REVIEW: Siberia [2018]

So sorry for the bird. The question is asked with a wry grin, but Katya (Ana Ularu) isn’t wrong to joke that the mysterious, handsome American who walked into her small Siberian town’s café is a spy. Any other film besides Matthew Ross‘ Siberia would have made Lucas Hill (Keanu Reeves) exactly that—especially now with the actor so successfully donning a suit to portray the dog-loving assassin John Wick. But that’s not who Hill is no matter how much the methodically measured beats of Scott B. Smith‘s script would have…

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TFF18 REVIEW: All These Small Moments [2018]

And then, somehow over time, I stopped smiling. It’s called All These Small Moments for a reason—one that becomes clear with a final, out-of-nowhere moment of voiceover narration in case you hadn’t figured it out yourself by acknowledging how formative, complex, and emotionally draining each one of writer/director Melissa B. Miller-Costanzo‘s dense scenes prove. Whether her current focal point is young Howie Sheffield (Brendan Meyer), one of the other teenagers at her disposal, the older object of his affection (Jemima Kirke‘s Odessa), or his on-the-brink-of-divorce parents (Molly Ringwald‘s Carla and…

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REVIEW: The Breakfast Club [1985]

“You’ll get the horns” It may not be the funniest film that John Hughes crafted, but The Breakfast Club is the one that I think made the biggest impression on me. Revisiting it—so many years after its creation, as well as many since I last sat down to watch its entirety—gave me an interesting experience. How the three friends with me had never seen it is beyond me, but that fact caused something I never expected. Each moment of weight, those moments when the kids explain the pressures of each…

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