Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody – Film Review

Ten years after the tragic passing of vocal legend Whitney Houston, Sony Pictures and the writer behind the Academy Award-winning Bohemian Rhapsody, fittingly release a biopic covering the highs and lows of the most celebrated Black artist in music history. Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou) directs a by the numbers biopic that surprisingly isn’t afraid to …

Zillion – Movie Review

The story of Frank Verstraeten’s dream started 25 years ago. It’s 1997, and though he’s a computer wiz all day every day, he starts to get fascinated with the nightlife. After he gets refused entrance at one of Belgium’s hottest clubs, he sets himself a goal: create his very own one-of-a-kind club that’ll destroy all …

Review – First Date

What’s more frustrating than watching a film that has all the elements to be great, but doesn’t know how to keep it all together and thus kinda goes nowhere. First Date has that problem. When a young guy (Tyson Brown in his feature film debut) finally takes the big step to ask out the girl …

Review – Flashback

Drugs can do a number on you. Especially when you start questioning time and reality. Flashback puts Dylan O’Brien in the middle of an existential crisis, while he tries to pick up the pieces of his past. Or is he? We meet Frank (O’Brien – Teen Wolf) as an adult, waking up from a recurring …

German Film Festival 2021 Review – Berlin Alexanderplatz

For someone who has never read Alfred Döblin’s classic German novel or watched the series, this modernised version of Berlin Alexanderplatz was an interesting experience. Not only does it tackle very relevant themes, it’s a saga in the life of one man, who gets used and swallowed by a climate that’s chosen the life he’s …

Review – Here Are The Young Men

Who’s in the coffin? Picture it, Ireland 2003, three young lads, Matthew, Kearny and Rez (Dean-Charles Chapman, Finn Cole & Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) are ready to go out into the world and make it their own. They muse about their futures while drinking vodka and popping oxy by the water with their friend Jen (Anya Taylor-Joy). …

Review – ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’

When it comes to jazz I’m about as white as a white boy can be. Smokey nightclubs have never been and will never be my natural habitat. But hearing the raspy vocals of Billie Holiday has always made me long for that era somehow. After seeing Lee Daniel’s ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ I …

Apple TV+ Review – ‘Cherry’

After directing the highest-grossing film ever with Avengers: Endgame, directors Anthony and Joe Russo could do anything they wanted. They chose to adapt Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel about the military, addiction, and crime: Cherry. Split into chapters, Cherry follows an unnamed narrator aka Cherry (Tom Holland) over the course of fifteen years — from meeting …

FIFF2020 Review – ‘La Déesse des mouches à feu’

Canadian director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s 90s coming of age drama ‘Goddess of the Fireflies’ (aka ‘La Déesse des mouches à feu’), is set against the backdrop of a rural Québec town and grunge music’s rise. 16 year old Catherine and her friends are loitering between shacks and mall parking lots, partying and learning about life and …

TIFF20 Review – ‘Akilla’s Escape’

25 years ago, the Toronto International Film Festival launched a new section showcasing films from Africa and the African diaspora. This year, as we join the call from the streets for Black liberation, we celebrate the voices that Planet Africa amplified. One of the titles being shown as part of Planet Africa 25 is Charles …