For the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s all about the heroes. The hero’s name will always be in the title because they are what draw the audience in and they are what the fans want to see. The majority of the time the stories revolve around the hero and their journey, so it makes sense to call a movie a Captain America movie or a Doctor Strange movie because that movie is about them. But…
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Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1994 landmark trilogy, Three Colors, recently got a 4k release. The good folks at Criterion sent me a copy of the box set to check out. From Krzysztof Kieślowski comes the Three Colors trilogy, a defining event of the art-house boom of the 1990s. The films are named for the colors of the French flag and stand for the tenets of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—but that hardly begins to explain their…
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The 2023 Sundance Film Festival has officially come to an end. I saw 28 feature films at this year’s festival and a handful of shorts. Overall, I thought this year’s festival was pretty solid. There were a number of movies that I really liked and only a few that I truly did not like, for one reason or another. However, missing from this year’s festival, as has been missing from the past couple of festivals,…
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Flora and Son is writer/director John Carney’s first film since 2016’s delightful Sing Street. Yet even with a seven-year hiatus, Carney has not missed a step as a writer, director, and songwriter. Flora and Son is a wonderful and whimsical tale about the mother-son relationship and how creativity can bring people together. Set in a small Irish town, Flora and Son follows Flora (Eve Hewson), a young, irresponsible woman living in an apartment complex full of unique characters. Flora’s…
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Sometimes I Think About Dying is the latest film from director Rachel Lambert and is adapted from the award-winning short film of the same name by Stefanie Abel Horowitz. The film follows a woman named Fran (Daisy Ridley) who likes to think about dying while working at her mundane office job. She’s good at making spreadsheets and hardly ever talks to or even acknowledges her co-workers. After work, she goes home to her lonely…
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Mami Wata is a stunning cinematic experience. Director C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi put his blood, sweat, and tears into this seven-year process of making the film and the final product was worth the effort. Mami Wata is a gorgeous movie rooted in West African folklore. Set in the remote West African village of Iyi. the villagers worship a Mermaid-diety named Mami Wata, who lives in the body of water on the island’s coast. The villagers…
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Infinity Pool was one of my most anticipated movies of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Director Brandon Cronenberg, son of the legendary David Cronenberg, has immediately established himself as an exciting voice in horror with his first two films, 2012’s Antiviral and 2020’s Possessor, one of my favorite movies from that year’s Sundance, by making visceral, grotesque horror films that run in the same vein as his father’s iconic body horror films while also…
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Pianoforte is a documentary that looks that the Chopin Piano Competition, the prestigious competition held in Warsaw, Poland that sees the world’s best young piano players come together and compete for a chance of a lifetime. It is a gripping, emotional ride filled with thrilling musical numbers as well as a fascinating analysis on competition and the pursuit of perfection. Director Jakub Piątek, whose feature film debut, Prime Time, premiered at the 2021 virtual…
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If there was a way to invest in the careers of an actor, like buying stock in a company in hopes of future gains, I would take all the money I have and invest it in the career of Jonathan Majors. From the first time I saw him in 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco to last year’s war-epic Devotion, Majors has been a star on the rise, consistently giving great performances…
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We first meet Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) at a wedding reception. The two cannot get enough of each other. They love each other’s personalities, they love their jobs, they love their bodies, and they love the life they have with each other, which is why Luke proposes to Emily that very evening. The following morning, they go to their jobs as financial analysts at a cutthroat financial firm where nobody knows…
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