In the outback of Siberia - in the village of Takuchet - Justas Walker, a born US citizen, lives and works. Here he has his own successful farm of 11 goats, a couple of sheep and several chickens. Russian neighbors dislike him and plot against him, but Justas looks at life with humor even in the most difficult moment. He has two friends, assistants, two Siberian men with a criminal past - Andrey and Vova. All together they are trying to prove with their work that there is still life in the Siberian village.
There’s been a longstanding criticism of sci-fi films about its lack of Black characters. For the past few years, Anthony Mackie has been successfully representing Black masculinity in the otherwise homogenous genre and I am here for it.
Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.
Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, Parasite (2019) became one of the few international films to break into the American mainstream.
It doesn’t offer an absolute answer for the dialectical ethical questions that emerged in search of justice but portrays the characters as living people beyond the identities of victims.
"THANK YOU, Zach Creggar!" Back in 2022, this now established star in the horror film genre gave us the quirkily creepy, unexpectedly funny (at times!) cinematic gem that was "Barbarian". It felt like a cool breeze just washed over us as, for ONCE, the much traversed roads these films tend to go with got an upgrade of uniqueness without sacrificing the ambiance of uneasiness you desire.
What seems like such a simple story of survival is so much more than that—it’s a story of family, and of war, and of destruction. It’s painful to watch, but not in a bad way. It makes its audience reflect on their own actions, and in how they are complicit in the sufferings of others as the adults in this film are. Grave of the Fireflies does not hold back from being heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t. It tells a message that needs to be heard decades after the war, and a story that cannot be forgotten by history.
