I was dreading going into Anora. Not because it looked like a bad movie, but because it’s been hyped up so much that I was afraid of what would happen if I was underwhelmed by it. But that fear didn’t come to ; Anora is fantastic. The film sees Mikey Madison star as Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, a Brooklyn stripper who begins a whirlwind affair with her client Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch. The…

Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to 2019’s Joker, is now in theaters … and the people are not pleased. With an overwhelming number of negative reviews, abysmal word-of-mouth, and a controversial ending scene, this is shaping up to be one of the least crowd-pleasing blockbusters in recent memory. But I, being the dumb comic book movie contrarian that I am, not only liked the film as a whole, but found the ending in particular to solidify and enhance everything…

I love director Trey Edward Shults, I love Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan as actors, and yes, I really like most music made by The Weeknd. I’m a fan of pretty much every major person involved in Hurry Up Tomorrow, as well as The Weeknd’s album of the same name, so I was really hoping that what conceptually seemed like a musician’s shameless promotional piece would wind up being one of the year’s biggest surprises.
But instead, it’s exactly what…

It is rare for any film franchise to go six movies without a single outright dud. It’s even rarer for a horror franchise to do that. Yet the Scream franchise is one of the very few that’s pulled it off over it’s nearly 30-year run. And while the 1996 original classic obviously deserves credit for kicking that off, nearly as much credit should go to the 1997 sequel Scream 2. This sequel properly continues the story of the original, lays…

INTERSTELLAR: A CINEPHILE AWAKENED

Throughout the majority of my life so far, I enjoyed movies. There were some that I loved and would re-watch constantly, others I hated and swore to never give another try, and some that went in one ear and out the other. Not too much like now, in that sense. However, I didn’t have the level of iration and love for the art form as a whole that I have now. You wouldn’t have seen me…

It boggles my mind that Peter Weir, the director of the masterpiece The Truman Show and the excellent Dead Poets Society, also made something with so little to latch onto. 

On paper, this has a lot of potential as a creepy, genre-defying mystery, and I don’t mind how few answers it provides. But it’s directed, edited, and shot too much like a more straightforward drama, not really emphasizing the more off-putting sensation many of these scenes should have. I might…