Despite The Mermaid proving to be a massive commercial and critical success in China, I hope that this bizarre, hilarious surrealist comedy proves equally potent in the U.S. market, whose status quo for comedy features has proven static as of late.…
Movie Review: ‘Gods of Egypt’
Alex Proyas’ fall from grace is one less publicized than say, M. Night Shyamalan, but it’s no less ostensible than his either. His work spanning from the early ’90s included his celebrated, neo-noir visual masterworks The Crow and Dark City, and…
The Film Canon: Munich (2005)
Munich is a historical epic boasting an identity crisis. It’s an angry, vengeful and violent statement, but it’s also empathetic and vastly despondent. Munich forces itself to relive bad memories of cultural despair and in doing so manages to approach…
Movie Review: ‘Risen’
The popular resurgence of Christian cinema has experienced something of a critical backlash in recent years. The reasoning is rather simple and doesn’t involve religion or belief; it’s simply that most of these films just suck. You don’t have to…
Is Hail, Caesar! Pro or Anti-Hollywood?
One of the defining features of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! are its blatant parodic references to Hollywood or, specifically, to Hollywood in the 1950s. Its glamorous, classic Hollwood aesthetic and throwbacks to 1950s cornball cinema begs a certain…
Movie Review: ‘Theeb’
One of the inevitabilities surrounding the Jordanian film Theeb are its comparisons to David Lean’s formative 1961 epic, Lawrence of Arabia. This is a mostly sound comparison, both films feature Ottoman railways, Bedouin desert guides, a blonde English officer and…
Movie Review: ‘The Lady in the Van’
It’s difficult to imagine Dame Maggie Smith without her grandmotherly charm, almost constantly exuding classiness and intelligence, reminding us that she’s been around the block more than once. The Lady in the Van too reminds us of her twilight years;…
