I’ve been attending the Sundance Film Festival for over ten years now and one of the reasons that keep me coming back to this film festival is watching the movies of emerging filmmakers and new filmmakers. I love seeing filmmakers who have been on my radar come into their own in terms of style and voice and I love seeing a new vision from a director who had never made a feature film…

    Aubrey Plaza gives the best performances of her career in Emily the Criminal, a slick, tough L.A. crime movie with shades of a Michael Mann movie. Plaza plays Emily, a woman living in Los Angeles strapped with a mountain of student debt. Unable to break into the job market because of her slight criminal record, Emily tries to make money working for a catering company where she is miserable. In a feat of…

    Akira Kurosawa’s effect on cinema is impossible to measure. Somebody could say that he was the greatest director to ever get behind the camera and it would be hard to argue with them. From his filmmaking technique to his influence on numerous genres, to the countless remakes of his films, Kurosawa’s influence looms strong even in today’s cinema and doesn’t look like it is going to stop anytime soon. The latest Kurosawa influence…

    Modern dating seems rough. With the rise in dating apps over the last few years, dating has been changed forever. With the simple swipe of a finger, you could be “matched” with a random person and choose to meet them for a date. But who really is this person? All you’ve gathered is a brief description, a picture, and maybe a small conversation about the date, but you’ve never spoken or seen this…

    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…