The internet has gone insane because Barbie—the highest grossing film of 2023—has been nominated for eight Oscars instead of 10, snubbing Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig for Best Actress and Best Director respectively. Screen Rant’s Sarah Little called this a “horrific shock” and said that “being left out of two significant categories [proves] the movie’s point about patriarchy.”…
2020s
Review: Beautiful Disaster
Freshman Abby Abernathy (Virginia Gardner) is a poker prodigy, known as Lucky 13, who was taught by her father, Mick (Brian Austin Green), and spent her childhood bailing him out while living in Las Vegas. Wanting a fresh start, Abby heads off to college in hopes of having a normal life. When she arrives, her…
Review: Dreamland
After her theatre debut in 2:22: A Ghost Story, for which she received an Olivier nomination, Lily Allen makes her television debut as Mel O’Sullivan in Dreamland. The series opens with Mel travelling via bus to Margate, her seaside hometown on the Kent coast, where her close-knit family still live, featuring some great class commentary on the…
Review: A Little White Lie
“They all wanna be writers but none of them like to read.” In order to prevent Acheron University’s annual literary festival being cut from the budget, English Professor Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson) knows she needs to secure a big author. In desperation, she reaches out to a famous yet reclusive writer named C. R. Shriver,…
Killing Eve’s Tragic Love Story
Also featured on Medium. Contains spoilers for Killing Eve Season 4 finale. Killing Eve’s finale was a betrayal of what made the series so remarkable in the first place. Television producer Sally Woodward-Gentle, who optioned Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle in 2014, said: “The notion of a female assassin was not unique,” but Jennings’ take was “fresh, intelligent, and tonally…
Review: ‘Umma’ Has Compelling Ideas but Falls Short Due to a Restrained and Disjointed Script
Korean immigrant Amanda (Sandra Oh) and her homeschooled daughter Chrissy (Atypical’s Fivel Stewart) live a quiet life on a rural farm beekeeping and selling honey. They live without modern technology as Amanda claims to be “allergic” to electricity, and therefore rely on local shop owner and friend Danny (Dermot Mulroney) to sell their honey. Amanda is…
Review: ‘Night’s End’ is Saved by An Entertaining Final Act
Night’s End, the latest from Jennifer Reeder (Knives and Skin), written by American playwright Brett Neveu, follows Ken Barber (Geno Walker), a divorced dad suffering from anxiety and agoraphobia, who finds himself in a haunted apartment. The first act builds a picture of Ken’s life, including his daily routine: he wakes up counting backwards from 10…
Review: ‘The Requin’ Loses Human Story of Survival Message to Laughably Bad CG Sharks
I’m not a fan of Shark films. There’s nothing particularly wrong with them — they’re just not for me. I find them quite boring and predictable, the sort of qualities I much prefer to be in my beloved slasher flicks. I watched The Requin (which means “shark” in French) purely because of Alicia Silverstone, but she delivered what…
Review: ‘The Fallout’ is an Intimate Character Study of Life After Trauma
The opening of Megan Park’s feature-length directorial debut, The Fallout, which follows the aftermath of a school shooting, felt reminiscent of 2018’s Vox Lux, in that abrupt gunfire suddenly destroys what began as a normal day. Unlike Vox Lux, however, we don’t see anything, we just hear it. It’s an inciting incident that won’t sit well with everyone,…
LFF Review: A Love Story
In Jennifer Sheridan’s original debut feature, Rose: A Love Story, husband Sam (screenwriter Matt Stokoe) and wife Rose (Sophie Rundle) live a secluded life together in England’s snowy woods. Sam spends his days in the freezing cold gathering wood, setting rabbit traps, and looking after them both, whereas Rose stays inside writing novels, on a typewriter…