Pepe the Frog needs no introduction by now. The laid back cartoon that took the farthest corners of the internet by storm has seen better days. One of the formerly harmless founders of modern meme culture was taken hostage behind enemy lines in 2016. Indie cartoonist Matt Furie's labor of love went from being a…
Continue reading ➞ ‘Feels Good Man’ Review – Pepe the Frog Pleads For Liberation
At 26, Yingying Zhang leaves China to study abroad in the United States at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A young ecologist filled with dreams, she aspired to one day be a married professor with children. Studying in the U.S. would provide her with greater opportunities, so her family back in Nanping, China did…
Continue reading ➞ ‘Finding Yingying’ Review – More than a True Crime Documentary
I’ll Meet You There is the type of film where characters say things like “we can't move forward until we face the past.” It is not that this sentiment is untrue, but rather that writer/director Iram Parveen Bilal is working with such interesting ideas that rigid following of soapy cliches and blandness feel frustrating. The…
Continue reading ➞ ‘I’ll Meet You There’ Review – Flawed, But Warm and Important
Lynn Chen's directorial debut, I Will Make You Mine, follows three women: Erika (Ayako Fujitani), Rachel (Lynn Chen herself), and Yea-Ming (Yea-Ming Chen) as they reconnect with their former lover Goh (Goh Nakamura) when he stumbles back into town. Despite the three women being drastically different, they all share the same struggle: moving on. Building…
Continue reading ➞ ‘I Will Make You Mine’ Review – Confronting the Past Rarely Feels this Real
Midway Games, oddly enough, could not have a more widespread yet niche following. On one hand, they were the home for what is still one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, Mortal Kombat. Their other titles that undoubtedly took a decade of youth by storm, unfortunately, lacked the legs to hurdle…
Continue reading ➞ ‘Insert Coin’ Review – Midway’s Legacy Refuses To Be Forgotten
Critical Thinking, the directorial debut of John Leguizamo (who boasts well over 200 credits on IMDb), falls into the subgenre of movies where inspiring teachers have to lift up underprivileged students. Coming after films like Freedom Writers and Stand and Deliver, which was infamously spoofed by South Park, "How do I reach these kids?", is certainly…
Netflix's new biopic, Sergio, follows the life of the famed Brazilian United Nations diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello. His extraordinary life was driven by the fight for human rights as he helped refugees and those in need within collapsed nations across the world. His resume rose him high in the U.N's arsenal of expert negotiators.…
Ren & Stimpy, the widely known program Nickelodeon probably wants people to slowly start forgetting. The scrawny chihuahua and blue-nosed cat blew up the cartoon industry in the early 90s, making way for the massive wave of animation auteurism that gave birth to many classics. It is completely fair to say that Spongebob Squarepants, Courage the…
No other film this year will take you on an emotional ride like Jumbo- quite literally. One of Sundance 2020's more unaccustomed films, this is the first feature from Belgian director/screenwriter Zoé Wittock. This could not be a louder proclamation of a debut; Wittock has gravitas and is here to shake conventional filmmaking. Rooted in…
Continue reading ➞ Sundance 2020: ‘Jumbo’ Review – An Out of the Ordinary, Yet Niche Love Story
Overwhelmed with the sheer amount of films that played at the BFI London Film Festival 2019, I have decided to review them all in one go. So, below are reviews for all the films that have yet to go up on the site and in addition to the festival films, there are a few bonus…
Continue reading ➞ Jojo Rabbit, Waves review – London Film Festival 2019 Final Reviews
