Alex Garland’s latest, Civil War, is a riveting cinematic event. It has been some time since a filmmaker has captured the climate of America so precisely. Paul Schrader’s powerful 2017 statement, First Reformed, is perhaps the last time and that was 7 years ago. Garland has created a grim and unsettling vision of America’s near future that can be seen as a companion piece to Schrader’s film, as both serve as stern warnings regarding blind faith and the country’s path towards violence.  A terrific Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, an emotionally hardened wartime photojournalist making her way th ..read more

The new Korean thriller, The Wild, is the latest entry into the Asian gangster genre. Over the last decade and a half, the Korean gangster picture has taken its place on the mantle, right beside China and Japan, forming an axis of countries who know how to craft such a film. The gangsters-versus-police movies made in these regions have a superior and unique style, blending brutal violence and powerful human dramas. Korean directors such as Wong-Tae Lee, Lee Jeong-beom, and Na Hong-jin (among others) have been crafting exciting crime pictures that play with the standard cliches found in the ge ..read more

Fallen Fruit is the feature film debut from writer/director Chris Molina. This is a sometimes humorous, sometimes touching, and always convincing story of a young man in flux, as he finds himself at a crossroads much too early in life. Drawing from the director’s own life experiences, Molina’s quite interesting film tells the story of 20-year-old Alex (an excellent Ramiro Batista), a brokenhearted gay man who has returned to Miami after living in New York. It is a bad breakup that brought him back to the Sunshine State where he grew up and one that has thrown him emotionally off course. Leavi ..read more

The Devil once again gets his due with yet another prequel to a classic horror film. Director Arkasha Stevenson is at the helm of The First Omen, the latest Hollywood cash grab hoping to find box office gold through name recognition. As witnessed in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, prequels can sometimes be a good thing. More often than not, prequels are a barrage of bad ideas (Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power, Oz the Great and Powerful, 2011’s The Thing) that desecrate the good name of the films they are referencing. To take ..read more

Dev Patel’s feature length directing debut, Monkey Man, finds its lead character bringing down the walls of vengeance and unleashing his hell in a violent and viscerally commanding revenge picture crafted with an infectious passion. The film’s aesthetic falls somewhere between the late 80s/early 90s action pictures of Jean Claude Van Damme and the modern kinetic style of films such as John Wick (Patel REALLY admires John Wick!) and Monkey Man mostly overcomes its paper-thin story. This is a film that gets by on Dev Patel’s unshakable drive as a filmmaker, as the journey from script to sc ..read more

The rhythms of life abound in director/writer/star Rudy Mancuso’s debut feature film, Música, a charming little piece about finding love and searching for one’s role in the play of life. In this fantastically imaginative piece, Mancuso stars, directs, co-writes (with Danny Lagana), choreographs, and composes the score. In his real life, the director suffers from a neurological condition called “synesthesia” that causes his mind to create rhythms with normal everyday sounds. The director uses this to great effect, as experiencing the constant musicality through the main character gives Músic ..read more

“Creepy Crawlies, creeping round my creepy house.” These lyrics from the Horror Rock group Scary Bitches perfectly capture the unnerving chills found in writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting, a thrilling creature feature about a young girl, her family, and the man-eating spider that terrorizes them all. In the tradition of Frank Marshall’s 1990 classic Arachnophobia, Roache-Turner has crafted a fun and creative horror thrill-ride that will make audiences’ skin crawl in the most entertaining of ways. As the tagline warns, “Your biggest fear just got bigger.” and are they ever right! 12 ye ..read more

I have long immersed myself in Japanese cinema. Growing up with a father who introduced me to Eastern movies at a young age, by the time I was a teenager, Japanese (and Chinese) films became my favorites, continuing to this day. The Asian filmmaking style has a richness and patience that American films could rarely achieve. Even their action films were something special with many of them existing as artfully directed works to be studied; the Japanese samurai pictures being the strongest examples. The samurai were actual historical figures whose tales lend themselves to myth. The bushido (the ..read more

Godzilla. King Kong. Together again. What else do you need? With the release of the original King Kong in 1933 and Godzilla in 1954, the two movie titans have been thrilling audiences for over 90 years. Now comes Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the fifth film in the latest incarnations of the beloved characters that began with 2014’s Godzilla from director Gareth Edwards. So far, the Legendary Pictures’ saga (featuring characters owned by Toho Co. Ltd. and dubbed the “Monsterverse”) has been a raucous good time. Written by Terry Rosio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater and directed by Ada ..read more

An extremely well-crafted and completely enthralling love letter to film noir (and a bit more), Apple Tv’s Sugar, is a most welcome new series. Through its unique tone and sharply focused scripts, this engrossing piece excels in placing its allegiances to times gone by. As Colin Farrell’s passionate yet enigmatic private investigator, John Sugar, moves through the city, one can almost hear the noir music of Dimitri Tiompkin and Miklos Rozsa or the boozy John Williams score from Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye guiding his way. This is Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and Robert Towne blende ..read more