Movie Reviews

    Diana, Princess of Wales was not a major figure in my life. She passed away when I was only nine years old and all I knew about her was that she was a princess and that there was a Beanie Babie devoted to her. Watching the 2021 film Spencer gave me a little more context to her life, though that movie plays with the narrative and truth in different ways that it’s tough…

    The Sundance Film Festival and IMDb have classified Carey Williams’ Emergency as a comedy, which is a bit misleading. There are funny moments in the film, particularly in the first act, but this is an intense, powerful look at the Black experience and their relationships with police and white fear. The genre might be wrong, but Emergency is a great movie. Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins), a straight-A genius on his way to Princeton…

    Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg makes his directorial debut with When You Finish Saving the World, a lackluster mother-son dramedy that features two excellent lead performances. Julianne Moore stars as Evelyn, a woman who runs a shelter for domestic abuse survivors. Her son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is an angsty high schooler who spends most of his days on Hi-Hat, a TikTok-like streaming service where Ziggy sings and plays guitar to his 20,000 followers. Evelyn…

    Scream, the fifth installment in the Scream franchise that probably should have been titled something like 5cream or simply Scream 5 or Scream V, is a testament to Scream as a franchise. Since the first film debuted in 1996, the Scream franchise has stuck to its roots in terms of what it is: murderous whodunits filled with meta-humor about the state of horror films. Whenever a new Scream film comes out, regardless of…

    Nightmare Alley marks director Guillermo del Toro’s first film following his Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water, a beautiful, twisted romance that looked at the love between a mute woman and an amphibian fish person. del Toro netted himself a Best Director Oscar along with Best Picture and the film also went on to win Best Original Score and Best Production Design, along with being nominated for a total of thirteen awards. I’m…

    Following a comedic directorial run of Anchorman, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys, arguably the greatest comedy run by a director this century, director Adam McKay shifted his focus to more dramatic, political fare that has garnered him tons of awards and nominations. With 2015’s The Big Short, McKay went after big banks and the 2008 recession in a film that garnered five Academy Award nominations,…

    The Matrix Resurrections marks our return to the Matrix in nearly two decades. The last time we entered the Matrix, we saw Neo (Keanu Reeves) defeat Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving) and sacrifice his life to reboot the Matrix and save the city of Zion. It appeared that the story of Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, and the journey to save Zion and defeat Mr. Smith had come to a perfect close. Never in my wildest…

      Spider-Man: No Way Home is the cinematic event of the year. Thanks to internet speculation, leaks, and the trailer of the film, we know that Spider-Man (once again played by Tom Holland) is being visited by villains of movies past in Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Dr. Ock (Alfred Molina), and Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church) from Sam Raimi’s original trilogy and Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx) from Marc Webb’s Andrew Garfield-led…

    Watching The Power of the Dog, the latest film from Oscar-winner Jane Campion, I was in complete awe of everything I was seeing. Campion, who hasn’t made a movie since 2009’s Bright Star, comes back from her twelve-year hiatus to make a detailed, layered, chilling western that is not only one of the best films of her career and one of the best films of 2021.  The Power of the Dog takes place…