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Let’s Rock: The Dialectic of the Sublime in ‘Twin Peaks’ – Film Daze
Music is a big part of Twin Peaks’ residents’ lives. This is made most evident in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of the show which picks up where the second season left off in 1991. Nearly every episode of The Return contains a musical number. This isn’t just a needle-drop synced perfectly…
Cannes 2025 Review: ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ – Film Daze
Akira Kurosawa's High and Low is the kind of film you watch in a state of quasi-paralysis. The 1963 noir is both taut moral thriller and enthralling procedural — a film of relentless jaw-clenching tension and compulsive rhythm that sets the bar for everything it does. In short, it's a masterpiece, and so it was…
Cannes 2025 Review: ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ – Film Daze
Wes Anderson is, quite famously, a details guy. Perfect symmetry, immaculate composition, and absolute devotion to every tiny element of his dollhouse creations — his work (and that of his behind-the-scenes collaborators) is dazzling in its dedication to the little things. The Phoenician Scheme, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is no outlier in…
Review: At Cannes, ‘The Mastermind’ Said the Unspoken – Film Daze
Attending the Cannes Film Festival — like many things right now — is a dissonant experience. In between the buzzy back-to-back screenings, star-studded events, and myriad other shiny distractions this year, there were harrowing news headlines to be read that made all this focus on celebrity feel obscene, knowing a genocide was raging, virtually unobstructed,…
‘Good Meat’: Mickey 17’s Little Deaths – Film Daze
But sex—specifically recreational, playful, non-essential and maybe even politically ill-advised or frowned upon sex—is spoken of, thought of, cherished, and communicated through in Mickey 17 in a way that touts it as not just important, but a key aspect of existing.
‘From Ground Zero’ Review: A Vital Testament to Palestinian Resilience – Film Daze
“The epic [is] for Israelis and the documentary for Palestinians.” That’s how legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is said to have wryly described Palestinian cinema — as being confined by its political reality to capturing only that reality. In the weeks following October 2023 — the period in which From Ground Zero was shot — that…
Sundance 2025 Review: ‘Middletown’ – Film Daze
Documentary directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ most popular documentaries, Boys State and Girls State, follow two groups of carefully selected high schoolers tasked with hypothetically creating a democratic government from the ground up, as part of a prestigious summer program. In the process, the subjects of Girls State and Boys State often find themselves…
TIFF ‘24 Review: There is Something Off About ‘Heretic’ – Film Daze
There’s something off about Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s Heretic, something rotten at its pit that leaves the film feeling macabre in its subtext in a way that feels unintentional. The film follows two young women, Mormon missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) as they visit the home of Mr. Reed…
TIFF ‘24: The Tender Embrace of ‘Sweet Angel Baby’ – Film Daze
In Melanie Oates’s Sweet Angel Baby, a small fishing town rests calmly against the roiling and raging Labrador Sea. Everything moves with the grain in town — if you grow up here, you either move away or stay forever, marrying your high school sweetheart and aging into your parents, maybe with a bigger and more expensive…
TIFF ‘24 Review: The Immense Power of ‘Santosh’ – Film Daze
As you watch Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, you can feel it crawl under your skin and make its way into your blood, hastening its pace until your heart is in your throat and you can taste steel. As you watch Santosh, you can feel it possess you, so much so that when you walk out after…
TIFF ‘24 Review: The Insatiate Horror of ‘The Girl with the Needle’ – Film Daze
Velvety shadows cut into the pristine fabric of light like sharp daggers, and faces contort with devious abandon under the weight of a brutal existence. Amidst the cold indifference of a stony city, a warm friendship is first forged and then cataclysmically broken. A visual feast of glorious strangeness, The Girl with the Needle offers…
TIFF ‘24 Review: ‘We Live in Time’ is Uneven and Underbaked – Film Daze
I left We Live in Time with tears in my eyes, walking in a bleary-eyed bubble filled with sweetness and love blown by the tender end of the romantic drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. The bubble burst when I overheard a man leaving the theater behind me saying to a friend, “He was…
TIFF ‘24 Review: ‘Gülizar’ Steadily Thwarts Expectations – Film Daze
In Belkis Bayrak’s Gülizar, Gülizar’s (Ecem Uzun) and her fiancé Emre’s (Bekir Behrem) gazes never manage to meet. As one looks up, the other looks down, and each finds their desire for understanding, for steady ground in the other, frustrated over the course of mere seconds. It’s small and apparently inconsequential, but Bayrak telegraphs this…
D’A Film Festival 2024 Reviews: ‘Las Largas Sombras’/’Past Lies’ & ‘Family Portrait’ – Film Daze
D’A Film Festival 'Las Largas Sombras'/'Past Lies' Review: Death on the Spanish Coastline in this Queer Coming-Of-Age Series The first episode of 'Las Largas Sombras' (streaming on Hulu as 'Past Lies') made its spectacular debut at Barcelona's D’A Film Festival. The highly anticipated miniseries adaptation of the bestselling Spanish novel Las Largas Sombras premiered its…
‘All We Imagine As Light’ is Luminous and Lyrical – Film Daze
"You have to believe in the illusion, or you'll go mad." So says an anonymous speaker in Payal Kapadia's glittering All We Imagine As Light. The film opens on documentary footage of Mumbai's hustle and bustle, accompanied by voiceovers from real people who moved to the metropolis seeking work. With more than a touch of…
‘The Apprentice’ Is an Unimaginative but Serviceable Look at the Making of a Monster – Film Daze
Director Ali Abbasi's breakthrough came by way of Border, a singularly strange fairy tale about a troll who stumbles upon a child trafficking ring while working as a Swedish customs agent. Six years later, there’s little trace of that same eccentricity or ambition in his latest offering, The Apprentice, which is Abbasi's take on a…
Interview with ‘The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed’ Director Joanna Arnow – Film Daze
“I think that unfortunately in this day and age, people really don’t want to see women expressing sexuality as having agency [...] I see BDSM—and any sort of consensual and safe sexual activity—as a healthy form of self-expression, that any kind of person should be able to pursue.
Sundance 2024: ‘Black Box Diaries’ Exposes the Flaws Inherent to Criminal Justice Responses to Sexual Assault – Film Daze
Black Box Diaries highlights that, as it currently stands, we will not find justice through pathways run by patriarchy and the valuing of the upper-class and higher-powered voices over the marginalized.
Sundance 2024 Review: ‘Daughters’ Portrays the Devastating Reverb of American Incarceration – Film Daze
Daughters is essential viewing in its insistence that we sit with the pain, grief, and ongoing that countless American families sit with daily under the oppression of the modern, for-profit prison system.