Ronnie Dunham (Mekhi Phifer) is a misguided young man who somehow lost his way years before, and found himself under the control of Rodney (Delroy Lindo), a kindly shop owner who is also a fearsome drug kingpin, supplying crack cocaine to the residents of the nearby Brooklyn projects. He employs Ronnie, who adopts the street…

Everyone wants their art to become iconic – there’s nothing quite as special as the moment in which your work becomes definitive of the particular art form, regardless of the specific area in which you operate. However, the challenge that comes with this kind of reputation is the tendency for the work to become so…

Looking back in film history can sometimes be a challenging endeavour, especially when focusing on a particular subject or convention that may have been emphasized as being particularly noteworthy when in actuality, it was overblown by someone combination of nostalgia and retrospective respect. This often happens when we’re considering certain filmmakers who are widely seen…

When it comes to taking matters in your own hands, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (Korean: 마더) is a film that redefines the concept. A darkly comical psychological thriller, very much analogous to the director’s intentions as a social commentator, this film proves Bong as someone who can take the most conventional concept and turn it into…

The murder mystery is a sub-genre of storytelling that has been popular for nearly as long as stories have been told. Stretching from the earliest days of Greek tragedies, straight through to the Shakespearean era, right into the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and their various narrative offspring such as the hardboiled…

Joker is the rare kind of film that wasn’t supposed to work. There were so many elements that went into the making of this film that would’ve suggested that it was heading for failure – in all honesty, who of us were expecting the director of The Hangover and its contemptable sequels to succeed in…

Any film that reserves the prestigious “and” credit for cultural icon Cardi B is going to instantly be something special. Naturally, Hustlers is not only an extremely entertaining film, but it is also one of the most unique cinematic experiences of the year, a hilarious and irreverent crime story that takes every opportunity it is…

“We lived in utter loneliness, neither here nor there” These words are spoken by Holly (Sissy Spacek), as she watches her boyfriend, Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) stand in the wilderness just outside South Dakota, in quiet contemplation. We find ourselves, like the characters, in the rural regions of the Southern United States sometime in the…

I do wish I knew what Sidney Lumet was trying to do with Serpico, but from the looks of it, not even he was entirely sure. Most definitely not a bad film by any means (in fact, it has moments of excellence consistently throughout), but rather one caught between genres and tonal shifts, whereby it…

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a private detective operating out of Los Angeles. He is a fiercely independent investigator, choosing to work by himself rather than choosing to get a job at an agency, even though he is frequently pursued to lend his services to the “information factories” as he calls them. His latest case…