CINEMA | Growing 'Minari' – Steven Yeun Finds His American Dream

"Grandma smells like Korea."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung (no relation) has made a startlingly moving and quietly emotional semi-autobiographical immigrant story set on a rural farm in 1980s Arkansas. Starring Steven Yeun (Chung's cousin by marriage) as a version of the writer/director's own farmer father, Minari tells a wondrously intimate tale of assimilating to the American Dream.

KAFFE | Aperture Coffee Bar x Riley Park–Little Mountain

Riley Park–Little Mountain—The photography-themed Aperture Coffee Bar's second location on Main Street feels much more unassuming than it actually is.

SCREEN | Vanessa Kirby Breaks Apart 'Pieces of a Woman'

"She got it gray like her soul. That's her spirit colour."

Bron Studios

British actress Vanessa Kirby gives a career-best performance as an expectant mother turned grieving one in Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó's messy tragedy piece, Pieces of a Woman. Despite the tour-de-force acting and high sense of tense melodrama, the intimate film folds parental suffering into a basic melange of circumstantial grief and dramatized trauma.

GENRE | A 'Promising Young Woman' Gets Her Revenge

"That is just asking for it."

Focus Features / LuckyChap Entertainment

British actress and filmmaker Emerald Fennell, who recently played Camila Parker Bowles in The Crown in addition to showrunning season two of Killing Eve, makes her feature directorial debut with a twisted dark comedy revenge thriller with a deceptively bright bubblegum pop gloss to it. Starring Carey Mulligan as a contemporary femme fatale, Promising Young Woman is all about an underestimated bombshell in disguise exacting her own form of disturbing vigilante justice against would-be male rapists.

CINEMA | Top 10 Films of 2020

Each film reviewed where linked below:

1) First Cow (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

2) The Nest (dir. Sean Durkin)

3) Lovers Rock (dir. Steve McQueen)

4) I'm Thinking of Ending Things (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

5) Minari (dir. Lee Isaac Chung)

6) The Climb (dir. Michael Angelo Covino)

7) American Utopia (dir. Spike Lee)

8) Swallow (dir. Carlo Mirabella-Davis)

9) Da 5 Bloods (dir. Spike Lee)

10) The Vast of Night (dir. Andrew Patterson)

CINEMA | Gal Gadot Throws Back to 'Wonder Woman 1984'

"This world is not ready for all that you will do."

Warner Bros. Pictures / DC Films

Director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot both return for their long-delayed but still highly anticipated and jam-packed DC Comics superhero sequel set some sixty-five years after the first film in WWI. Wonder Woman 1984 feels more than just an unabashed throwback to the long bygone spirit of the original 1970-80s Superman films as a bright and colourful adventure romance designed to comment on our current cultural political climate through glossy '80s culture contrasted with acts of kindness.

SCREEN | A Jazzy Afterlife – Pixar's 'Soul' Meets Body

"There's a soul missing."

Walt Disney Pictures / Pixar Animation Studios

Pixar Animation creative head Pete Docter delves further into the soft mechanics of human experience for another life-affirming animated embodiment of our very being. Soul uses jazz music and the nature of existence to rethink what it is to live and have a purpose. Through glowing orbs visualizing said souls and humorous riffs on everyday life, the existentially warm film sure feels pleasing and surprisingly adult.

SCREEN | On Being Vietnamese – 'No Crying at the Dinner Table'

"So let us listen. That's all."

Travelling Distribution

I have never seen anything so effectively document exactly what it feels like growing up in a Vietnamese-Canadian household than Toronto-born (now Montreal-based) filmmaker Carol Nguyen's award-winning documentary short film, No Crying at the Dinner Table. In the fifteen-minute short, she interviews her parents and sister as they therapeutically describe internalized past traumas around death and their lives as refugees artfully intercut with intimate b-roll footage of them performing personal daily rituals revealing their vulnerabilities.

CINEMA | Tom Hanks Spreads the 'News of the World'

"We're all hurtin'."

Universal Pictures / Playtone

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass and his Captain Phillips star Tom Hanks reteam for a sombre but earnest screen adaptation of author Paulette Jiles' 2016 western novel News of the World. Greengrass' road film opens in 1870 after the repercussions of the American Civil War in a still divided South. It actually feels surprisingly a lot like Cast Away except in the West with an orphaned German girl raised by natives instead of a volleyball.