REVIEW: Tove (2021)
Tove often feels less like a biopic about Tove Jansson’s career and more like a study of the Finnish art world in the 1940s. Eeva Putro’s screenplay is largely concerned with the conflict between the comforts of traditional family values and commercial art and the…
REVIEW: The United States vs Billie Holiday (2021)
The true power of music is its ability to carry a voice and a message beyond the limitations of its time and into the future. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is one such vital example of the kind of lingering and potent stories living on within…
REVIEW: Mank (2020)
Anyone who loves cinema, or who knows somebody who loves cinema, will be all too familiar with Orson Welles classic film Citizen Kane. What is hard to believe in our days of superhero franchises and directors who have to prove themselves for years, is that…
REVIEW: The Twentieth Century (2020)
Oscilloscope Pictures have been responsible for distributing three of the best, most unusual and distinctive films of the year – We Are Little Zombies, Saint Frances and now, The Twentieth Century. To even begin to describe The Twentieth Century is going to feel like my…
REVIEW: Stardust (2020)
Stardust has big predecessors that make it impossible for there not to be some sort of immediate comparison. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019) came out in the last two years and made history, making it difficult to identify which movie someone was talking about…
REVIEW: Small Axe – Mangrove (LFF 2020)
A number of the films that’ve snuck through the bars of the cinematic prison that is 2020 are films that chastise many of the institutional issues that have suffocated the most vulnerable for decades. Recently we saw a damning indictment of the American justice system…
REVIEW: Small Axe – Red, White and Blue (NYFF 2020)
Red, White and Blue is the second true story from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series to play the festival circuit and in some ways, is a counterpoint to the first – Mangrove. While Mangrove is a story of the police’s harassment campaign against a Caribbean restaurant…
REVIEW: One Night in Miami (TIFF 2020)
History is concretely objective and clear: it is defined by what happened, when, where, and how. Yet, there’s something about that latter portion, the how, that doesn’t feel so cemented. Yes, we can point to events that lie on the timeline leading to revolutions, and…
REVIEW: Tesla (2020)
Tesla is sort of like the curse of the monkey’s paw. You say that you want someone to finally make a totally unconventional biopic, and then one finger on the monkey’s paw curls. A common criticism of biopics is that they often come across as…
REVIEW: Summertime (Sundance 2020)
Carlos Lopez Estrada directed one of the best films of 2018, Blindspotting (written by Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal). Estrada had collaborated with Diggs and Casal before this, directing music videos by Diggs’ experimental rap collective clipping. He also filmed BARS – a live musical…
REVIEW: The 40-Year-Old Version (Sundance 2020)
Radha Blank is a New York-based playwright and television writer who had plans for a autobiographical web series, which were derailed with the death of her mother. After some time passed, she realised that film was a better format for the project and that has…
REVIEW: Fighting With My Family (2019)
A hardcore WWE fan for the best part of 20 years, that for all the judgmental remarks directed my way for being so invested in it, has been an exhilarating escape as these technically sound superstars put it all on the line. The giddy no-nonsense…
REVIEW: I, Tonya (2018)
Several forms of media have become an integral component of our lives. Television always seemingly provides negative stories of crime, illnesses, and depressing weather forecasts. Radio may regurgitate what we’ve seen via television, excluding music and sports stations. Motion pictures allow one to escape reality…
