by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
All of Us Strangers | 2023
It's difficult not to get personal writing about a film like Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. I didn't really write about it when I first saw it back in December of last year. I managed a half-hearted piece for my top ten write-up (where it came in at number five), but it somehow felt too close, too raw, for me to fully grapple with.
Matt and Mara | 2024
In the days since I first saw Kazik Radwanski's Matt and Mara, I've found myself reflecting on it quite a bit. It's an unassuming film, small in scale and short in length, but its impact is something quite lovely and lingering: an unexpectedly profound reflection on loneliness and the human connections and disconnections that result from it.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice | 2024
Coming out some 36 years after the original Beetlejuice, Tim Burton's new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn't exactly striking while the iron was hot. While the first film was a hit in the 80s, its reputation has only grown over the following decades, becoming a cult classic and Hot Topic staple.
Alien: Romulus | 2024
Taken on its own, Alien: Romulus is a solid film. It is difficult, however, to analyze franchise films like this in a vacuum, especially when this is the seventh film in the venerable Alien series (ninth if you count the Alien vs. Predator films). To paraphrase Kamala Harris, Alien: Romulus exists within the context of all that came before it.
In her 2008 essay "Chungking Express: Electric Youth" (included as an extra in the booklet of the Criterion Blu-Ray), critic Amy Taubin compares Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express to Jean-Luc Godard's seminal 1966 film, Masculin Feminin. It's a perceptive parallel, acknowledging both films as quintessential products of their time in depicting youthful romance and disaffection.