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…
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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…
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The 2022 Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week and, as I’ve written many times, this festival is very near and dear to my heart. I started attending the Sundance Film Festival back in 2011 as a volunteer for the festival and over the last couple of years have had the honor of covering the festival as a member of the press. This is a film festival I truly love. I love the focus on…
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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…
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It’s that time. Time to look at the best movies of 2021. Crazy that the year is officially over, but here we are. 2021 as a whole was an interesting one, but as a movie year, I thought it was rather great. Though the COVID-19 pandemic still lingered around the entire year, we saw movie theaters open back up and audiences head back to the cineplex. Film festivals had an interesting year, with some being…
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Continuing my look at the best movies of 2021, here are my picks for the best performances in 2021. Every year this is the toughest list to make and every year I feel bad about leaving some performances off. Like previous years, I have broken the performances down by category, much like the Oscars, with Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. For each category, I will list the “nominees” and…
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Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2021, I am now going to look at some of my favorite movie scenes and moments from the movies of 2021. Whether it was a masterclass scene of acting, an exhilarating action scene, or a moment of pure entertainment, these were all scenes from 2021 movies that I loved. There were a ton of movie scenes that I loved in 2021, but this group of movie…
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Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2021, I am now going to look at the best technical achievements of 2021. I will be looking at the best screenplays of the years, the best camera and set work, the best music, and other technical categories. Like Best of the Genres, each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short reasoning as…
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Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2021, I am now going to look at the best movies from each genre. I will be looking at the best foreign-language film, best comedy, and best action movie, along with other genres. Each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short reasoning as to why I picked it the best. Here are my…
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Comic book movies dominate the cinematic landscape today. It feels like every year more franchises and comic book characters are being brought to the big screen. Though 2020 was a very strange cinematic year, we still got a handful of comic book movies. Pandemic or not, comic book movies are here to stay. 2021 offered up eight comic book movies, which is close to the same number we got in 2019 and 2018 (we had…
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