Your Monster is billed as a horror-fantasy, with notes of a rom-com, featuring a Broadway hopeful (Melissa Barrera) discovering a hunky beast (Tommy Dewey) in her closet. Sounds wild, right? What if I told you writer/director Caroline Lindy plays everything “straight”? What if I told you that the film is so quiet, you can hear the emptiness between lines of dialogue? Granted, this is a deliberate choice to play up the film’s quirkier qualities, but…
Movie goers who have been caught rolling their eyes at “chapter narratives” will be pleasantly surprised by Sean Garrity’s The Burning Season, a reversed romantic drama that unravels an affair between two star-crossed lovers.
By: Jolie Featherstone Funny and charming, French Girl takes audiences back to the classic romantic comedies of the 2000s in this impressive feature-length directorial debut from James A. Woods and Nicolas Wright.
In a rare move, instead of recommending The Pod Generation by itself, I’m asking you to pair the sci-fi indie with another one from the same ilk, After Yang.
Passages has a great introduction. Film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) orders actors around and painstakingly focuses on someone’s inability to walk down a flight of stairs. As Tomas shows the actor how to walk down the stairs, it becomes very obvious that Tomas wants to be idolized. He does this by being intimidating to get what he wants.
By: Danyal Somani Book Club: The Next Chapter follows the friends from its predecessor: Vivian (Jane Fonda), Carol (Mary Steenburgen), Diane (Diane Keaton), and Sharon (Candice Bergen). In this next instalment, they travel to Italy for Vivian’s bachelorette party. However, with the sudden inclusion of an old flame (Vincent Ricotta) and a persistent police chief (Giancarlo Giannini), the trip doesn’t go according to plan.
Showing little regard for the intelligence of its audience, One True Loves stretches the suspension of disbelief until its final fray.
You Can Live Forever is the latest romance in queer cinema to tell a story about “forbidden love” in unlikely places, as two young women start falling for each other within their Jehovah Witness community. It’s a good movie that not only shows an accurate portrayal of yearning hearts, but also teaches viewers about the upbringing in this specific devout life – the film is emotional and educational.
In Stars Fell Again, the extra-cheesy follow-up to 2021’s decidedly unfunny Stars Fell on Alabama from returning director V.W. Scheich, suffers from many of the same flaws as its predecessor — weak characterization, poor pacing, and a lead couple that’s about as interesting as a stack of wet cardboard.
