Irish teen Char (Hazel Doupe) lives in a North Dublin housing estate with her Grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie), her uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) and, most importantly, her clearly troubled mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), who appears to be in the throes of some sort of…
The Card Counter takes a similar shape to many of Schrader’s Lonely Man films, but this latest can’t quite overcome the template and thrive on its own merits. Oscar Isaac is William Tell (a self-applied pseudonym), former soldier, and ex-con. He patrols the country…
Kate isn’t doing anything new from an action-narrative perspective, but slick choreography and gleeful violence helps this girlboss brutality go down smoothly. Kate, a female assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) discovers she’s been poisoned and has less than 24 hours to prowl the neon-lit streets…
In Barbarian Invasion, retired actress Moon Lee (Tan Chui Mui, who also directs), not to be confused with actual retired martial arts actress Moon Lee, is now a divorced single mother looking to do a bit of personal reclamation and regain her former sense…
The end of the Edo period in Japan in 1867 was basically the end of the samurai era, and has, accordingly, been the inspiration for countless films. The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai focuses in particular on events during the Boshin War that…
Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman, freely adapted from a Clive Barker short story, is the tale of a white academic who inadvertently summons a murderous ghost, textually a manifestation of racial violence against Black men, but simultaneously a commentary on the fear of their…
Snakehead starts with a rather deceptively benign premise that promises a much more generic film than is actually on offer. A Chinese immigrant gets mixed up with human trafficking while attempting to make a better life for herself and her family, blah blah. What…
Blockbuster Beat by Matt Lynch Film
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings | Destin Daniel Cretton
Shang-Chi is perfunctory origin story work boasting little characterization and an overestimation of its representational currency. The Marvel Cinematic Universe marches on undaunted with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which, despite its representational bona-fides, could not be a more purely generic exercise…
Reminiscence is silly, arch, and derivative, an objective failure that nonetheless manages to entertain even as it induces eye rolls. It’s kind of fashionable these days to point out how movies (especially genre movies) not based on preexisting IP or part of a franchise are…
The Protégé is sometimes tonally ungainly, but its no-frills, old-school action filmmaking are a breath of fresh air in an increasingly CGI-saturated genre. When she’s rescued as a child from her native Vietnam by the hit-man Moody (Samuel L. Jackson), and then subsequently trained in…
