Movie Reviews

“Lie become truth only if person want to believe it.” Nariyoshi Keisuke Miyagi, The Karate Kid High school sucks. You’re in a different world, away from the safe confines of grade school where everything made sense for all those years. Now, there are sports, clubs, dances, A.P. classes, theater productions, and all other manner of extracurricular […]

Many are the films looking at love at the beginning of two young, upwardly-mobile strangers’ lives. All throughout the years, whether by Howard Hawks or Nancy Meyers or Marc Lawrence, they’re all about the discovery of not only themselves as people, but who they can be as a couple. Much like Meyers’ own Something’s Gotta […]

The first paragraph of my review of Kenneth Branagh’s 2015 live-action Disney reimagining of Cinderella contains this sentence: “This is definitely not a modernized, jaded, snarky take on the Cinderella story; for those of you wanting the full-on fairytale, where the noble are just, the damsel in distress is saved, and all get their just deserts, […]

The best of art makes us uncomfortable, revealing our blind spots and forcing us to look at things differently, as both individuals and as a society. American history is rife with racial injustice, and there is no shortage of evidence that plainly demonstrates that we haven’t risen far above our unsavory past. In 1992, Bernard […]

As we continue to dig out of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s obvious that the cinema world will have something to say about what we’ve gone through and what we’ve become. There have already been more than a few pandemic-based films of varying quality – some shot on Zoom, some shot with traditional methods – but […]

Superficially, CODA is the same kind of “be who you are” coming-of-age story where a kid from the wrong side of the tracks (really, is there a “wrong side of the tracks” these days?) finds a talent that makes them shine, lifting them out of the hell that is high school and bucking their family’s […]