The road to Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capital of the “Islamic State”, has been long and hard. Now encircled, the world’s largest terror group resorts to booby-trapping roads and houses, as well as deploying suicide bombers, snipers and grenade-dropping drones. This was the most dangerous and unpredictable film our crew has worked on. It also became a testament to the territorial demise of a cult that uprooted the lives of millions of people across Iraq and Syria and contributed to the largest refugee crisis of our time. There are three stops on the road leading to the Raqqa frontline: the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) base, the first medical point and the foreign volunteers camp. With unprecedented access, we managed to document what each of them face in the final weeks before the fall of Raqqa.
Tran Quoc Bao succeeds in telling us a story about martial arts, human decay, and friendship. The originality shown by his filmmaking is admirable and brings fresh air to the classic Chinese martial arts genre.
Stranger Things season 4 ups the ante to the max! The show’s scope has been expanding for the past three seasons, and boy do they give us a spectacle to behold. As much as I love spectacle, this season occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ambition.
Dune has stunning visuals, a striking soundtrack, and great performances. But it has issues everywhere from its pacing, to its story, to its diverse representation.
Zombie apocalypses have been metaphors for late-stage predatory capitalism, but never a system disrupter that brings about freedom.
Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.
The shattering of what we strive to maintain as reality. It is certainly truthful to state that most, if not all, of us have experienced moments of genuine mental stress. Regardless of what might be the cause, the sheer unsettledness, the pressure that weighs upon us is a tangible force that CAN seem insurmountable. However, more often than not, this is only a temporary , one we can come through and simply move on from.
