Kirsten Stewart’s biographical film The Chronology of Water (2025), based on Lidia Yuknavitch's work, captures Yuknavitch’s memory as she navigates trauma, sexuality, love, family, and writing. Memory is presented as ocean waves, colliding and roaring. Until Lidia can come to terms with the water of memory, she will be lost. Here, water takes on new and multiple meanings: life and death, breath and drowning, time and memory, filth and cleansing. The story is based on Lidi

In an age where horror films need to continuously compete to meet the growing standards of an actual “scary movie”, the film Primate takes the traditional template of a horror movie whilst adding its own unique spin, with a killer ape named Ben. Nicole Au picks apart the various aspects of this movie in this review, attempting to see how Primate stands on its own and in the bigger scheme of the horror genre.

La La Land is the film for the yearners, with Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) being the epitome for “right person wrong time.” La La Land is captivating in its lively dance scenes and nostalgic usage of technicolor. However, Nicole Au calls into question if this film effectively portrays a deep, painful, love story or if the stunning cinematography is just the shell of meaningless, forgettable plot.

The heartwarming success story of Chris Gardner as portrayed in Gabriele Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) carries an overtly ideological message, promulgating a comforting yet dangerous illusion—a perfect capitalist meritocracy.

This review of the documentary Martha: A Picture Story argues that the film transcends biography, using archival footage, interviews, and cinema verité to present photographer Martha Cooper’s work as an ethical act of “rehumanization.” The review also contends that director Selina Miles crafts a powerful manifesto on the politics of looking, challenging viewers to see dignity and art in marginalized spaces and to question ingrained cultural hierarchies.

In this review, Alicia Bai explores Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a study of psychological destabilization through visual form. Focusing on camera techniques, lighting, and colour, she demonstrates how Hitchcock immerses viewers in the protagonist’s obsessive descent into madness. While acknowledging structural weaknesses in the film’s conclusion, Bai ultimately positions Vertigo as a defining work of cinematic art.

A review of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, a minimalist, tragicomic twist on the heist genre, following Josh O’Connor as an apathetic family man whose amateur art theft slowly falls apart.

The ivory tower of cuisine comes alive in Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. Remy the rat, under the tutelage of the spirit of the late Chef Gusteau, attempts to find the key, but what will it take for the world to welcome its most unconventional chef?

This article attempts to analyze Wes Anderson’s work through the lens of James C. Scott’s 1998 book Seeing Like A State, using Asteroid City and The Phoenician Scheme to try to understand auteurship as a form of quasibureaucratic control, a form of control that these films, despite their pervasive stylization, subtly yet consistently undermine. Many have accused Anderson of retreating into pure mannerism, but these films can be read as dramatizations of resistance to their ow

Welcoming the New Year with finals behind, Caramelo prompts the usage of troupes and the future of storytelling with its own comedic and sensitive uniqueness. Whether it be a statement piece or a slapstick comedy, it’s important to experience films that remind us of the beauty and transformation of film.

2025 marks the fourth year of what has now become an annual tradition: agonizing over the list, caught between performativity and pure dopamine. A few things are different this time. The industry, ever more so, is tasked with answering the existential questions regarding the ethical use of generative videos, mergers, box-office numbers, and perhaps most importantly of all, the role of advocacy cinema in the current zeitgeist, where paranoia and distrust for the government and

Every year without fail, Love Actually makes its way onto every list of classic movies to watch during the Christmas season. The film uses the overarching theme of holiday romance to bring together nine carefully crafted love stories. While Nicole Au can undoubtedly agree that this film is the perfect Christmas movie, she does an in-depth examination of each storyline to determine which ones deserve more praise than others (and to spark lively debate amongst other die-hard Lo

This article argues that Primal Fear is one of cinema’s most overlooked twist-driven thrillers. The movie follows defense attorney Martin Vail as he defends a timid altar boy, Aaron Stampler (played by none other than Edward Norton), who appears incapable of murder. As Vail’s investigation unfolds throughout the course of the movie, the film reveals layers of church abuse, legal manipulation, and moral ambiguity. Nicole Au argues that Primal Fear deserves far more recognition

This piece explores how Costa-Gavras’s Z treats politics not merely as a clash of physical power, but as a fight for narrative control. In Z, the struggle to explain an event becomes a struggle to define reality. Its ending, in withholding any sense of resolution, is what makes the film feel disturbingly modern.

Why are people so toxic about the movie Sinners on social media? Various online behaviors such as virtue signaling, aggressive opinions, and performative media literacy all stem from a common place of wanting to belong, and nowhere is this more clear than in the Instagram and Reddit comment sections of Ryan Coogler’s racially-charged blockbuster. In this piece, Caleb Lee uses the online discourse surrounding a particular film to point out a growing failure to engage meaningfu

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon turns 25 this year, and Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece is still one of the most influential movies of its time and era. Blending balletic action with aching romance, the film follows two women, Jen and Yu Shu Lien, grappling with desire and duty. Michelle Yeoh delivers arguably the best performance of her career as she anchors a story that transcends expectation. Visually stunning and emotionally devastating, the film remains a rare fusion of myth,

The impossible romance at the heart of Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), in which love, for dreamers, is both a catalyst and casualty of ambition.

In her review of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (2025), Sadie Cho explores how the American remake of Save the Green Planet! (2003) uses a female instead of a male protagonist to question the ethics of enacting hostility towards a harmful healthcare CEO when said hostility is partly motivated by misogyny and incel ideology.

At its core, Fight Club (1999) is a film about duality: masculine self-invention and self-destruction, chaos and control, and reality and delusion. The film's ability to reckon with these dualities simultaneously serves as a testament to its cinematic excellence. The protagonist (Edward Norton), whose name is never revealed, is introduced as a man who follows the same mundane routine and blindly buys into consumerism. He spends his nights scrolling through IKEA catalogs and

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language (2024) takes place in a quasi-fictional city merging Winnipeg, Canada, and Tehran, Iran, where three distinct stories gradually converge. Blending absurd humor with cultural hybridity, the film explores how randomness and dislocation can reveal deeper connections between people and places. Rankin’s vision suggests that universality arises not from sameness or logical coherence, but from the fluid coexistence of difference—a cinematic space