Ad Astra: A “Down to Earth” Sci-fi Film
Ad Astra won’t be this year’s big sci-fi space adventure but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. More space drama than space adventure, Brad Pitt’s emotional journey to the furthest reaches of our solar system as a blue collar astronaut will leave you in awe.
For My Sister, the formally ambitious micro-budget debut feature from Miami-based filmmaker Gabriel Rhenals, tackles the stigma related to mental illness with aplomb. Rhenals (who wrote, directed, shot, and edited the picture) navigates emotionally dense terrain with a gentle hand and light touch, providing a film that is both socially useful and surprisingly fun.
Continue reading For My Sister Skillfully Navigates Mental Illness Stigma
Released in 1968, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead film revolutionized zombies from menacing and mythic servants à la Halperin to the cannibalistic harbingers of the apocalypse that trudge across screens today.
Continue reading The Surprising and Enduring Importance of Night of the Living Dead
On April 6, 1993, a seventeen-year-old Zairian immigrant, Makome M’Bowole, was killed while unarmed and handcuffed to a radiator in police custody in Paris, France. What the French police would go on to call an “accident” became another incident in a widespread problem in France at the time, where over three hundred detained and unarmed people had been killed in police custody since the early 80s. Riots were commonplace after these killings in the communities of the victims, which were impoverished and comprised of racial and ethnic minorities as well as immigrants.
Taraji P. Henson has had a great run as of late. The last few years have witnessed the astronomical rise of her star; the long-beloved but long overlooked actress finally garnered the recognition she had worked two decades to attain. But this ain’t it, chief.
Continue reading Mind Reader Taraji Fails to Connect with the wishes of the Viewer
We hope to bring to you all with every newsletter a review of a classic, and not to mention awesome, film available to the FIU community through the Kanopy streaming service. This week we watched RWF’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a remake of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows set in a post-WW2 Germany still reeling from the recent tragedy and failure of Munich. Amidst this all, Emmi, an elderly Polish widow, and Ali, whose real name is El Hedi ben Salem Mubarak Muhammad Mustafa, but is nevertheless known by a name that has become shorthand for all Arab (namely North African) workers, strike up an unlikely relationship.
It is hard to find anything redeeming about Steven Knight’s new film Serenity. The director, who also wrote and produced the film, delivers a movie completely lacking any self-awareness with a shaky premise, woeful one-liners, and a baffling plot. It should have been telling that a film with this much star power would see its release date pushed back twice.