A Queer Review of the Austin Film Festival (2023)
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.

A romcom from veteran Nigerian Director, Lancelot Oduah Imasuen, tells the story of love in the context of old generation Africans in diaspora and their new generation kids, who were born in the United States. Its explores the conflict between parents, nurtured in the African culture and their American born children.
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
Yeah, sure, the movie’s about Carnage. But it’s really about love. A love that defies all odds: the love between a man and his man-eating alien symbiote.
KIMI is the main character of this film and as much as I wish it was Angela Childs played by Zoe Kravitz, it isn't. KIMI is a smart device that works not unlike Amazon's Alexa and Google's Nest assisting in anything from home purchases to music playing all under the guise of only activating when in use.
Thunder Force brings much-needed diversity to the superhero genre. Unfortunately, it's also an uninteresting and unfunny mess.