Review: The Other Lamb

by Chris Feil

Fueled by a fevered intensity, Małgorzata Szumowska's The Other Lamb follows the stoic Selah (Raffey Cassidy) as she comes of age in a cult hidden within the American mountainside. Her fellow believers are all women, suggestively separated by uniforms of blue and red, and under the charms of the faux-Jesus man they refer to only as Shepherd (Michiel Huisman). Selah was born into the flock without experience of the outside world or any of its modernity, instead knowing a normalcy of blood ritual and ominous polygamy.

But as the arrival of puberty brings the threat of becoming one of the Shepherd’s many wives, Selah experiences visions that enlighten her to the sinister nature that belies her deceptively peaceful existence, setting into motion her rebellion...

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Review: The new "Emma."

by Lynn Lee

Now that we’ve revisited past Emma adaptations like 1996's Miramax release and 1995's Clueless, courtesy of Claudio, it’s time to turn our attention to the latest version, which just went wide last week.  It’s a production of relative newcomers, marking the directorial and screenwriting debuts, respectively, of photographer Autumn de Wilde and Booker Prizewinning New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, and starring a cast of mostly fresh faces headed by rising star Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch).  Whatever it’s lacking in big names it certainly makes up for in indie credit.

The result is an Emma that’s bright, fun, and funny – not attaining the sublime heights of Clueless but more successful than the 1996 Miramax version with Gwyneth Paltrow...

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Review: The Invisible Man

by Chris Feil

What was once meant for the microwaved territory of the would-be Dark Universe has found new, timely, and sometimes ingenious life as a one-off. Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man morphs its source material with a shift in perspective, making its mad scientist a complete phantom figure to the audience.

However, he is a monster all too intimately familiar to the protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’s fraught survivor Cecilia. The film aims to place itself alongside the greats of our current age of horror by placing us thrillingly in her escape from abuse, and in turn offers something fresher to its namesake than previously imagined. If not always a complete success in its genre elements, on a conceptual basis, The Invisible Man is valuable and invigorating as a portrait of the fallout from enduring domestic abuse.

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"Farewell Amor"

... one last Sundance review from Murtada Elfadl 

Early on in Farewell Amor, Angolan immigrant Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) sits down to eat with his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), they talk about all the years they spent apart. Walter moved to New York to escape the Civil War and was hoping to bring over Esther and Sylvia, yet they were stuck in Tanzania for seventeen years. That's a long time to be apart; Are they still a family or just three strangers trying to avoid the awkwardness of small talk?

It’s a moment of fraught emotions and stilted silence. Yet as Mwine, Jah and Lawson play it, it is also a moment of guarded release. The wait is over, there’s awkwardness, doubt and trepidation but also hope...

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Review: Birds of Prey

by Chris Feil

Cathy Yan returns Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn to the screen after the regrettable Suicide Squad, and it’s somewhat of a rebirth in more was than one. Now single but not fully exorcized from her sublimating relationship with the Joker, Harley is looking to stand on her own two feet. Yet Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) again aligns her with a newly birthed group of crimefighters, this time in an all-female set of not-so-anti heroes.

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