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Two-Minute Warning | The LAMBCast
The March Movie of the Month is an exploitation thriller that doubles as a disaster film. If there are consistent threads in the 70s wave of disaster pictures it was that Irwin Allen Produced them or Charlton Heston starred in them. The outsized producer is absent this week but we do get Moses on the show. This was the first of two films centered on a terror attack at the championship game of American Football. “Black Sunday” came out a year later and is probably better remembered, but “Two Minute Warning” has a cast that may trump the other movie…
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Movie Review: “The Electric State” In A State Of Disrepair | ForReel
Where even to begin with The Electric State? The latest film from the Russo Brothers features an all star cast and is set in a 1990s-influenced retro future full of pop culture references, but fails at almost every turn to be anything interesting at all. Let’s not mince words here, The Electric State is a colossal misfire on almost every level. The film is set in an alternate 1994 where robots “invented” by Walt Disney became commonplace in the decades following, and eventually rose up to assert their rights in 1990. The world – of course – went to war to…
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Deep Blue Sea, Chapter 11: Sowing Chaos | Deep Blue Sea The Podcast
Jay and Mark are joined by Matthew Simpson from Awesome Friday (@SMatthewAF and @awesomefridayca on X) to discuss “Untimely Jam” the 11th chapter of DBS. In this episode, they also talk about big waves, helicopters in creature features, and Renny films that should be in the Criterion collection. Enjoy! This week, I joined Deep Blue Sea The Podcast to talk about a longtime favourite film of mine, Deep Blue Sea! Listening Links:
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Daredevil: Born Again | That Shelf
Before the days of Disney+, Marvel Studios struck a deal with Netflix to bring several of their street-level heroes to the small screen. There were several, but the first of them was Daredevil, a master acrobat and vigilante who wears a red combat suit adorned with devil’s horns and who is, by day, a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock. The shows were a mixed bag, but Daredevil was mostly a success. Fans loved the darker tone the series embraced. In particular, both Charlie Cox’s portrayal of the titular character and Vincent D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the series villain, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, but…
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Small Achievable Goals | That Shelf
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two coworkers, one a little uptight and by the book and the other perhaps a little too loose for their own good, have their fates and jobs intertwined by happenstance. Then, hilarity—with a dash of honesty and vulnerability—ensues. This is the tried-and-true setup of Small Achievable Goals, a new comedy series from Jennifer Whalen and Meredith MacNeill. As the series opens, Julie (Whalen) and Kris (MacNeill) run into each other on their way to work. Julie is the successful producer of a hit podcast and is expecting a promotion, and Kris is an up-and-coming makeup influencer…
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29th Annual Online Film & Television Association Film Award Winners
This is my second year as a voting member of OFTA, and this years awards are now announced! The Online Film & Television Association has selected Anora as 2024’s best film. In addition, it was presented two other prizes. Sean Baker’s film about a exotic dancer who marries a Russian playboy who isn’t allowed to do so also claimed the awards for Breakthrough Performance Female and Male for stars Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov. It joins four films (The English Patient, Traffic, The Hurt Locker, and The Aritst) that have won the top prize while only winning two other awards. The record holder for fewest…
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‘My Dead Friend Zoe’ Hits Like a Ton of Bricks | Exclaim!
