This Much I Know To Be True (2022) - Movie Review

Teaming up once again with director Andrew Dominik (and I mean in front of the camera, since he also contributed to Dominik’s… interesting Marilyn Monroe biopic), This Much I Know To Be True serves as a follow-up to the 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling. Where that film captured Cave at his most outwardly melancholic, wrestling with his grief over the death of his son, this shows him in a much better place.

White Noise (2022) - Movie Review

Up to this point, writer/director Noah Baumbach has operated in the chattier sectors of American indie cinema. We’ve look at three of his films on this blog already, and they have all involved intimate and unvarnished looks at families with a shared interest (or even disinterest) in the arts. And despite a couple disagreements here and there in the film craft or the framing of their central ideas, I’ve come to look forward to seeing new films from the guy. So you can imagine my surprise when his new film is a major switch-up from his usual wheelhouse.

Clerks III (2022) - Movie Review

 

Much as he did with Jay & Silent Bob Reboot a few years ago, Clerks III has Kevin Smith returning to the good ol’ days with a threequel to the film that started it all. And somehow, we’ve gone even more meta than Reboot, as this sequel to Clerks is… well, about making the movie Clerks.

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary (2020) - Movie Review

The discourse surrounding films tends to isolate documentaries from basically every other kind of production. Sure, there are mockumentary hybrids that blur that line, but overall, people expect a degree of facticity from documentaries that isn’t normally expected (or at least expected as much) of fiction or even fictionalised versions of real events. Considering how the nature of filmmaking involves a certain element of constructing reality in its very process, that facticity isn’t always guaranteed or even aimed for. But every so often, a documentary takes this idea on-board and basically turns into its own statement on what makes a documentary qualify as such.

Astronaut (2020) - Movie Review

“Keep up the good fight, ‘cause what’s the alternative?”

This is one of the first lines in the film, spoken to Richard Dreyfuss’ Angus during a medical check-up. It’s one of those early bits of dialogue in a film that ends up explaining the bulk of what is to follow, as we see Angus’ attempts to win a lottery for a ticket on the first commercial flight into space.

The Farewell (2019) - Movie Review

I’ve gotten into this a fair bit in past reviews, but suffice to say, I really can’t stand Liar Revealed plots. The ones where the entire story hinges on characters intentionally keeping secrets from each other, mainly for the sake of giving the third act a chance to engage through breaking the artificial tension created. It’s incredibly distracting to see in pretty much any movie, as it turns whatever comes after the deceptive moment into a prolonged waiting game. It’s tedious, and the kind of narrative nonsense that can turn me right off from properly enjoying a work of fiction. Enter this film, where none of the usual gripes apply.

Paddleton (2019) - Movie Review

There’s no real way to prepare for someone’s death. Oh sure, there’s a lot of planning that goes into the memorialisation of those we care about, but even if we have the foresight to know the precise where, when and how of a person’s death, that still isn’t enough to truly ready one’s self for the reality of it. To go from alive to just… not, from one instance to the other, is a transition that forms a lot of the human condition and its fear of what it cannot possibly know, and more so than the fear of loss, it’s the fear of things left unsaid that can strike even harder.