Movie Reviews

Ari Aster, the current darling of highbrow horror, has created an audacious and inherently polarizing tragicomic odyssey about the relationship between Jewish men and their mothers. Anxiety is a constant theme in “Beau Is Afraid.” As the title suggests, Joaquin Phoenix’s eponymous Beau is afraid of everyone and everything around him. And why wouldn’t he be? The version of New York he lives in is a chaotic hellscape ridden with roaming gangs, knife- wielding maniacs and venomous spiders. Unfortunately, Beau’s mother unexpectedly dies and he sets off on a perilous journey to her memorial.  Having made a name for himself …

Words by Harry Moore  “Air” Hollywood’s one-time golden boys Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have collaborated once again to give us what is arguably the best film of the year so far. Following the consecutive releases in his directorial career of “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town” and “Argo,” which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2013, Affleck was hailed as one of the most exciting and accomplished filmmakers of his generation. Unfortunately, his career behind the camera stalled after agreeing to play Batman for Zack Snyder, and it has been almost a decade since his last, not-as-well received …

Words by Harry Moore   Sequels have driven Hollywood for decades now and when it came to new entrants to long running film series, it was March Madness at the movie theater. While there may be not much in common in the recent releases of a rebooted slasher franchise, the spinoff of a decades old boxing series and the latest character fronted by an action legend, each film delivered on meeting the expectations from what has come before while striving to tread new ground for their ongoing stories. For latter sequels in long running series, it rarely gets much better …

Movie Reviews  Words by Harry Moore Black Panther: Wakanda Forever          Marvel’s sequel to its 2018 sensation Black Panther is tasked with the burden of continuing the story of the people of Wakanda, while also paying tribute to the original film’s star Chadwick Boseman who passed away in 2020. For director Ryan Coogler, it is a delicate undertaking that he manages to handle with grace – for the most part. Coogler doesn’t shy away from the real, palpable loss that looms over the film, allowing for grief to be a driving theme of the picture. When it comes to creating …

Words by Harry Moore   <Black Adam> Warner Bros. and DC comics take another swing at its interconnected universe of superhero movies with this Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson-fronted bore about a god-like antihero. The film begins in the ancient country of Kahndaq, where a tyrannical king has enslaved much of the population and rules with an iron fist. When a young slave boy attempts to stage a revolution, he is given mythical powers by the Council of Wizards and becomes the heroic champion of Kahndaq, known as Black Adam, who kills the king before going into an eons-long slumber. But …

Words by Harry Moore    Halloween Ends David Gordon Green directs the closing chapter in his Halloween trilogy which promises to be the final clash between the mask wearing killer, Michael Myers and Jamie Lee Curtis’ original final girl Laurie Strode. Halloween Ends takes place four years after the events of the previous two films, 2018’s Halloween and last year’s Halloween Kills, with the constantly terrorised town of Haddonfield grappling with the communal trauma that Michael has inflicted upon them. That trauma manifests in the townsfolk looking for a new bogeyman as Michael has disappeared into the shadows since his …

  Best new movie Smile When a psychiatric doctor watches as her patient commit a violent and disturbing suicide in front of her, she begins to experience host of horrifying and increasingly hostile hallucinations which lead her to believe that she is being haunted by a supernatural presence. Filmmaker Parker Finn makes his feature length debut with Smile, an effective horror film that reveals an emerging director who possesses a strong sense for creating unsettling imagery, most notably the recurrent eponymous smile that reveals that the entity is present. Finn should also be commended for delivering well-worn horror tropes in …

Best of the Silver Screen and the Small Screen   Best New Movie: Confess, Fletch The latest adaptation of Gregory McDonald’s Fletch novel series does an admirable job of bringing the comedic detective series to modern audiences, many years after Chevy Chase’s iteration of the character. Jon Hamm stars as the investigative reporter, Irwin M. “Fletch” Fletcher, hot on the case of searching for his wealthy fiancé’s (Lorenza Izzo) stolen collection of priceless paintings—until he stumbles into a murder investigation where he gets labeled the presumptive prime suspect. Greg Mottola, the director behind Superbad and Adventureland, helms the picture keeping …

Bullet Train A group of disparate and colorful assassins are placed on a speeding bullet train traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto in order to complete a job from a mysterious benefactor. Brad Pitt stars as the perennially unlucky retired hitman, Ladybug, in this entertaining but overly convoluted action comedy from director David Leitch, one of the minds behind the John Wick series and several other major action films from the past decade. The film’s plot is filled with double crosses and revelations that makes it nearly impossible to describe the events in an efficient manner, but the film is saved …

Nope Jordan Peele has enjoyed one of the most unexpected second acts in the history of Hollywood; going from being a cult hero in the sketch comedy scene to being arguably the most prominent mainstream auteur to emerge in American cinema in the last 20 years, with Peele presenting himself as a kind of 21st century Rod Serling, telling modern-day parables about our culture through a lens of horror and science fiction. With his latest film, Nope, Peele looks to the skies to create thrills that are on the biggest scale he has done yet as an adaptive alien being …