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 Outfit [2022]

You can’t make something good until you know who you’re making it for. The key to a good mystery isn’t tricking the audience as much as it is entertaining them. The more you watch from this genre, the less slips past your perception. The moment the filmmaker fails to maintain their “trick” is therefore the moment he/she loses their viewer because there’s nothing else for us to grasp onto. Director Graham Moore and co-writer Johnathan McClain understand this fact. They know they can lean into the usual double-cross tropes if…

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REVIEW: The Death of Stalin [2017]

I can’t remember who’s alive and who isn’t. The Russians may have taken umbrage with British director Armando Iannucci‘s The Death of Stalin—a tale of backstabbing governmental hilarity—but their successful quest to ban it domestically is a case of “doth protest too much.” The Soviet Union allied with Hitler’s Nazi regime before joining the winning side and Stalin was very much an enemy of my enemy type of compromise. So while some may have glossed over his many atrocities because he once posed for a photograph with Roosevelt and Churchill,…

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REVIEW: The Deep Blue Sea [2011]

“Beware of passion. It always leads to something ugly.” Almost fifty years after its publishing, Terence Rattigan‘s play The Deep Blue Sea has made it back to the big screen in an adaptation by writer/director Terence Davies. In a year with two British stage revivals, it only seems fitting that the original 1955 film starring Vivien Leigh would receive an update as well. Dealing with the contrasting concepts of love and lust, it’s a tale of one woman and her desire for passion inside a world quick to deem it…

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