Time to Score 

Lee Daniels’s Billie Holiday biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday was released on February 26th, 2021, and my immediate reaction to it was one of discomfort.

My review’s title is a nod to Shakespeare and is entirely deliberate. The original movie portrayed the high-end fashion world as a brutal arena of plotting, backstabbing, and betrayal, and most Shakespeare’s plays depend on these plot devices. The Devil Wears Prada 2 uses the same formula, and is, plot-wise, almost identical. Once again, we plunge into the cutthroat world of Runway, where to get and stay at the top, you must let go of your principles and moral sense. The only thing different is that due to the digital era, Runway is not a print magazine anymore, but one that is running online.

'Run This Town' takes an unflinching look at the Rob Ford scandal that shook Toronto to its core while using fictional millennials to drive a concise story .

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

We sat down with Writer/Director Albert Acosta to discuss his debut short film, (ha-ha), Acosta's foray into narrative cinema, and how his personal experiences have shaped his filmmaking philosophy.