August has the reputation of being a slow month for theatrical movies. Occasionally you’ll get a Guardians of the Galaxy or an awards player like The Help or Straight Outta Compton, but August usually acts as a cinematic transition month, where the summer movies begin to fade and the fall movies begin to ramp up for festivals and an awards push. With August being a slower month, it is very easy to lose interest…

  Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies starts off like it will be a movie about a party amongst friends during a hurricane. The party is being hosted by David (Pete Davidson) at his parent’s huge mansion. Attending the party is David’s girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), Jordan (Myha’la Herrold), Alice (Rachel Sennott), Greg (Lee Pace), a guy Alice has only known for a few weeks through Tinder who David is intimidated by, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg),…

  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….