Atlantics (2019)

Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, Atlantics (2019; Atlantique) has been released by Netflix to stream. The directorial debut of Mati Diop, the film is set in Dakar, Senegal, and observes the coastal terrain where a looming hotel is under construction in the distance. Initially the style of the film is docu-drama, […]

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

For me, Dolemite Is My Name (2019) was a good time. I was predisposed to like it because of the writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. They wrote one of my favourite movies, Ed Wood, and the easy comparison was that this was a Blaxploitation version of that biopic. There’s a similar structure with supporting […]

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 […]

High Flying Bird (2019)

Director Steven Soderbergh’s film for Netflix, High Flying Bird (2019), is a collaboration between Soderbergh, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (writer of Moonlight) and actor Andre Holland (also of Moonlight and The Knick) who plays an agent trying to make some moves during an NBA lockout where the salaries of young black players are drying up […]

1922 (2017)

Zak Hilditch’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella 1922 (2017) has hit Netflix. While there are references to classic Edgar Allan Poe horror elements of rats and apparitions, it’s more about the truer horror of the evil that men do, how one’s own vanities poison everything around them. One of Thomas Jane’s best performances (not […]