Reel Encounters

After a brief opening sequence set in the 1970s, which the film will later return to, most of Osgood Perkins’s newly released “Longlegs” takes place in a grim and austere version of Oregon in the 1990s.

In the last decade, two of South America’s best directors (Pablo Larraín and Sebastian Lelio, both Chilean) made their English language debuts (“Jackie”, and “Disobedience”) with bold films about women resisting to be quelled by their historical and societal circumstances.

Lupita Nyong’o’s face is the most effective visual effect in “A Quiet Place: Day One”.

It feels cruel that if you search for “The Heartbreak Kid” on Google, the Farrelly Brothers lethargic 2007 comedy comes up first, rather than the 1972 Elaine May film that it is (somewhat) based on.

Time is at the centre of most sad films. The loss of it.

Towards the end of “Inside Out 2”, as the film launched into its dual climaxes, I began to figure out a dichotomy that was causing a mild sense of discomfort throughout much of the running time.

We are in a dystopian futuristic version of Australia where the sprawling plains have degenerated into miles and miles of radioactive wasteland.

The upcoming Netflix release, “Hit Man” feels tailor made for the sensibilities of director-writer Richard Linklater.

We are centuries in the future of Wes Ball’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”, but we could also be centuries in the past for all the ways the world we spend the film in seems like a kind of Dark Ages.

The idea of Ryan Gosling as a charming, if bad-luck prone, comedic leading man does not seem like an unusual thing to see on screen.

In the dark of night, two people have a late-night conversation the evening before a very important tennis match.

There’s an allure to ambiguity in art that A24’s “Civil War” constantly seems aware of.

What a coincidence that Matthew Vaughn’s action blockbuster comedy “Argylle” arrived to streaming on Apple TV+ at the tail-end of last week, the same week that saw online film enthusiasts grappling with the leaked industry responses from the March 28 screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming “Megalopolis”.

It’s unlikely that many are tuning into the latest film in the MonsterVerse franchise, for the human characters.

In “Immaculate”, Sister Cecilia (played by rising-star Sydney Sweeney) is a young nun whose new role at a remote Italian convent begins to threaten the limits of her faith, and then her life.

The unexpected thrill of seeing a pudgy panda excelling at expert martial arts were long-gone by the time “Kung Fu Panda” arrived in cinemas in early 2016.

Dennis Villeneuve’s sequel to his 2021 foray into the world of Frank Herbert’s prose opens with the voice offering what seems, at first, to be a helpful reminder of what happened previously for audiences.

Each year, I use the weekend of the Academy Awards to write my last official post on the previous year in film, usually predicated on the relationship with the imminent Oscar winners.

You wouldn’t think that the recent Oscar nominee for Best Picture (Celine Song’s “Past Lives”) has much in common with the Will Gluck romantic-comedy “Anyone But You”, but both films are an unwelcome reminder that contemporary romances keep forgetting the most important thing – a burning romance.

Although every cinematic biopic is liable to be compared to the reality of its subjects, there’s no immediate artistic value in overzealous fidelity to truth in film.