News & Movie Review

Till Death (2021) In the sweepstakes of acting challenges that can carry the weight of a movie, Megan Fox does it handcuffed to the corpse of her character's dead husband. In the slickly shot and smartly constructed cat-and-mouse thriller “Till Death,” her character must also drags said corpse around without being seen by home intruders. Don’t be quick to judge that this sounds like “Gerald’s Game,” 2017's excellent Stephen King adaptation where Carla Gugino was handcuffed to her bed next to her dead-from-a-heart-attack husband. Handcuffs and a dead husband are exactly where the similarities begin and end. Within its own macabre ball-and-chain concept, “Till Death” delivers the suspense, nasty goods, and a strong performance from Fox in a tight 88 minutes. Fox plays Emma, an unfaithful wife who's about to celebrate her wedding anniversary with her equally unfaithful lawyer husband, Mark (Eoin Macken). He takes her to their winter lake house, where they share a romantic eve...

An Unquiet Grave (2021) Sometimes, a horror film doesn’t need a hefty budget or a scare-every-ten-minutes ratio to be considered effective. In the micro-budget horror indie “An Unquiet Grave,” writer-director Terrence Krey and co-star/co-writer Christine Nyland rely solely on two dialogue-driven performances and a quietly mounting mood that can be felt, and those elements should be enough. Take 2017’s quietly gripping “A Dark Song,” which also uses dark magic to invoke catharsis. Alas, even minimalist filmmaking in its leanest, most hushed, whispery, and languid form can benefit from a little more dread, which this underwhelming two-hander could have used. After Jamie (Jacob A. Ware) loses his wife Jules in a car accident to a drunk driver, he convinces his edgy twin sister-in-law, Ava (Christine Nyland), to return to where the accident happened. “Can you really do it?” Ava asks at her sister’s tombstone. She knows what she’s in for, and eventually, we will know, too. A year later, Ja...

F9 (2021) The further the “Fast and the Furious” franchise goes over the top and the smaller the “Vibe” magazine article source about underground street racing that inspired the 2001 original appears in the rearview mirror, the better. “F9”—not counting 2019’s spinoff “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” —is the ninth installment in the hugely successful racing/heist/spy/superhero franchise, one that persists as steadily as Vin Diesel’s bis and tris. This increasingly absurd saga shows signs of slowing down, but one can’t wait to see it jump all of the sharks when Dom Toretto and the fam are having wheelchair races and pulling off food heists from their nursing home cafeteria. For now, “F9” offers everything the fans crave. Bringing director Justin Lin (who was behind movies 3-6) back into the driver’s seat, number nine is gleefully well-endowed with insanely physics-defying action stunts, dramatic soap-opera reveals, more globe-trotting than you can shake a passport at, and...

   Crime Procedurals are a dime a dozen nowadays. The genre, which has become a staple for channels like CBS, with its 20 or 22 year run shows of Law and Order - SVU, NCIS, Criminal Minds, has a high possibility of becoming stale or running its course. And after 2020, police procedurals and even comedies related to cops (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) started to feel decidely unsavory and valorizing towards a profession historically involved with societal ills, both for its cure as well as for its increasing effect. Among the glut of these police procedurals, very few stand out, evolve and become something almost multi-generational in impact. Be it The Wire or Homicide - Life on the Streets, shows like those evolve past the constraints of the police procedurals because of the change in its key foci. Most police procedurals would be very plot heavy each episode, with the plot resolving itself by the end of the episode. The beauty of shows like The Wire, or Homicide, and currently Bosch is...

False Positive (2021) With chance-taking, firmly independent distributor A24 and against-type creatives behind and in front of the camera, one knows “False Positive” can’t just be a standard-issue potboiler. Initially, with Ilana Glazer co-writing the script with director John Lee (2016's "Pee-wee's Big Holiday") and starring, the film recalls a dead-serious Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig committing to the bit in 2015’s “…from Hell” thriller “A Deadly Adoption,” which seemed like a joke on all of us but did, in fact, air on Lifetime.  As by-the-numbers as its general concept would seem, “False Positive” reveals itself to be anything but, flipping the joy of pregnancy into a woman’s paranoid nightmare, particularly when men in the medical field have a God complex. In using genre tropes to mine mommy-to-be anxiety, men controlling women’s bodies, and gaslighting, the film admirably goes to some uncomfortable places with overt shocks and disturbing insinuation. Known best...

Premiered in Brazil in 2019, it was nominated for a Teddy Award at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival or 70th Berlinale. It won an award at the 2020 Outfest Los Angeles. It was also up for a 2021 GLAAD Media Award. It's been available for months online and I'm only now getting around to it, but it's the perfect film to spotlight for Pride Month. Reportedly, it's the first Brazilian film to portray a transgender character in a positive and relatable manner. There have been quite a few Brazilian LGBTQ films over the past decade or so. One of them could have actually beaten this film to the punch in that regard.  Don't Call Me Son  (2016)  is a Brazilian film that won a Teddy Award at the 66th Berlinale. Yet, that film never confirmed if its protagonist was transgender or gender nonconforming. Bixa Travesty  (2018) is another Braziliam film that won a Teddy Award at the 68th Berlinale and it was a documentary definitely about a transgender musician but who did provocative t...

This is the official submission from the Ivory Coast for the 93rd Academy Awards for Best International Feature. It made the shortlist but didn't get the nomination. It's rare for African cinema to be recognized at the Oscars, particularly African cinema that focuses on Black people. The Academy has nominated ten films from Africa. Four of those were films from Algeria and were not about Black people. There was a film from the Ivory Coast that was nominated and won, that of Black and White in Color (1977), but even that film focused more on the White protagonists. The last film from Africa with a Black protagonist to be nominated and win was Tsotsi (2006) at the 78th Academy Awards. The last film from Africa with a Black protagonist to be simply recognized was Timbuktu (2015) at the 87th Academy Awards. A film from Africa was actually nominated at the 93rd Academy Awards, that of The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021) from Tunisia, but Tunisia is more of a country with Arab peop...