Shithouse (Review)

Shithouse is all about distilling the awkwardness of The College Experience. The strange conflation of formative years, relentless opportunities to make mistakes, and vague promises of a limitless future. It’s anchored by an unusually tender lead performance and a handful of genuinely affecting moments. In Cooper Raiff’s directorial debut, he gives us real reason to watch his next move.

Call Me By Your Name (Review)

Few present-day movies are as self-indulgent as Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Set in a beautifully nostalgic 1980s Italy, this film feels extracted from another era. Based on the novel by André Aciman, it is an exploration in anguished love. A torture of the soul. It is at once beautiful and almost haunting, anchored by two of the greatest lead performances in recent memory, no qualifiers needed.

Sound of Metal (Review)

Sound of Metal announces the arrival of Riz Ahmed as a leading man. Wide-eyed and slightly manic, he plays the well-treaded role of an addict who has their life torn apart unforeseen. But this film is brilliant in its bareness. It simply lets the viewer watch Ahmed hit those familiar story beats. The result will leave a raw mark on you.

Tenet (Review)

Watching Tenet is like playing a game of chess. Except you’re playing it in reverse. And halfway through you’re told it’s not chess. And someone starts explaining completely different rules, that you’ve never heard of, but explains them in a way that they seem to think is obvious and you’re too embarrassed to do anything but nod. You will not understand Tenet the first time you see it. There is simply too much to process in such little time. At one stage the protagonist is told to try not to think about the contorted time-travel concepts being thrown at him. That’s a bit harder for the audience; when almost the entire movie feels like a vomit of exposition about what is going on and why.

Dark Waters (Review)

Dark Waters, a movie based on the true story of a lawyer who successfully sued an American icon, follows admirably in the footsteps of countless other ‘legal conspiracy’ films – those films where a lone, seemingly misunderstood man sees and knows something others don’t and develops a maniacal need to get to the bottom of it. This film hits most of those satisfying beats and has its own brooding atmosphere to boot, and while it isn’t perhaps a classic in this genre, it is a mostly enthralling tale of persistence in the face of corporate greed.

El Camino (Review)

An impossible follow-up; El Camino precedes perhaps the greatest television series of all time. The slow-simmering world of Breaking Bad never really seemed like it would slot well into a 2-hour movie format, and El Camino proves that theory somewhat true. But it also carries all of the best features of that series – beautiful scene structure, lived-in characters and a desperate, beloved protagonist searching for something, and running from everything.

Ad Astra (Review)

In the pantheon of science-fiction movies, where will Ad Astra stand? That’s a difficult question to answer. Despite boasting Brad Pitt as the lead, this film hasn’t been billed as a sci-fi blockbuster and hasn’t really tried. It feels destined to be swept underneath a sea of upcoming mega-films, not least of which Gemini Man. That would be a shame, because this Apocalypse Now-in-space saga is a thoughtful piece on how we shape our own legacy, and is oddly appropriate at a time when our planet truly feels in transition.

Category: Film