Review: Clemency
Before watching Clemency, director Chinonye Chukwu’s meticulous dismantling of the death penalty in America, it is worth reading President Trump’s infamous 1990s full-page ad in The New York...
Category: Film and movies
Recalibrate the media, reconstruct the system, reimagine the police: pointing the way through movies (and a podcast and a web-series)
With trust in the media, in institutions, in each other at a depressing low, it’s important to know how we got here - and how to flip the script. Which is why I’ve compiled an eclectic...
The Romanians Are Coming!: The nonfiction gems of “Making Waves U.S. Tour of Romanian Cinema”
Hard to believe that it’s only been a little over three decades since the people of Romania decided they’d had enough of their country’s communist strongman and rose up to topple his...
Why this is the time for international films
The barriers of subtitles are insurmountable for some people, but a change of habit in what we see in the cinema may allow us more options to explore. Foreign films still find it difficult to reach...
A profile in parental courage: “D. Wade: Life Unexpected”
As its title suggests, D. Wade: Life Unexpected is an unexpected film. The latest offering from ESPN Films and Imagine Documentaries (an offspring of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine...
Resident Evil 3: a horror of preparations
Resident Evil as a franchise has been an incredible success. Most successful series get a good ten years or so, especially horror franchises. But Resident Evil has been going strong for two and a...
Spoor review: too far from paradise
A provocative crime story with a significant environmental message, the movie Spoor is based on a novel by 2018 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk. A classic crime story centres on...
CATS review: “a bonkers, terrifying, glorious masterpiece”
Last week I went to see Cats, the movie. I fully expected to hate it, having forgotten the wonder the nerdy, musicals-obsessed 13 year old I once was felt years ago in the Bradford Alhambra. In fact,...
10+ pop culture releases from 2019 worth revisiting—or discovering—in 2020
While 2019 was a crappy year for politics and the effects of climate change (among other things), it was an outstanding year for pop culture. If you had trouble navigating the firehose-like release...
’Tis the Season: some docu-series suggestions for holiday binging
With the frantic holiday season in full swing - not to mention a US presidential impeachment, a countdown to Brexit, and the end of liberal democracy as we know it (or so sayeth Twitter) - the final...