Movie Reviews

  David Leitch’s Bullet Train is a movie with a lot of characters. To start, there’s Ladybug (Brad Pitt), an assassin who, despite his nickname, is having a terrible streak of luck that only seems to be getting worse for him. There’s Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), gun-for-hire brothers who will do any dirty job that they are asked to do. Then there is Prince (Joey King), a seemingly nice and innocent-looking…

  Jordan Peele’s Nope is the director’s biggest film to date and arguably his most impressive, which is a lot to say seeing as his debut film, the Oscar-winning Get Out, has become a cultural touchstone, and his follow-up, Us, features one of the great performances of the last ten years from Lupita Nyong’o. Where Get Out and Us felt smaller in terms of their scale but huge with their themes, Nope is a perfect…

  The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic is one of the most unique and interesting movies of 2022. It is a captivating experience putting us front and center into the experience of a blind and handicapped man who goes on a journey to meet the person he loves in person for the first time. It is a smart, sweet, tense, raw, and beautiful film. Jakko (Petri Poikolainen) is blind and paralyzed…

  I have not had a more frustrating experience at the movies in 2022 than I had with Thor Love and Thunder, the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What made the film so frustrating was that it brought the MCU back to a place that it had not been in for what feels like forever but the film was made with such little passion and focus that it ended up not being a…

  The summer movie season is synonymous with big characters. Just this summer alone we got the likes of Doctor Strange, Maverick, Buzz Lightyear, and Elvis Presley on the big screen, characters whose popularity and stature can barely fit on screen. But possibly the best character of summer 2022 is someone we have never met before and someone who is far from a giant. His name is Marcel. He is a soft-spoken seashell with pink…

My reviews of Public African Toilet and Nothing Lasts Forever from the 2022 SXSW Film Festival.     PUBLIC AFRICAN TOILET Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah’s stunning directorial debut Public Toilet Africa (Amansa tiafi) is a crime film set in Ghana but is a crime film we rarely see nowadays. A mesmerizing, vibe-heavy, slow-burning film that is just as much about the crime at hand as it is about the place it is set and the people who live in it….

    Top Gun: Maverick is one of those rare sequels that surpasses its predecessor in every way imaginable. That isn’t a slight on Tony Scott’s 1986 high-flying bro-down that has since become a seminal piece of 80s cinema, it’s just that everything in Top Gun: Maverick is taken to new levels. The action is more dynamic and intense, the performances are better, the filmmaking is tighter, the themes are stronger, and the emotions are…

  There are a lot of arguments out there that Marvel and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a machine just churning out movies. That their movies are just a product of an assembly line and that they all look and feel the same. There are movies in this 28-movie, four-show cinematic universe that fit this, but it isn’t the case for all of them. My favorite movies in the MCU are the movies that have…

  The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, or Massive Talent as the advertisements now call it, and what I will be calling it throughout this review because The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is an obnoxiously long title, is a movie that wants to be a love letter to Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage. The Oscar-winning actor was at one time of the biggest movie stars in the world, starring in blockbuster box office hits and…

  The Northman is director Robert Egger’s version of Hamlet. The classic Shakesperian tale of a son getting revenge on his uncle who killed his father years earlier. We’ve seen this story numerous times, whether it was a direct adaptation of the Shakespeare play or with animated lions. But with Eggers behind the camera, The Northman is a thrilling experience and solidifies Eggers as one of the premier visual artists working today. The Northman starts…