Poker Face (2022) - Movie Review

I picked this film purely for nostalgic reasons, and I don’t mean that in a fond way. Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, The Water Diviner, was one of the first movies I ever reviewed on here way back in December of 2014. That was back when I was still heavily in the phase of obsessing over people who talked about movies, as opposed to obsessing over the movies themselves, and I still had a lot of growing up to do as a writer and just as a person in general. Chances are there are quite a few films from back then that I’d likely have a different take on if I were to write about them today (hell, that has definitely been the case for a few of them, like The Babadook), but Crowe’s first attempt as a director has never struck me as one of those potential examples. So, let’s see how he goes at his second attempt in the chair, and him now writing the script as well.

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.

Citizenfour (2015) - Movie Review

Given my relative infancy when it comes to talking films, I find myself once again stepping into new territory with today’s review. As a rule, I don’t usually actively go after documentaries unless they stand out in some special way. And when I say "special", I mean the kind of special that results in the literal one-joke film The Aristocrats or the rather bluntly-titled Fuck. Then again, considering how my favourite film of last year turned out to be a documentary, I have since grown a bit warmer to the idea. So, with the announcement that this film won the Oscar for Best Documentary hitting literally minutes before seeing it for myself, this has a certain amount of hype to it. Or at least it would, if the Oscars had any kind of significance, but that’s neither here nor there. Time to crack into today’s film already.