Allelujah (2023) - Movie Review

It’s Shitty Plot Twist time again!

Yep, we’ve got another film where my usual attempts at weave around story specifics for the sake of spoilers (as I’ve said before, I don’t like the idea of ruining the experience of a film for anyone, even if I personally didn’t care for it) are rendered moot because the narrative not only hinges on a major twist, but so does the film’s efficacy as a whole. This is the kind of shift that had me going from generally liking the film, albeit not all that enthusiastically, to having a confused slack-jawed look plastered on my face for the entire ride home from the cinema. It has been quite a while since a single moment has so utterly demolished the rest of the film around it, but that’s what we’ve got here.

Belfast (2022) - Movie Review

After how well our last look at the work of Kenneth Branagh turned out with All Is True, and considering how self-reflective that film was, I was quite looking forward to this new feature. Where All Is True showed Branagh contemplating his future and his place as an older thespian that was becoming more known for gun-for-hire work than his more theatrical fare, Belfast is primarily about his past. It’s a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about young Buddy (Jude Hill) growing up in the midst of The Troubles, although it’s not as overtly dramatic as that may make it sound.

All Is True (2019) - Movie Review

After spending most of this decade adding his approach to period fidelity to a wide range of other literary adaptations, from the Arthurian tinges of Thor to the whodunit conservatism of Murder On The OrientExpress, filmmaker and thespian Kenneth Branagh has returned to his Shakespearean roots to direct and lead a production all about the man himself. Specifically, a story covering the last three years of the Bard’s life, from the destruction of the Globe Theatre to his untimely death.

Red Joan (2019) - Movie Review

Communism on film has been around for as long as film itself. The Soviet propaganda machine, in particular the works of Sergei Eisenstein, helped pioneer filmmaking techniques that have become commonplace across the globe. Hell, if we’re talking honestly, Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera is one of the most important films in the history of the medium, and it too wielded communist iconography to make its statements about the potential of cinema.

I bring all this up partly so that those with knee jerk reactions to anything regarding socialism can safely skip this and save themselves some self-induced headaches. But also because, knowing the ideology’s connections to the art form, it’s rather disappointing that a modern film could depict that same ideology in quite possibly the dullest fashion possible.