Author: Josh

Reviews

For better and worse Billie Eilish’s new concert film with James Cameron brings fans into the arena tour

by Josh

What a time it is to be a pop star. When the arena tours have done a year of sales, you can share the experience with fans who couldn’t score a ticket via the magic of the multiplex. Taylor did it with Eras, Beyonce did it with Renaissance, immortalizing their mega-shows and collecting some extra cash. Between concert films and jukebox biopics, movies that feature familiar music have become one of the surer things in a shaky industry.  Now, curiously enough, it’s Billie Eilish’s turn and she’s doing so by sharing co-directing credit with none other than James Cameron and in 3D, no less. The experiment and its result is mildly perplexing. 

Reviews

With stunning performances, Mother Mary conjures visions of a pop star in crisis

by Josh

David Lowery’s latest, Mother Mary, shares with his filmography an openness to the surreal as well as the ability to give main character energy to bolts of fabric. Bolstered by two entrancing performances from Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, it joins his others as deeply fascinating and surprisingly revelatory examinations of humanity.

Reviews

Miroirs No. 3 explores the eerie kindness of strangers

by Josh

With something always tantalizingly out of reach, Christian Petzold’s films carry a certain rigor of academic riddles, albeit koans populated by characters nursing their own quiet tragedies. With vibrant interiority, Paula Beer’s melancholic university music student becomes a makeshift bandage for a rural family in the wake of a freak car crash.

Festivals Reviews SIFF

Suburban Fury allows Sarah Jane Moore to make her own myth

by Josh

One of the best entries in last year’s SIFF Northwest Connections program is situated 800 miles south on I-5 and a half century in the past: the biography of Sarah Jane Moore, one of two women who independently attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford while he campaigned for election in California. Eschewing typical documentary conventions, the story of the would-be assassin is told by the subject herself, having been released from prison 32 years into her life sentence.

Festivals Reviews

Pillion brings BDSM to the multiplex

by Josh

Who could have possibly guessed that the squirmiest elements of watching a meek all-grown-up Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) inadvertently stumble his way into a submissive arrangement with a godlike motorcycle dom played by Alexander Skarsgård would be the amount of holiday barbershop quartet singing?

How to Make a Killing -- Glen Powell
Reviews

How to Make a Killing taps the breaks on the Glen Powell Experience

by Josh

John Patton Ford taps Glen Powell to star in his loose re-imagining of a 1949 black comedy in which an outcast needs to eliminate everyone on the family tree ahead of him in the line of succession to inherit a fortune. For once, his charisma isn’t enough to make it work.

Festivals Reviews SIFF

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions explodes the documentary as visual album

by Josh

Kahlil Joseph’s multi-sensory film takes inspiration for W.E.B. Du Bois’s dream — unfinished at the time of his death, but realized decades later by a group of scholars led by Henry Louis Gates — of creating an Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. Acting more as chief curator or executive producer than a typical film director, he assembles a richly textured visual album for the screen that includes a long list of talented filmmakers, collaborators, and guest stars.