If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) is director Barry Jenkins’ follow up to the award-winning Moonlight, an adaptation of the James Baldwin novel. Beautiful cinematography by James Laxton and lush score by Nicholas Britell. Lovely performances from KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry. All of it working together to create a […]

Shoplifters (2018)

Shoplifters (2018; Manbiki Kazoku) is the first that I’ve seen of writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s many critically-acclaimed films. It’s about a struggling family that make ends meet by shoplifting and who take in a young girl from an abusive home. Observational, funny and warm, there were moments that just had me tearing up instantly. At first, […]

Little Sister (2016)

Writer-director Zach Clark’s (White Reindeer, Vacation, Modern Love Is Automatic) film Little Sister (2016) is available to stream on Netflix. Small, stylish, empathetic and intriguing, it’s about an ex-goth turned nun (Addison Timlin) returning to her family in North Carolina after her brother (Keith Poulson) returns from the war a scarred shut-in. The sequence where […]

Gemini (2017)

I’ve liked director Aaron Katz ever since a friend loaned me DVDs of his early ‘mumblecore’ films Dance Party USA and Quiet City. With Gemini (2017), Katz still retains intimacy between characters and small stakes stories but has more cinematic, smoother visual style now. Much like an earlier film he did, Cold Weather, Gemini is […]

Bad Timing (1980)

Continuing to catch up on the films of Nicolas Roeg after his recent passing, I settled in to watch Bad Timing (1980), a film that failed financially on release and became very hard to see due to its explicit content. Infamously an executive at Rank Organization that released it, said it was “a sick film […]