It’s really not clear why Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson would want to cash-in her awards clout on a hopelessly muddled slog like Unicorn Store. Filmed ages ago, the film has been sitting on a shelf since at least 2017, only finally being released now, presumably, to capitalize on Captain Marvel’s billion dollar success. Larson must have seen something in the material, at least at some point, as she directed, produced, and starred in the film — but the finished product suggests less…
The directorial debut of Ghanan filmmaker Sam Blitz Bazawule takes a while to get where it’s going; the plot synopsis of the 80-minute film that’s floating around the internet really only describes the last 20 or so minutes. The Burial of Kojo is ostensibly about…
One baffling segment in BNK48: Girls Don’t Cry sees the Thai version of Japanese girl group AKB48’s “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” — one of the most popular J-pop singles released this decade — being regarded as a potential flop by some members of BNK48, the Thai branch of…
The Dirt is a terrible movie. Adapted from Mötley Crüe’s group-authored autobiography of the same name, Jeff Tremaine’s film is This Is Spinal Tap without the self-aware irony, a biopic that stumbles into every cliché that Walk Hard skewered over a decade ago. The actors playing Nikki Sixx…
Released in 1967, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde was the New Hollywood urtext: young, sexy, fast, and violent. It’s impossible to view The Highwaymen as anything but a purposeful riposte to that earlier film — a stodgy, old fashioned, purportedly ‘true story’ of the lawmen that gunned…
Early in the second half of J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Ben Affleck’s character executes a South American cocaine farmer, lying on the ground, just moments after killing several others in a split-second act of self-defense. There’s plenty of violence to go around in the…
The unconventional comedic drama Dear Ex has become a major success story for Taiwanese filmmakers Mag Hsu and Chih-yen Hsu. Nominated in eight categories at the Golden Horse awards, and winning three, this queer-interest tale deals with the fallout from the death of family man Zhengyuan (Spark Chen),…
Dan Gilroy has birthed one of the worst movies of the year, a hapless art world satire that gives way to an inept horror film: Truly, it’s two terrible movies for the price of one. Velvet Buzzsaw introduces us to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Morf Vandewalt,…
It is the proclivity of many a film-watcher to make a director’s body of work conform to a linear narrative — and while it isn’t rare that a filmmaker winks at, and plays with, this supposition, in our postmodern era, it is rare that a filmmaker chooses projects for the specific purpose that…
Through its ongoing effort to inundate viewers with as much content as possible, Netflix presents Revenger, a mostly boring action movie starring Bruce Khan, a stunt man and former Jackie Chan double who hasn’t had an IMDb credit since 2005. Khan plays Kim, a former cop or agent or…