Bradley Cooper’s feature directorial debut, A Star Is Born, knocks it out of the park thanks to a stellar performance from Lady Gaga. Bring it home today! Following a performance, country rock star Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) hits up whatever establishment he can find for alcohol. It just so happens that he lands up one bar’s drag performance night. A former employee, Ally (Lady Gaga) just happens to grace the stage that night. When Jackson…
"A Star Is Born Now On Digital and Blu-ray"Tag: Toronto International Film Festival
Pairing Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben) is a thrilling soap opera with plenty of twists and turns coming around the corner. The film starts with Laura (Penélope Cruz) traveling to her native Spanish village with her children, Irene (Carla Campra) and Diego (Iván Chavero). For whatever reasons, Laura and husband Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) now live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In any event, she’s back home for her sister’s wedding. The wedding goes as…
"Everybody Knows: A Thrilling Soap Opera"
Maiden tells the inspiring true story of skipper Tracy Edwards and the first female crew who made history by entering the Whitbread Round the World race. It comes as no surprise that the misogyny that Tracy Edwards and her crew dealt with in the late 1980s still exists today. While the male competitors were asked the “sensible sports questions,” no reporters dared to ask the Maiden crew these questions. Nobody gave them a chance. As soon…
"Sundance 2019: Maiden"
Anthropocene – The Human Epoch follows the Anthropocene Working Group in their mission to add this epoch to the Geological Time Scale. The phrase was initially coined by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 in their proposal for the current epoch. In 2009, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy ordered the AWG–a collective–to look into whether or not this epoch is real. These people are experts in their field, be it climate and polar science, oceanography, ecology, archaeology,…
"Sundance 2019: Anthropocene – The Human Epoch"
Telling the story of Neil Armstrong and the mission to the moon, First Man is an intense ride and an IMAX screen should be considered required viewing. Saying that this film is an underappreciated masterpiece would not be an understatement. Starring as astronaut Neil Armstrong, veteran actor Ryan Gosling captures the very essence of his persona. Armstrong lived with a public profile but he was very much a private person. He saw this as just…
"First Man: Now Available on 4K/Blu-ray/DVD"
The Hate U Give offers an art-imitates-life narrative of a situation that’s all too familiar in minority neighborhoods frequented by white police officers. In a perfect world, this film would be in the Oscar conversation. As the film starts, former gangster Maverick Carter (Russell Hornsby) is giving his kids the all-important talk about what to do when they see police officers. His kids are young for the talk but this has grave importance in their…
"The Hate U Give: Now On 4K/Blu-ray/DVD"
It doesn’t matter that Capernaum (Chaos) is a subtitled film because this film will have you in tears by the time that the credits finish rolling. The film starts off with Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) suing his parents, Souad (Kawthar Al Haddad) and Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef). Zain does this even as he’s been serving a five-year prison sentence for stabbing someone. It takes some backstory to eventually reach the point but we eventually learn that he…
"Capernaum (Chaos) is Gut Wrenching"
Beautifully directed, If Beale Street Could Talk is able to raise the bar on what we come to expect from writer-director Barry Jenkins. If you didn’t notice it with Moonlight, Barry Jenkins has a way with telling a story on camera. If Beale Street Could Talk further enhances his work as a storyteller. Jenkins puts so much care into the film even if it’s James Baldwin’s words that he adapts on screen. We especially see…
"If Beale Street Could Talk is Beautifully Directed"
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes explores the life of Fox News founder Roger Ailes while tackling the sexual harassment that brought him down. “It’s easy to make somebody into a monster. It’s hard to see that you’re on that path, too.” The above are the words that we first hear as soon as the film documentary starts. What’s most surprising is that they come out of the mouth of former Fox News…
"Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes"
The sound design for Roma is so intricate that watching this film in anything other than a theater would not be doing proper justice to the film. Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is the film’s main focus. She’s working as a live-in maid for a middle-class family living in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood. The family dynamics change when Señor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) returns from a conference only to leave again. This means that Sofia (Marina De Tavira), a mother of…
"Roma: One of The Best Sound Designs Ever!"