Kimi (2022) - Movie Review

 

Of all the filmmakers who tried to persist when COVID made its initial devastating impact on the film industry, Steven Soderbergh always felt like the one who was the most primed and ready for it. In 2011, he and Scott Z. Burns basically predicted COVID itself with Contagion, and in 2019, he and Tarell Alvin McCraney gave one hell of an analogy for how much streaming and decentralisation would need to fill in the gap once lockdowns started happening in High Flying Bird. Between his place as a vanguard of independent cinema, and his championing for availability of both product and production, given his use of consumer-grade smartphones to film High Flying Bird and Unsane, he is a cinematic voice that seemed destined to thrive in this environment.

Sweetheart (2020) - Movie Review

Female-led survival horror flicks have been steadily making the rounds over the last handful of years. The Shallows, Crawl, both entries in the Metres Down series; I guess the recent resurgence in ‘prestige’ horror cinema combined with the attempts to bring more female lead characters to the screen have resulted in this intersection. But up until this point, these films have thrived (or floundered) based on being short but sweet genre exercises, not rising too far above the benchmark for man vs. nature yarns. And then this film came along, yet another from the industrious (industrial?) Blumhouse production line, which… basically recontextualises this entire trend.

Bad Samaritan (2020) - Movie Review

Remember Geostorm? Unless you’re an obsessive like myself who writes about nearly every new movie they watch, probably not. Well, get ready for the whiplash because this is what director Dean Devlin made after that infamous attempt to beat Roland Emmerich at his own game. And the result could not be more different from his previous. He’s gone from world-spanning disaster spectacle to an thriller with elements of home invasion cinema that has more in common with the works of Thomas Harris than anything to do with making us fear man-made climate change.

The Invisible Man (2020) - Movie Review

The Universal Monsters. A stable of cinematic creatures that served as the progenitor for the modern craze surrounding cinematic universes, which itself has found repeated non-success in the post-MCU landscape. Dracula Untold was retrofitted to be part of the ‘Dark Universe’, and the results are unsurprisingly rushed, and the less said about the Tom Cruise vanity project (well, more so than any of his others, at least) The Mummy from 2017, the better. Hell, even before then with the works of Stephen Sommers in the 2000’s, attempts to bring back the classic monsters kept shooting themselves in the foot as far as trying to create serialised franchises out of them.

But now that Universal has stopped putting the cart before the horse, and are letting individual films stand on their own for a change, we have the latest attempt to bring back the old guard. And holy shit, this is easily the best attempt yet.

Seberg (2020) - Movie Review

I don’t think there’s a single actress working today who could take this role other than Kristen Stewart. As much as the white liberal populace could quite easily take a shine to stories like that of the real-life philanthropist and actress Jean Seberg, the narrative of a white woman implanting herself into the protests and struggles of the Black Panther Party isn’t something just anyone could pull off. With how high-profile Stewart has grown of late, and how endearingly riot grrl her public persona has become, her status as one of the mainstream's favourite social subversives makes her ripe for this kind of story. And thankfully, through thick and thin, she manages to pull it off.

Judy & Punch (2019) - Movie Review

Even in an era when distaff revamps of older material are quite commonplace, this one is more out-there than most. It’s a reinterpretation of a 17^th-century puppet show (itself an ancestor of mature puppet capers like Meet The Feebles and Avenue Q), directed by first-time filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes, one of many, many actors who got worldwide attention after featuring in David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. I swear, that movie was designed to break games of Six Degrees To Kevin Bacon.

Countdown (2019) - Movie Review

Well, someone must’ve overheard me when I was complaining about how outdated Sextuplets was, because this horror film falls into the same category. However, this isn’t a matter of questioning whether the idea behind it was ever good, but rather questioning whether the idea is good now. Speaking personally (as if I ever do any different around here, but regardless), I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the phrase "there’s an app for that" unironically or outside of a game of Cards Against Humanity. Or, at the very least, it's been many years since that last happened. I can’t find any hard data to prove that this is a script that has been kicking around for a long time, but looking at the end result, I would not be surprised because this is some serious reheated leftovers.

Eli (2019) - Movie Review

I don’t like getting into spoilers in these reviews. Oh sure, if a film’s ending is particularly noteworthy (usually for how bad it is) and it bends my entire understanding of the film as it unfolds, it becomes somewhat of a necessity to delve into it in order to give my full perspective. But otherwise, much like how I don’t like even indirectly insulting people who like films that I personally don’t, I don’t like the idea of taking away the chance for someone else to experience a well-constructed twist in a work of fiction. But we’ve reached another one of those times where, for reasons I’ll get into, I have to get into this film’s conclusion in order to properly explain just how… baffling this thing is.

Unsane (2018) - Movie Review

 

There’s a specific type of discomfort that comes out of watching a film like this. It’s the discomfort in knowing when someone is actually telling the truth but everyone else insists that they’re not. The feeling that makes you want to put your hands through the screen into the film’s reality and just start yelling that this person is right, that things are happening to them, or at the very least give assurance that they’re aren’t as crazy as everyone wants that person to believe.