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.… Continue reading I Am Not Your Negro: A tonic for the blind
This gotta be the shortest delay for a Disney live action remake right? I mean we had Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty by any other name) followed by Branagh’s Cinderella, then Favreau’s The Jungle Book and David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon; but Pete’s Dragon came out in ’77 and never really hung about in the public consciousness. Beauty… Continue reading Beauty and the Beast: Classic remake, or remade classic?
Family be hard. I imagine that ain’t the way for everyone, but when Bush Senior talked about wanting families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons, one guesses it weren’t a simple minority he was talking about. There’s one respite for everyone, eventually you get to grow up and… Continue reading It’s Only the End of the World: Family Matters
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… Continue reading Moonlight: Watch with Empathy
If the baseline for a compelling documentary is the exploration of an outlandish true story, Tickled has you covered. An investigation by New Zealand journalist David Farrier into the American fetish-sport of competitive endurance tickling. An investigation that slowly reveals a hidden world so bizarre that the frivolous matter shows itself well worthy of a… Continue reading Tickled
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest is a sweeping story of the struggles presented by both commitment and infidelity. Presented as the story of a mother’s life as narrated in the form of a letter sent to her estranged daughter, we travel through the Spain of the eighties, nineties and millennium, observing all the ways that humanity finds… Continue reading Julieta
