Category: POC Filmmakers
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Fast & Furious 8: I don’t care what you Americans call it.
It’s called Fast & Furious 8 here in the UK. Seems to be Fate of the Furious in other markets. Misleading; there don’t seem much fateful or furious about this joint. We open in Cuba, I guess the lifting of the embargo has made it the new hot place for films to visit. It is…
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I Am Not Your Negro: A tonic for the blind
Most of the time I’ve spent ‘writing’ this review has actually been spent researching James Baldwin. Reading extracts from his essays, novels, plays; watching him appear on the talk shows that the film extracts from; that famous 1965 Cambridge debate with William F. Buckley Jr. to whom the film rightly does not give a voice.…
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Some Cold Takes: Life and Chips
Life Life is a film by perverts. Serious. The ISS horror flick is, when it’s not trying to be Gravity, the most legit affecting horror movie I seen recently. Mostly cos the setting turns the cabin the woods into something weird and new. Not without its problems, given everything gotta be so technical, we treated…
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Get Out: Scary funny
Daniel Kaluuya has been in his early twenties for like 10 years now. I guess he’s the sort of actor who you’d look at them online and be surprised to find out they’re actually thirty something. Turns out he’s only twenty seven which makes me feel real small cos that means he was seventeen when…
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The Fits: What’s a haunted house without the ghost
I’m not sure what to make of The Fits. I think that’s okay, it’s the first feature film by Anna Rose Holmer, and it’s clearly trying to cover a lot of ground. It’s exploring belonging and gender presentation and coming of age as a black girl. It’s a delicate balancing act for the most part…
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2016’s Best Film: Your Name
It was the Oscars last night as I’m writing this. It looked like a fun evening and, despite all the drama and controversy, everyone deserves congratulations no matter who we think should have won in any specific category, and whether we still think the same way in a few years’ time. In the morning i…
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Moonlight: Watch with Empathy
I mean, I’m really not interested in any take on Moonlight that isn’t coming from a queer black person. It’s a beautiful evocation of a life that comes so far from mine that I feel fully inequipped to deal. Queerness comes pretty easy of my tongue, but that small-town, middle-class, white-British queerness. How can it…
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The Great Wall: A Communist Spectacle
I am woefully underprepared to talk about Chinese film, it’s a huge whole in my knowledge i am desperately trying to fill up. Now we see the release of the most expensive, expansive Chinese film of all time and it’s hard to know what to make of it. Is it an attempt to position China…
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Fences: August Wilson’s August Play
Fences feels like an accomplished play. Everything that I’m sure shone throughout the various stagings of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning classic shines here. Under Denzel Washington’s direction though it never feels like it quite makes that leap to a film. That’s not to suggest inferiority by no means, I’ve never seen it staged (and…
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Jackie
In the UK, when the queen dies, because some day she will, we cancel comedy until after her funeral. It’s one part of this officially recognised national mourning ceremony. The BBC will cancel all the comedy, our queen is dead, why should the people laugh. It’s weird cos the BBC ain’t a particularly archaic body,…
A Grand Quiet 