Review: “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”

It’s difficult to watch, and even enjoy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple without feeling increasingly aware of its, shall we say, apparent lack of need to exist. A direct sequel to last year’s 28 Years Later that forms a bridge to a pending trilogy capper, director Nia DaCosta’s horror thriller pulls together characters from […]

Review: “Dead Man’s Wire”

Dead Man’s Wire is as lean and taut as they come, launching into action with little preamble. And yet, the film opens not with Tony Kiritsis (a live-wire Bill Skarsgård) entering the downtown office of his mortgage broker Richard Hall (Darce Montgomery), who he will very soon be taking hostage, believing that Hall and his […]

Review: “OBEX”

Cocooned from the shrill clicking of the 17-year cicada brood outside by the static buzz of his television sets— three, to be exact, stacked one on top of the other and nestled against a vast wall of VHS tapes— Conor (Albert Birney) lives a life of pleasant seclusion, drawing comfort from the company of his […]

Review: “Marty Supreme”

Marty Mauser isn’t a human being— he’s the vessel for a potent cocktail of relentless ambition and pure ego. Coasting by on the sheer force of his charisma, his arrogance ballooned so big it doesn’t allow space for anyone to refuse him, the competitive table tennis star doesn’t have an actual paying job, doesn’t worry […]

Review: “Avatar: Fire and Ash”

Almost every entry in director James Cameron’s filmography marks a massive technological leap forward for cinema. Terminator 2: Judgement Day contains the first entirely computer-generated character. Titanic— the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release— merges old school epic storytelling and practical effects with computerized visuals to great impact. Avatar broke […]

Review: “The Voice of Hind Rajab”

It’s difficult to rate a film that dramatizes a real life event that is so recent and raw, and the product of a conflict that is still ongoing. It’s also difficult to deny the daring nature and beating heart of The Voice of Hind Rajab, which opens with the following title card: “The film is […]

Review: “Wake Up Dead Man”

It would be so easy to make every entry in the Knives Out series a cookie cutter whodunit, coasting by on the charms of lead Daniel Craig and the increasingly starry revolving door of famous faces who populate the rest of the cast. It’s a credit to series creator, writer and director Rian Johnson, however, […]

Review: “WTO/99”

Astonishing, incendiary, and eerily prescient, Ian Bell’s documentary WTO/99 may depict one single event in American history, but does so in manner that reveals the ripple effects that globalization and anti-environmental, anti-labor practices— far from mainstream, hot button issues at the brink of the new millennium— have had on our current climate, economic, and human […]

Review: “Hamnet”

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet opens with a quote from a 2004 article by Stephen Greenblatt titled “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet”: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” It’s a plain, matter-of-fact statement, not the sort of […]

Review: “Wicked: For Good”

When I reviewed Jon M. Chu’s big-screen adaptation of the first half of the hit Broadway musical Wicked around this same time last year, I was surprised to find that it had some merit— in its performances, and its translation, and its broadening of the source material— given my distaste for both the show and […]