Film Reviews
The subheading on one of the posters for My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 claims that “People change. Greeks don’t.” Yet, what made the original film so dynamic and engaging is exactly that:
Many of you have seen the classic, fairy tale love stories in films. There is a princess who lives with a curse that was cast on her by an evil witch. The only way she can be free from this curse is by finding true love.
Aside from sports bloopers, a few Hemingway novels and stock footage I don’t know much about bullfighting. Common sense dictates that provoking a bull to charge you to stab it going to be dangerous, and there’s bound to be a daredevil mentality to being a matador. With that rudimentary knowledge, it felt like Gored would provide some insight into bullfighting, the cultural identity of matadors, and the passion of its subject.
There are few novels considered “unfilmable” that haven’t been translated to the big screen. High-Rise, director Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G Ballard’s cult 1975 sci-fi novel, is the rare movie adaptation that doesn’t feel like it has been adapted, so peculiar and distinctive to the director is the increasing foregoing of narrative in favour of societally depraved surrealism.
The inner urge for survival is the most primitive of all impulses. For the longest time, sex was believed to be the driving force that pushes people, unconsciously and fully-cognizant, towards certain results in life. But after WWII especially, psychologists and holocaust survivors began to revisit the idea, and psychoanalysts took the obvious cue from Darwin:
With technology rapidly advancing as the solution to even the most basic human tasks, director Ariel Martin’s sci-fi short The iMom takes “what if” to a chillingly stark place. Modern Parenting Set in a not-too-distant future, robotics has evolved to the point of public consumption. Realistic in both appearance and reaction, the affordable iMom (Matilda Brown) is the latest innovation in aiding new parents with the daunting task of child rearing.
Searching For Hell is an international exploration of infernal places around the world, with a loose but entertaining concept of what hell is. In five segments, the audience visits the site of the deepest recorded excavation into the earth in Serbia, the tourist town of Hell, Michigan, a house designed to reconstruct the Buddhist conception of hell according to tenth-century writer Ojoyoshu, the toxic sulphur mines of Indonesia, and the chaotic capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each vignette has its own style, varying from the carnivalesque to the dialectic to the observational, and the decision to release the documentary online through the Virtual Reality Cinema (VRC) app Cineveo can only add to its dreamlike, haunting quality.
The opening of Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha is intense. A few seconds in, we are staring eye to eye with Krisha, the titular character (Krisha Fairchild). She is looking at us, and we are looking right back.
Zootopia is the cinematic equivalent of a Dr. Seuss novel; though mostly made for kids, it resonates with deeper and socially relevant themes. The political landscape from which this film was born is apparent almost from the start, and though at times less than subtle with its agenda, it still manages to be an incredibly witty, emotional and entertaining movie experience.
Michael Thelin’s directorial feature debut is perhaps most effective in its earliest stages. When we are first introduced to a sleepy suburban neighbourhood, it is already clear that something is amiss. When we witness the kidnapping of a young woman on her way to babysit, we begin to get some idea of what is in store.
Ryan and Amy are sitting nervously on a sofa in a nondescript room. A doctor addresses them, “Mr and Mrs Green, I’m sorry, it’s not good news”. The doctor continues to tell them that their one year old son’s chemotherapy has not worked.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is its unwillingness to pander to its audience. Though people may have been expecting a semi-typical supernatural horror film (complete with jumpscares and excessive gore), what they receive instead is something much more disturbing in its implications. Set in Puritan era New England, The Witch is an atmospherically driven, religion-coated film that is, at times, both beautiful and terrifying.
Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies, I could watch it a hundred times without getting bored. I have watched it in different phases of my life, through various perspectives. Every time I watch it, I learn a new detail that I had not noticed the before.
As a director, Atom Egoyan has increasingly shifted away from the emotionally raw content of his beloved 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter in favour of seedier, pulpier material that film suggested he had emotionally matured away from. Egoyan’s love of trash cinema informed his earlier work, but after showcasing his potential to make a drama film divorced of genre pretensions, the fact he is still preoccupied with putting an unwarranted arthouse inflection on such material feels like wasted potential. How to make trash cinema out of human tragedy without being offensive He manages to attract the attention of A-list casts and find his way back into the official selection of the Cannes official selection with most releases, purely on the strength of his earlier work, not out of a desire to honour his current sub-De Palma mindset.
A fatal flaw runs through many conversations about gender issues: they narrowly focus on women. The problem largely stems from comfort, as that is how the battle has been framed for decades.