M3GAN review — Batteries charged for killer doll movie

January 16, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Gerard Johnstone | Written by Akela Cooper and James Wan | 102 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime Writer-Producer-Director James Wan has some experience with murderous doll movies, but this isn't any Annabelle picture, this is something quite different. M3GAN, and, yeah, that's a title the producers are bound to regret when they…Read More

Broker review — Easy-going road movie takes the scenic route

January 14, 2023 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda | 129 min | ▲▲▲△△ A version of this review was posted in September 2022 from the Toronto International Film Festival. Back in 2019 Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters got a lot of approbation and awards. It's solid in a lot of ways, and it's overlong and dramatically delicate. This new…Read More

Holy Spider review — Ruthless serial killer movie supersedes genre

January 13, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Ali Abbasi | Written by Abbasi and Afshin Kamran Bahrami | 116 min | ▲▲▲▲△ An earlier version of this review was posted from the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022. Holy Spider is a pitch-black serial killer thriller from the Swedish-Iranian director of 2018's fantasy love story, Border. This is a…Read More

Shin Ultraman review — Bizarro bombast from Japan

January 12, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Shinji Higuchi | Written by Hideaki Anno | 118 min | ▲▲▲△△ | In Cinemas (Cineplex Event Screen) I wasn't especially familiar with the Japanese Ultraman series beyond knowing it showed up in the 1960s in the genre shared with Godzilla (Toho Studios is a producer here) with all those radioactive monsters known…Read More

FITI’s Most Anticipated Films of 2023

January 8, 2023 flawintheiris

Inspired by a recent episode of The Empire Film Podcast, I though you might be interested in the feature films I'm most looking forward to in 2023. This is a selection representing the varying levels of my curiosity, looking at feature films expected to arrive on either streaming or in cinemas. You'll see a lot…Read More

The Pale Blue Eye review — Heart of gothic procedural tells a tale

January 5, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Scott Cooper | Written by Cooper, based on the novel by Louis Bayard | 128 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Netflix Scott Cooper is a director of gritty genre pictures. Some, like the western, Hostiles, deliver a potent brew of desperate characters in an unforgiving setting, while others, like the gangster drama Black Mass,…Read More

How many films did I watch in 2022?!

January 2, 2023 flawintheiris

Before you start to think all I do on this blog is make lists, this is the last for this season, I promise. Here's a list of every single movie I watched in 2022, partly inspired by filmmaker Edgar Wright who keeps a similar list. Between keeping up with brand new features, both on streaming…Read More