High Flying Bird (2019) - Movie Review

One of the things I really appreciate the medium of cinema for is being able to take subjects and ideas that I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about on this side of the screen, and turn it into something worth being invested in. Subjects like professional sports, about as far from my hobbyist purview as a tea leaf is to the larger workings of the East India Trading Company, and something I’ve looked at in past reviews like Concussion. Not something I take much interest in personally, but with the right filmmaker, I’m willing to give it a second glance. Steven Soderbergh has managed to do just that.

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.

Tangerine (2015) - Movie Review

By next year, approximately 2 billion people will have access to a smartphone; a little more than a quarter of the world. This means that more than 1/4^th of Earth’s population can become amateur filmmakers. With the continuing advances being made in mobile phone technology, including the cameras attached to them, as well as the advents of services like YouTube and Vine, it is now easier than ever for Joe Bloggs to call himself a director. Of course, that same notion also makes standing out in the industry even tougher: Yeah, it’s easier to do, but that also means that you have to compete with everyone else who can do the same thing. Still, all of this information kind of makes the weirdly high budgets most found footage films get ($3 million and up) look especially wasteful by comparison. So, in the hands of true-blue American independents, a budget of approximately US$100,000 and only three iPhones to serve as the cameras, how does today’s film fare?