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image courtesy of www.willowandthatch.com As a James Ivory film, I went in predisposed to like this. Howard’s End, A Room with a View, and especially The Remains of the Day form an incredible triad of English period drama, powered by sharp characters and formidable performances. Maurice arrives right after A Room with a View, another E. M. Forster adaptation steeped in English manners and stifled passion. And society… OH, SOCIETY. At Cambridge, Maurice (James Wilby) falls for

image courtesy of sbiff.org If every movie had a title sequence this good, cinema would be in much better shape. The film positions itself as a story about the gay experience in Thatcher’s England, but it’s really an immigrant story first and foremost. The movie says it best itself: for Pakistanis in England, you’re “nothing without money.” That line is the engine of everything that follows, and it’s the most honest thing the script has to say. Unfortunately, it takes its tim

image courtesy of behindthelensonline.net I don't like when a film is too manipulative. It feels artificial, and instead of tapping into my emotional core, it turns me off - that's the moment I start noticing the machinery instead of feeling anything. I can sense the gears turning, the swell of the score cued exactly where the script needs me to break, and once I'm aware of the apparatus, I'm gone, watching from the outside instead of living it from the inside. There's a real

Tilda Swinton is a female Nicolas Cage with a better batting average. She is almost always the most interesting character in any film she's in, whether she's playing a witch, a lawyer, or a social services worker who may or may not be human. In Orlando, Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's genre-defying novel, Swinton is asked to carry something even stranger than usual: a single character who lives for four centuries and switches sexes halfway through, all while bar

Pride Month has turned into something of a film festival for me this year, and watching these movies back to back has left me sitting with a question I can't quite resolve: how honest are they? I don't really know how true to the lived experience of these people any of this is.

image courtesy of thecinemaarchives.com I love a project movie - a group of people from different backgrounds coming together to achieve a common goal. The format works across every genre, as long as you have compelling performers and a script that earns its emotional beats. In its purest form, you make a film about a genuine collection of people who share the screen and blur the notion of a single lead until the question becomes irrelevant. That is precisely what director Ro

image courtesy of indiewire.com Those reading glasses are doing some heavy lifting. That’s maybe the most honest way I can summarize this film - a film doing a lot of quiet, careful work, but one that also left me expecting something a little more, for lack of a better word, charged. I’ll admit my assumptions going in were off. A lesbian romance made in 1985, at the height of Reagan’s America, directed by a woman - I figured it would feel transgressive, raw, maybe even a litt

image courtesy of rottentomatoes.com I want to preface this by saying I suspect this is a better film than my rating suggests. The problem is almost certainly me. Before this, my Wong Kar-wai experience amounts to two films: In the Mood for Love, which is a stone-cold masterpiece, and Chungking Express, which I’ve only seen once and never quite found my way into. Unfortunately, this landed closer to the latter - I could admire it without fully connecting to it in the way it s

image courtesy of mubi.com My only prior experience with Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a single viewing of Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - an all-timer of a title - which I didn’t understand at all. So I came in expecting something equally surreal and impenetrable. It isn’t, exactly, but it is split into two entirely different films that may or may not be thematically linked, depending on how you look at it. The first half is a surprisingly swee

image courtesy of variety.com Sometimes, it’s best not to overcomplicate things to make your point. The greatest farces - think Airplane!, Clue, take your pick - succeed precisely because they target obvious, well-worn tropes and strip them down to their absurd essentials. Done poorly, that approach feels lazy and toothless. Done right, it lands like a sledgehammer wrapped in a feather boa. This mostly does it right. The film embraces every stereotype it can get its hands on

image courtesy of vulture.com Grief has been the subject of countless films. So has guilt. So has the long, painful road toward recovery. The “ghost story as emotional reckoning” device is hardly new, and it won’t retire after this. But I want to be clear: I deeply respect what Andrew Haigh is attempting here, and the vision behind this is genuinely ambitious. It just doesn’t fully stick the landing for me. Adam (Andrew Scott) is a writer hollowed out by loss - his parents di

image courtesy of theguardian.com While I enjoy the outdoors, I can’t for the life of me ever imagine doing work like this. I’m not against manual labor and I’m certainly a supporter of all things farming, but watching Josh O’Connor haul himself through the mud, sleet, and thankless grind of a Yorkshire sheep farm made my bones ache. That unglamorous authenticity is precisely where this film earns its keep - it doesn’t romanticize rural life; it shows you the cracked hands an