Reviews

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