Grief is universal. Every single one of us has suffered the loss of a loved one — or will suffer it in the future. Despite its pervasiveness, grief is a complex emotion, one that’s not always easy to explain coherently. French philosopher and author Albert Camus began his 1976 essay, Losing a Loved One, “Losing a loved one, uncertainty about what we are, these are deprivations that give rise to our worst suffering.” It is this experience of loss and suffering that drives the narrative in writer/director Daniel Keeble’s short film, Alleviate (2023), an ARK Pictures production. However, it is th ..read more

I’m not sure how I came across the true love affair between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu, but it was a story so bizarre that I had to learn more. When I discovered that David Cronenberg had made a film adaptation of the story, M. Butterfly, I knew I had to see it. For the uninitiated, Boursicot was a French diplomat who fell in love with a Chinese opera singer, Shi Pei Pu, and believed that the opera singer was genetically female, when in fact Shi was a male who merely portrayed women on stage and used Boursicot to feed information to the Chinese govern ..read more

With the sheer volume of films coming out through streaming platforms, directors need a good hook to get anyone to notice them. In the case of No One Will Save You (2023), the hook is verbal minimalism. I wasn’t sitting there counting, but if I remember correctly, there were only 5 words of spoken dialogue in the entire film. Now, you might assume that this made the viewing experience a snooze fest. On the contrary, the film keeps a breakneck pace for nearly all of its 93-minute runtime. But as exciting as it may be, Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You doesn’t take its dialogue-free script i ..read more

Silent as the Grave (2023), a film by Brad Podowski and Dan Gremley, offers a completely fresh take on a genre that has largely been played out in recent years. Neo-noir is, by default, a revamping of existing styles and genre tropes, yet this film does an excellent job of subverting expectations. Even if you set aside the fact that Silent as the Grave is a great technical achievement, especially as a low-budget indie project, it also does something that most genre films fail to do — it draws you into a totally unrelated experience. On the surface, the film is a tense, neo-noir, whodunit thril ..read more

Presenting filial solidarity (or lack thereof) in the face of obstacles is a popular theme in dramas, though it feels like a go-to component of Japanese cinema. Isao Takahata’s harrowing animated film, Grave of the Fireflies (1988), is perhaps the most notable example; an older brother fights to keep his little sister alive through war and chaos. Another is Spirited Away (2001), in which young Chihiro travels to a strange spirit world after her parents are mysteriously turned into pigs. Yet another is Kurosawa’s Shakespearean epic, Ran (1985), which tells the story of a crumbling clan that suc ..read more

Promotion for Jeanne du Barry (2023) was confusing from the start, as all of the posters and teasers featured the bloated, stoic face of Johnny Depp. As the film’s narration began in French, I wondered why Depp, an American with adequate but not altogether impressive abilities in the art of speaking French, would be cast as King Louis XV. But this is just the tip of the iceberg when questioning the many, many terrible decisions that went into Maïwenn’s tedious, directionless, and historically inaccurate recounting of the life of King Louis’ scandalous mistress, Madame du Barry.  It’s stra ..read more

I wish I could outdo the title of this review, but it really does summarize everything you need to know about Neil Burger’s Voyagers (2021). It takes a story that was already told by William Golding more than half a century ago and puts it…in space. Naturally, there are things to be appreciated about the film beyond its derivative plot. There are a few entertaining moments, I guess. The spaceship looks like what you might expect a spaceship to look like in the year 2063. The special effects aren’t bad enough to draw viewers out of the film. And, perhaps most importantly, it gives Lily-Rose Dep ..read more

It’s no small feat to make a short film look good. Most young filmmakers simply don’t have the budget or the expertise to make the mechanics of cinematography, lighting, and staging work together to create something really beautiful to look at. This is part of the reason I was so taken aback when I began watching Justin Solaiman and Hudson King’s surrealist fantasy short, The Coronating (2023). But once I got past the initial shock of such a visually-captivating short film, I could enjoy a 20-minute story that managed to pack a lot of big ideas into a small, digestible package.  As a piec ..read more

I hope that other film viewers stand in solidarity against films with misleading titles. If you’re like me, and you went into The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) expecting to see the Pope getting exorcised, I share your disappointment. It’s not that the idea of the Pope being exorcised of a demon sounded all that interesting or entertaining, but the title really writes a check that the film can’t cash.  And I truly believe this was an intentional marketing ploy. Calling it The Pope’s Exorcist leaves just enough room for interpretation to encourage people to come out and see what’s actually going o ..read more

In the past, I’ve had a lot to say about the zombie comedy genre. I’m not the only one, either. Zombie films make great targets for political and social readings, and zombie comedies have, by and large, been made in a postmodern and perhaps post-postmodern world, where anything and everything is meta-fiction and aware of its own inspirations. These films poke fun at zombies while simultaneously using the cinematic and narrative elements that define them. Shaun of the Dead is among the best of these films, and since it came out nearly two decades ago, many lesser films have tried and failed to ..read more