We’ve seen many films with protagonists haunted by their trauma and soldiers struggling to return home before; what sets My Dead Friend Zoeapart is its performances, specifically Sonequa Martin-Green’s. She proves herself beyond a shadow of a doubt, playing Merit constantly under stress, not only from what’s going on in her world but from Zoe’s presence, who promises to disappear forever if Merit ever speaks of her, something Merit can’t bring herself to do. Link: https://exclaim.ca/film/article/my-dead-friend-zoe-film-review
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Sebastian Stan Stands Out, Adam Pearson Wins Audiences Over In “A Different Man” | ForReel
…This first layer of the story is fascinating, with Stan playing Edwrard playing Guy playing Edward, and crushing it. He threads a precise needle with this performance in which he is very visibly still the same man he was but can project confidence while never letting anyone know whom he was before –even going so far as to strike up a relationship with Ingrid without letting her know who he is. This dichotomy is fascinating to watch as Stan creates two distinct body languages and switches between them at the drop of a hat, sometimes within the same scene. It’s…
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Win or Lose Season 1 Episode 1-4 Review | KeithLovesMovies
It’s hard to believe that Disney+ is now five years old, and it has yet to feature a series from Pixar. Films are both short and feature-length, yes, but while effectively every other branch of the Disney empire has branched out into streaming series, Pixar has taken the longest to arrive. It’s shocking not only because of the business mandate to do so but also because Pixar seems like the perfect division to do it. The good news then is that not only is the wait over, but Pixar has also brought their trademark creativity and story-first attitude to their first series, Win…
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Movie Review: Gripping Thriller “September 5” Lead By Strong Performance From John Magaro | ForReel
Everything that happens has happened for a first time. Terrorism as we know it has been with us since the late 18th century, but on September 5th, 1972, something happened for the first time. As the Palestinian militant group Black September stormed the Munich Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine more hostage, it was captured live on television. This was the first time a terrorist action was captured live, and the choices that the journalists doing that work made helped shape the conversation around broadcast and journalistic ethics in ways we still feel today. …
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Parthenope – Overly Distracted By Its Own Beauty | KeithLovesMovies
Paolo Sorrentino has made a name for himself by telling wistful, dreamlike stories about beautiful people existing in beautiful places. His latest film, Parthenope, is not an exception to this trend. Following the life of a young woman from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, as she lives and loves around Naples, Sorrentino seems intent on investigating beauty, both what it delivers and what it costs. It’s a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, which unfortunately may be too shallow to carry the themes it is trying to grapple with. The first shot of the title character, Parthenope (Dalla Porta), as she…
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‘The Gorge’ Is Promising but Empty | Exclaim!
In the earliest scenes of The Gorge, we meet our two protagonists, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Levi, a former Marine scout sniper, lives a life of solitude, wayward and clearly suffering from some form of PTSD. He receives a text telling him to report to a Marine base where he’s interviewed by Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver), a high-level somebody who can offer him a new sense of purpose. Meanwhile, Drasa, camped out in a hunter’s blind, waits for the perfect shot. After she takes it and kills a Russian Oligarch, she visits her dying father. She has received a…
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‘Disco’s Revenge’ Gets the Last Laugh | Exclaim!
Disco was a dirty word, at least when I was a teenager in the 1990s. It was an exiled musical style from a bygone era, only spoken about to ridicule. Even when the 20-year fashion cycle caught up to us and made bell-bottom — apologies, flared — cool again, we didn’t dare speak favourably of disco music, a genre thoroughly ostracized by that point. I’m still not sure why we were supposed to hate it, though. The funky bass riffs and danceable beats, it always seemed like a genre that should be popular, especially as R&B, soul and electronic dance music were…
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Kind Hearts and Coronets | The LAMBCast
Who would have thought that we’d get back to back MOTM Episodes? That happened because we had no show the first week of February and with a short month, things sneak up on you. This month all of the choices for MOTM were provided by the host,, it is his birthday month and that’s how we roll on the LAMB. The community however makes the final choice and they went for the oldest film on the list. All of these were blind spots for Richard, but we had a couple of LAMBs who enthusiastically endorsed “Kind Hearts and Coronets” from…
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‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’ Stands Alongside Animated Superhero Classics | Exclaim!
Spider-Man endures as one of the most iconic and relatable superheroes. He starts his journey when he’s just a kid, learning hard lessons early about the nature of responsibility — everyone knows the quote — and he spends his time trying to balance his normal life with his superhero life, to varying degrees of success. Peter Parker, in many ways, reflects us. He’s constantly pulled in different directions, sacrificing the life he wants for the aforementioned responsibility he feels to help the people of New York. We’ve all felt this push-pull of different obligations, wants and needs, and while his…
I am a Rotten Tomatoes-approved, freelance film & television critic and podcast host from Vancouver, Canada! I am a co-founder of the Cascadia Film & Television Critics Association and a voting member of the International Film Society Critics, Pandora International Critics, and the Online Film & Television Association.
I maintain bylines at Exclaim!, Awesome Friday!, That Shelf, ForReel, Movies We Texted About, KeithLovesMovies, and I can be heard regularly on the Contra Zoom Podcast and The LAMBCast.
