Movie Reviews

    Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is not a typical biopic of Princess Diana. This is not a movie that starts at Diana’s childhood and ends at her death, showing the highs and lows of her life. This film doesn’t care about that. The opening title card of the film reads “A fable from a true story” letting us know that this isn’t a film based on a true event but isn’t fully made up either….

      There is no director like Wes Anderson. Nobody has his visual style, his tone, or his dialog. Nobody frames a shot like Anderson does or gets the performances from his actors as Anderson does. Watching an Anderson movie is watching something wholly unique from any other movie that is currently being made, like watching a film from Quentin Tarantino or a film from Pedro Almodovar. Seeing a Wes Anderson movie once is…

      Ridley Scott’s latest film, The Last Duel, takes the Rashomon approach in telling its story. It is a movie that revolves around one event but from three different perspectives. The event at hand is the rape of Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer) at the hands of Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), a friend of Marguerite’s husband, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), who challenges Jacques to a duel once he finds out what…

    “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” So utters Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III. Michael says this line after he finds out that he has been double-crossed and is forced back into the mafia lifestyle he has tried to leave after a lifetime of crime that has filled him with regret. This quote kept running through my head while I was…

    A movie is best experienced knowing as little as possible about the movie you are about to see. Knowing the cast and knowing the director is good to know, as it could give you an idea of the kind of tone the movie will have. Knowing the genre is also good as if you could be looking for a comedy and end up seeing a horror movie. But beyond that, the less you…

    Though advertised as the origin story of the legendary Spider-Man villain, 2018’s Venom was more of a buddy comedy rather than a superhero or supervillain origin story. The film focused on Eddie Brock, played by Tom Hardy, a reporter who becomes bonded with an alien symbiote that has crash landed on Earth named Venom. In typical superhero origin stories, the movie would have been about Eddie learning how to use the symbiote as…

Here are my reviews for the horror film You Are Not My Mother and the Finnish drama Compartment No. 6 from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.     YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER You Are Not My Mother begins with an older woman setting a baby on fire in some sort of ritualistic act. If that isn’t a way to grab the viewer’s attention right away. Who is this woman? Why is she doing this? We find out…

Here are my reviews for Hold Your Fire and Lakewood from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.     HOLD YOUR FIRE In 1973, four Black men were looking to rob guns from John & Al’s Sporting Goods in Brooklyn, New York. What transpired was one of the most infamous hostage situations in American history and would later be considered the birthplace of hostage negotiation. Stefan Forbes’ enthralling documentary Hold Your Fire tells the story of what occurred during…

My reviews of Dashcam and Julia from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.     DASHCAM Dashcam is a horror movie that made me miss the full theatrical experience. Though it doesn’t break new ground in the found-footage genre, Dashcam is an insane, bloody, twisted film that is full of jump scares that would have the audience howling. Dashcam takes place all through the live stream of Annie (Annie Hardy), a MAGA-hat rocking vlogger whose obnoxious rants and tirades…

      The Protégé stars Maggie Q stars as Anna, a highly-skilled contract killer who was raised and trained by Moody (Samuel L. Jackson) after he found her in Vietnam as a child. When Moody is unexpectedly murdered, Anna vows to get revenge on the people who killed the man who taught her everything. As she digs deeper into potential suspects, she becomes entangled with Rembrandt (Michael Keaton), an enigmatic killer who might have…