Review: “Expend4bles”

Generally poorly executed in story, dialogue, and action, the one pure pleasure the Expendables series had to offer was the joy of watching aging 80s action legends like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis appearing together on screen, quoting their iconic lines back-and-forth to one another in bouts of fan service banter […]

TIFF Review: “Seagrass”

The long toots of the ferry horn have a lilting, almost musical sound, one that emphasizes the playful mood of the two little girls running around the boat deck. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The calm blue water seems to stretch into infinity. The girls pester their dad for a dollar for some […]

Home Video Review: The Complete Story of Film

“A lie to tell the truth.” That’s one way that filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins describes the nature of filmmaking in the narration that kicks off the first episode of his epic 15 part, 915 minute long documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. He’s applying that statement to the Normandy Beach sequence from Steven […]

Review: “We Kill for Love”

A man walks into a cluttered room, settles in, and slowly begins to unpack its contents: dusty pulp novels, VHS tapes of long-forgotten films with titles like Illicit Dreams, Secret Games, and Lipstick Camera that flicker to life in all their low-res glory on a tiny TV set. A narrator (Anthony Penta) identifies this man […]

Review: “Blue Beetle”

A bright young man unexpectedly binds with a mutant insect that grants him superhuman abilities and makes him a target of some bad people who would rather weaponize his powers. That sounds like I’m recounting the origins of the seemingly never-ending series of Spider-man movies, but it’s actually the premise of Blue Beetle, the newest […]

Review: “Scrapper”

“It takes a village to raise a child.” This sentence that appears across a black screen disappears within an instant, scratched out by yellow, crayon-like markings, a new sentence scrawled beneath it in clumsy handwriting: “I can raise myself thanks.” This playful intro kicks both the style and tone of Scrapper into motion. Writer and […]

Review: “Haunted Mansion” (2023)

The time: October 2013. The place: Anaheim, California. The people: my roommates and friends who were, like me at the time, Disneyland cast members, whose appointed backstage tour of one of the theme park’s most storied attractions, the Haunted Mansion, was delayed due to a necessitated clean-up of a loved one’s ashes a family thought […]

Review: “Brother”

“Think on every step before you take it. Put it to memory, remember that the whole way up. And if you can’t use your memory right, you lose.” Francis (Aaron Pierre) utters those words to his younger brother Michael (Lamar Johnson) as they stand staring up at a transmission tower in their Scarborough, Toronto neighborhood. […]

Review: “Barbie”

Everything is perfect in Barbieland. Barbie wakes up in the pink plastic confection that is her dream house, greets her friends, showers, and selects a stylish ensemble from her expansive wardrobe. She eats breakfast (a perfectly toasted waffle washed down with a glass of milk) before she goes about her day, which includes attending political […]

Review: “Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One”

Tom Cruise is the 21st century’s Buster Keaton. That Cruise is one of the last true movie stars is certain: his name— and his outspoken devotion to cinema— alone drives audiences to movie theaters in droves, despite his often unsavory personal life that typically draws more fascination than ridicule. That first statement might provoke more […]