Movie Reviews

  Every year around this time, we tend to get movies that feel geared toward the Oscars and awards season. Prestige pictures featuring award-winning directors, actors, writers, and crew members telling a story that feels dramatic or important all for the sake of winning awards. While some of these movies see success at the Oscars, many have failed, whether it be a lack of or zero nominations, a failed box office, a low critical reception,…

  Todd Field’s TÁR, the director’s first film since 2006’s Little Children, begins unlike any movie I have seen in 2022 and maybe ever. The credits roll, but they feel like the closing credits. Set to a backdrop with no music, we see the credits of everyone who worked on the film, from the stars to the craft services team. It almost felt like the film was playing backward or someone in the projection booth…

  Daniel Craig returns as the world’s greatest detective Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson’s sequel to his 2019 murder mystery that is even bigger and wilder than the first film. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blanc is struggling. He is bored out of his mind and spends most of his days sitting in a bathtub reading or playing online video games waiting for his next great case….

  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a movie that looks at the importance of a legacy. It looks at the legacy of the characters in the film and how important they are to their nations and the people of their nations. It looks at the legacy of its actors and how significant they are or were to the franchise and to the film community. And it looks at the legacy of the film and its…

In Martin McDonagh’s latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin, Collin Ferrell plays Pádraic, a cow farmer who lives with his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) on Inisherin, a fictional small island off the coast of Ireland. Pádraic is a nice man. A man who goes about his days like clockwork. He works with his cows, delivers milk to the local grocer, and goes and meets his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) at the local pub for…

  There is no denying David O. Russell’s success in the 2010s. Throughout that decade, Russell made four films, The Fighter in 2010, Silver Linings Playbook in 2012, American Hustle in 2013, and Joy in 2015. Each of these films grossed over $100 million at the worldwide box office and garnered tons of awards attention. All four films combined earned 26 Oscar nominations, three of them for Best Picture, five of them for Russell’s directing…

  While watching Runner, I could not believe that this was the feature-length directorial debut of director Marian Mathias. There is such control and visual understanding in every aspect of Runner that you usually don’t see from someone with only one feature film under their belt. While the story didn’t fully work for me, I was in complete awe of everything I was seeing on screen. Runner followers Haas (Hannah Schiller), a soft-spoken 18-year-old living…

  Travis Stevens’ A Wounded Fawn would make a perfect double feature with another 2022 horror movie, Fresh, with the theme of the two films being “don’t go to a house in the woods with a man you just met”. While the two films have a similar creepy setup to them, they are both very different movies. Fresh was a straightforward gross-out cannibal story, A Wounded Fawn is a little more complicated than that. Stevens…

  Alex Heller writes, directs, and stars in The Year Between, a darkly funny comedy about mental illness and the importance of family. Heller plays Clemence, a college student who drops out of school and moves back in with her parents in an Illinois suburb following a newly diagnosed mental illness. While at home, Clemence is constantly clashing with her parents (Steve Buscemi, J. Smith-Cameron) and her two younger siblings (Emily Robinson, Wyatt Oleff), who…

  EO is a modern version of Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au hasard Balthazar, which finds us on a journey with a donkey, named EO, as it explores modern Europe and the people who live in it. It is a gorgeous and moving film that is almost a truly great film. We open the film finding EO at a circus, working in his act in front of a relatively big crowd. He is loved by the…