailer. This grey-toned, deadpan dystopian drama is quite the unexpected surprise. Not necessarily in quality, but in the amount of thought…
When a wave breaks, there are two parts to the sound. There is the dull, deafening roar, the power of the sea taking over, with no nuance to the distortion of pure noise. Then, there is peace. There is the gentle sound after the crest, the soothing tapping of water walking itself back along the…
To review a film that has garnered controversy early, in this case at the inception of its casting, it is best to begin with a disclaimer. As a cisgender lesbian, even if I may experience dysphoric tendencies, it is not my place to tell trans men how to feel about the way they are represented…
Overwritten, underdeveloped, and tone-deaf. These are the qualities we see in a Disney live-action remake. These are the qualities we see in Mulan. I have made no secret of my disdain for the Disney+ original offerings on this site, it’s as close to a niche as I have here, so I suppose I should be…
Stage Mother is essentially a “straight savior” story, but this element could have turned out far worse than the vaguely charming result. Jacki Weaver is Maybelline, a conservative church choir director who moves to San Francisco to run her son’s drag club after he overdoses. She had gone to his funeral against the will of…
Disco is coming of age tightly wound with religion. Much like Alice Rohrwacher‘s Corpo Celeste, it’s about the effect intense religious pressure within Christian denominations has on a young woman. Mirjam (SKAM’s Josefine Frida Pettersen) is 19 years old, and a world champion freestyle disco dancer. Her Evangelical church takes great pride in this, and…
I firmly believe that Dee Rees is a good filmmaker. I feel like I should get that point out of the way before I go any farther into this. Pariah is one of my favorite films, an empathetic story of a teenaged, lesbian African-American. It was a queer film in the modern era before queer…
Boy No other figure in history captures Australia’s obsession with the outlaw hero persona as perfectly as Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly – the 19th century bushranger whose final uttered words find themselves inscribed in the flesh of more than a handful across this land: “Such is life.” His life and death have indeed indelibly marked the…
After years of making sequels and seemingly studio mandated films that generally received a mixed to negative critical reception and low box office returns, aside from last year’s billion-dollar grossing Aladdin live-action remake of the 1992 classic animated film, Guy Ritchie has finally returned to making original concept films with The Gentlemen. Unfortunately, The Gentlemen…
Bad Boys for Life was something I never expected to happen – even when it was announced – but I was intrigued on what a Bad Boys film would look like all these years later. Surely a film as hateful and outwardly repugnant as Bad Boys II couldn’t exist today, so I anticipated something more…
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