REVIEW: Cha Cha Real Smooth [2022]

I keep forgetting I’m around children. The critiques are legitimate. Cooper Raiff‘s latest film Cha Cha Real Smooth does feel like it was created by a sophisticated AI with protocols to produce the perfect indie darling for mass appeal, emotional resonance, and potential awards glory. That doesn’t, however, mean it doesn’t succeed at doing all those things in a way that transcends whatever ambitions or intent went into it. Whether the quirky humor, swooning heartache, or endearingly sweet characters, there are more moments that deserve an eyeroll than I can…

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REVIEW: Poser [2022]

I belong here. More than a wallflower, Lennon Gates (Sylvie Mix) is a voyeur. It’s one thing to listen from afar and process what you’ve heard, but another to record it and absorb it as your own. That’s where her affinity for sound has brought her. What started as collecting ambient noise as though she were an aspiring foley artist has currently spilled over into personality, ideas, and opinions. Rather than learn about topics such as fine art, she attends gallery shows to record people’s pretentiously oblique insights so she…

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REVIEW: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande [2022]

So, what is your fantasy? Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) anxiously awaits her guest, fussing about her clothes and drinking champagne to ease her nerves. Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) finishes his coffee, smiling at the baristas as he waves goodbye before heading to the hotel. He knocks at the door. She startles, walking to it before lingering so long at the peep hole that he begins to bend to try and look back. Beyond their obvious age difference, this disparity of emotional and psychological calm is what’s most present when they…

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REVIEW: Crimes of the Future [2022]

Body is reality. Much like how heartbreak proves necessary for love, pain is needed for life. To live anesthetized is to simply exist—unfeeling, unbothered, unmoved. It’s no wonder then that National Organ Registry investigator Wippet (Don McKellar) would chuckle when admitting how performance art has become the new rage. Everyone wants to be that thing that breaks through the monotony. They want to both push themselves to the point of artistic beauty through their numbed bodies and inspire audiences to do the same. Not everyone is equally successful, though. When…

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TRIBECA22 REVIEW: Huesera [2023]

Bleed from the inside. According to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women who Run with the Wolves, the “Bone Woman,” or La Huesera, “collects and preserves that which is in danger of being lost to the world.” A Mexican myth sees her scouring the mountains and riverbeds for the remains of wolves, assembling what she finds to recreate the animal as though an ivory sculpture which will eventually become reanimated and ultimately reborn as a human woman freely laughing towards the horizon. They say she provides a glimpse of the…

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REVIEW: A Raisin in the Sun [1961]

Damn all the eggs in the world. Debuting in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin in the Sun became the first play written by a Black woman to get produced on Broadway. With four Tony nominations, it’s no wonder Hollywood jumped onboard to bring it from the stage to the screen two years later. Hansberry adapted herself with Daniel Petrie hired to take directing duties from Lloyd Richards as almost the entire cast of principal actors stayed put. Besides a sequence of Walter Lee Younger (Sidney Poitier) frustratingly jumping to attention…

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REVIEW: Watcher [2022]

You’re suspiciously quiet. Despite being half said in jest as a means of disarming Julia’s (Maika Monroe) fear, Irina’s (Madalina Anea) words are no less chilling. Her response to the former’s belief that someone is following her is to admit how never learning the truth may prove better than knowing. Better to “live with the uncertainty” than “find yourself bleeding out with ‘I told you so.’ caught on your lips.” That is the unfortunate reality illustrated by writer/director Chloe Okuno‘s feature debut Watcher (adapted from Zack Ford‘s original script and…

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REVIEW: Men [2022]

It’s the tip of the blade. Harper (Jessie Buckley) arrives at the gorgeous country estate owned and rented out by a kindly yet awkward man (Rory Kinnear‘s Geoffrey) in a bid to escape the tragic turmoil surrounding her. Anyone who’s seen the trailer knows said turmoil stems from the death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), his face falling in front of the window that she gazed out from has permanently fixed to her brain. When someone asks whether she’s tormented by this event, she rejects the word. When they…

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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: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner [1967]

You may be in for the greatest shock of your young life. Just because Stanley Kramer‘s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a product of its time doesn’t mean it’s any less relevant fifty years later. It was only four or so years ago that a friend and his wife were looking to sell their home when their real estate agent took a phone call and said how she was touring a “nice interracial couple” as if the descriptor was somehow crucial to an act that she completes multiple times…

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REVIEW: Dinner in America [2022]

You better tame that tone. Born from the decision to combine two sketches written in the aughts that weren’t quite working on their own, filmed in 2018 (stewarded with the help of Danny Leiner, who passed during production), and debuted in 2020 at Sundance, writer/director Adam Rehmeier would be forgiven for just being happy Dinner in America is finally hitting the public. The result is more than the culmination of a lengthy artistic gestation, though, because its content, humor, and heart all merge to deliver a piece with the potential…

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