review
The Substance
A fun, satirical metaphor on the consequences of dealing with male-dictated beauty standards in media, ageism and self-worth determined by vapid objectification.
Reviews
late night reviews and rants about film and other media
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review
The Boy and The Heron
At times a whimsical adventure, The Boy and the Heron is fundamentally about dealing with grief, trauma and human agency.
review
Past Lives: Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day
Past Lives, doesn't pack any surprises in its storytelling but there's a kind of melancholic poetry to its visual language that I haven't seen since the 'Before' Trilogy. Quite a strong debut for its director Celine Song, but it doesn't come without caveats.
review
Oppenheimer
Navigating a careful line between art-house cinema and one-liner driven Hollywood blockbuster appeal, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer biopic, which contextualizes the Manhattan Project as a mostly early Cold War-era military endeavor tainted by anti-communist paranoia, is highly ambitious, timely, and, in its cinematography, at times nothing short of brilliant.
review
The Smashing Machine
It's by no means Raging Bull or The Wrestler, but Safdie's directorial vision and Belgian composer Sinephro's soundtrack elevates what otherwise could have been another overly dramatized run-of-the-mill biopic.
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Asteroid City
More so than than his previous films, Wes Anderson's newest film, superficially a story-within-a-story focusing on one hand on a ragtag ensemble cast in a retro scifi play, and on the other hand on that play's lead writer and its lead cast, may come over as just a handful of colorful vignettes forming a pastiche of postmodernist cinema.
review
The House on The Slope
Often heart-wrenching and unfortunately timely, The House on The Slope is a limited series that aims higher than the boundaries of the genre, and creates an unforgettable narrative as a result.
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The President's Cake
Bleak, borderline nihilistic even, the backdrop of the film is more interested in the direct failures of the Saddam regime than offering any substantial critique of the American imperialist structure that had driven the region into desolation and was actively bombing it (presented instead as an always present inevitability); in turn making the film particularly palatable to a western audience that can consume it within the comfort of any ideology without being overly challenged.
review
El Sett
Making a biopic of a pan-Arabic legend, whose rich career spanned over 70 years, while navigating both the personal and the rapid political and socioeconomic developments of Egypt, is no easy feat, and the end result is good; it is touching, entertaining, captivating.