TIFF22 REVIEW: Sidney [2022]

You’re not who you think you are. With Sidney Poitier‘s own voice providing the narrative backbone to Reginald Hudlin‘s documentary Sidney, we get to rediscover just what a wonderful storyteller he was. He speaks about his childhood in the Bahamas, his adolescence in Nassau, and the overnight culture clash of coming to Miami without realizing just what it meant to be a Black man in America with such emotion and drama that we can’t help but hang on his every word. A harrowing experience at the end of a police…

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TIFF22 REVIEW: Chevalier [2023]

Choice comes from within. The Toronto International Film Festival wasn’t kidding when they said they were welcoming director Stephen Williams back after pivoting into prestige television. It’s been twenty-seven years since his theatrical debut Soul Survivor with a laundry list of all your favorite shows in the meantime. It just goes to prove that sometimes it’s all about the right project bringing you back into the fold. And it seems a script by rising star Stefani Robinson (coming from FX shows such as “Atlanta” and “What We Do in the…

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REVIEW: The Legend of Molly Johnson [2022]

Sing it in your sleep. A favorite of Leah Purcell‘s as a child, Henry Lawson’s short story “The Drover’s Wife” was always at the front of her mind upon growing into adulthood as an artist. It only makes sense then that she would take that tale from 1892 and reimagine it as an Australian western able to bring her own ancestral history as a fair-skinned Aboriginal woman into the light. First, she had to give the titular wife a name: Molly Johnson. Next, it was fleshing out a dramatic narrative…

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REVIEW: Elvis [2022]

He was a taste of forbidden fruit. There’s a lot to talk about when dealing with Elvis Presley. Too much for one film to do him justice. That’s why Baz Luhrmann (who writes with Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) decides to tell someone else’s story instead: that of Colonel Tom Parker, the self-proclaimed “Snowman” who discovered the King and helped make him an American icon. Unfortunately, he also probably played the biggest role in killing him thanks to the pills and injections necessary to keep Elvis on-stage and…

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REVIEW: Beba [2022]

This is my part. Writer/director/subject Rebeca Huntt worries aloud about whether her family will ever speak to her again after watching her feature debut Beba. It’s a real concern not only because of how intimate and uncensored this introspective look at her life and ancestry proves, but also because they have a history of shutting themselves off verbally and emotionally from each other. Her brother and father haven’t spoken in over a decade. Her brother isn’t seen or heard from during the film beyond still photographs. The depiction of her…

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REVIEW: Benediction [2022]

The world is full of anomalies. The tragic artist is a well-worn trope and yet historical record continuously demands it be used. War poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden) fits the bill—a man of growing renown who was whisked off to fight the Germans during World War I only to come home marred by the experience and inspired to speak against motives that had steadily grown less virtuous by the day. He was a hero awarded for his bravery and adored by the men who served under him yet one of…

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REVIEW: The Duke [2022]

You’d like this one, love. It’s a wild story of a British “Robin Hood” stealing from the government in 1961 to hopefully (and earnestly) payback taxpayers who better deserved the funds set aside to stop a hostile takeover of ownership of Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) had already gone on-record (and served jailtime) for his efforts to end the BBC license fee being charged poor pensioners who simply wanted a television to connect with the fast-growing world outside their doors. With no one…

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REVIEW:Dear Mr. Brody [2022]

It was a pretty intense ten days. Fifty years is a long time, so you must forgive those who’ve forgotten they wrote to Michael Brody Jr. in the first place. A lot of people did, though. Why wouldn’t they upon hearing how the twenty-one-year-old heir to a margarine fortune was publicly giving it away in a bid for world peace? Brody and his wife Renee‘s faces were plastered on magazine covers, newspapers, and TV thanks to Ed Sullivan. Americans from coast to coast were clamoring to get them on the…

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REVIEW: Against the Ice [2022]

They say there’s truth in every dream. I must say that I was excited coming into Against the Ice. It has a captivating premise centered around an Arctic expedition at the northern end of Greenland circa 1909, is based on the autobiographical account of Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen, and deals with an almost three-year survival opposite extreme weather conditions, isolation, and polar bears. Director Peter Flinth ratcheted up my anticipation even higher during the opening scene, dropping us into the action as Mikkelsen (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who also co-adapted the…

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REVIEW: Bestia [Beast] [2021]

Her name was Íngrid Olderöck, otherwise known as “The Woman with the Dogs.” A Carabineros de Chile officer turned National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent under Augusto Pinochet, she received the nickname due to having trained a German Shepherd to sexually abuse and rape political prisoners of the regime in a middle-class neighborhood home coined the “Sexy Bandage.” She would later desert and fall victim to an assassination attempt led by the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) despite always assuming the hit was orchestrated by the Carabineros itself. She’d survive,…

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REVIEW: The Queen of Basketball [2021]

Long and tall and that’s not all. What better way to hear about Lusia Harris than from the woman herself? Ben Proudfoot‘s documentary short The Queen of Basketball sees the charismatic former three-time national champion and Olympic silver medal-winning player going through her scrapbook of memories following a rise from daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers to the first woman drafted by the NBA. Did she pursue what was most likely a publicity stunt? No. She also doesn’t regret the decision when looking back and seeing who her children have become through…

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