film

In 2014 Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala made their feature film debut with the psychological thriller Goodnight Mommy, garnering critical acclaim as one of the top international films of the year. Amid the buzz, I sought it out and came away extremely disappointed with what I considered a film too straightforward to shoulder the weight of the twisty story it was trying to tell. Watching it I knew that there was going to be an eventual kink in the narrative and scope of the film limited the possibilities of how it was all going to end. In so […]Read more »

Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, or as it was known briefly prior to its “re-branding”, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is the partially-stand-alone, partially-preempted-franchise-starter follow-up to David Ayer’s 2016 film Suicide Squad. The latter was by all accounts a complete dumpster fire and one of my biggest letdowns of that year. Birds of Prey continues to follow Suicide Squad member Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), but nearly all other references to the previous film have been scrubbed clean in an effort to soft reboot the property. Meanwhile, nobody is complaining. While it retains some surface […]Read more »

The Gentlemen is the latest movie from writer/director Guy Richie and marks his return to the British street crime genre for the first time since 2008’s RocknRolla. In the interim, he has directed two Sherlock Holmes films, a failed King Arthur “reboot”, the live-action Aladdin film and the criminally under-seen The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After over a decade, he seems to very naturally slip back into the feel of things. The violence, the non-linear story-telling, the uncouth and frankly uncomfortable vulgarity; it’s all here. In all this time it’s refreshing to see he hasn’t really changed. Unfortunately for him, however, […]Read more »

In 1991, in an effort to compete with Nintendo and their smash-hit Mario franchise, Japanese video game developer Sega released “Sonic the Hedgehog”. The original game was a fast-paced side-scrolling platformer starring the eponymous snarky blue anthropomorphic rodent tasked with protecting the natural world from Dr. Eggman (localized to Robotnik in America) and his army of machines. Sonic would go on to become the de facto mascot for Sega through their resignation from the console wars of the 1990s and early 21st century, and well into their later continuation as game publisher. In recent years, the franchise has fallen on […]Read more »

Osgood “Oz” Perkins’ directorial debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter received some mild praise in the horror industry for being able to effectively build atmosphere and tension while carefully navigating tropes of the supernatural thriller genre. While I wasn’t particularly blown away by the film, I was impressed by the originality of Perkins’ story and its reluctance to stick with a safe and sterile conclusion. Much like his debut, and what I’ve heard of his follow-up I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, his newest film Gretel & Hansel radiates a dark and brooding atmosphere while slowly building up […]Read more »

Weathering With You is the newest animated film by Japanese director Makoto Shinkai, whose smash hit Your Name broke box-office records in 2016 as one of the most commercially successful and critically revered anime films of all time. Praised for its twisty and emotional plot as well as stunning visuals, Your Name would prove to be difficult to follow up as Weathering With You fails to live up to its predecessor on an emotional level but succeeds in being just as visually impressive. The film follows Hodaka, a high school boy who runs away from home to live in Tokyo, […]Read more »