Category: REVIEWS

I think I had a date with someone like Arifa once. Just once. Arifa (Shermin Hassan) wears her heart on her sleeve and she has no filter when it comes to telling people exactly what she thinks of them.

She also has a lot on her mind as well, she worries about her mental health, she worries that she has never met the right man who loves her as much as she loves them and her father, Hameed (Jeff Mirza) is illegally selling tobacco. Then one day she meets a mysterious man called Ric (Luca Pusceddu) who says that he runs a professional gaming business, however she isn’t really sure she can trust him.

Arifa is the story of a young woman living in London and getting to an age in her life where she thinks she should have everything sorted. Everybody in her life has different advice to give her as far as what she needs to do to be happy but Arifa decides that she is fine the way that she is and that everybody else should just deal with it.

As the film follows Arifa it shows a comedic, dramatic and sometimes emotional story that I’m sure most people will identify with. If you don’t know or have never met somebody like Arifa then you probably are like her and should probably look at the way you treat other people.

However, although Arifa is a blunt and stubborn character, it’s to her credit that Hassan is able to find the humanity in Arifa and puts that into her performance. Hassan fleshes out Arifa into a relatable and three-dimensional character, even when at times the audience may not entirely agree with her behaviour.

Arifa is also a story about personal growth and self-awareness and Sadia Saeed’s script is often funny, honest and sprinkled with an undertone of what it’s like to live as a brown skinned woman in the 21^st century. The casual racism that undoubtedly comes from Saeed’s first hand experience, is often treated with humour but it also gives a very realistic look at how people whose skin colour is anything but white are treated today.

From casual conversations assuming things about Arifa to profiling somebody because of the colour of their skin, Saeed’s script reminds the audience of how easily people can jump to the wrong conclusions because of what they read in the media, again fleshing out the reflection of modern-day London.

Arifa is a funny, relatable and naturalistic look into a young woman’s life and the hidden pressures in a person’s life who most would just judge on first impressions. Most films would just portray Arifa’s abrupt and obnoxious behaviour for laughs, but the film is all the better for portraying a real person with hopes for the future and the audience will leave Arifa feeling hopeful as well.

While Kalani (JoiStarr) works hard in school with a desire to get into Yale, the actions of her family and friends threaten to keep her contained within Harlem as she struggles to push against the world that’s holding her back. 

Director, Robert Rippberger’s film is at its strongest when it hones in on Kalani and her personal struggles. Strive touches upon her endeavour to uphold her life at school, where she is ostracised and singled out based on the colour of her skin and her social standing. Sadly, these moments seem fleeting in the 83-minute runtime, with the lion’s share of the narrative is fully submerged in Kalani’s family dynamic, which is far less engaging and begins to test the patience of its audience after a while. 

Throughout Strive, I desperately wanted the film to explore the themes it alludes to in the establishing scenes. To have the courage to champion Kalani’s story on its own merits without weighing it down with melodrama. JoiStarr is a great actress but we only get a frustratingly meagre taste of that. She has a commanding screen presence in each scene but there are so many superfluous elements thrown into the mix that you lose that brilliance intermittently.

Where this could have been an inspirational story, focusing on the plight of this young, bright, black teenage girl and the racial and class-based adversities she faces, the narrative suffers through a whistle-stop tour of clichés. Picture an entire year of soap opera plots in under 85 minutes with each one detracting from the seed of a wonderful story. 

There are some standout elements to Strive that offer an enticing glimpse at the future for some of its actors. We get three tender scenes with Danny Glover as tutor (and confidant) Mr. Rose with these brief pauses in the cycle of onscreen suffering seeming like islands in which I wanted the film to vacation.

These moments were truly touching, with Glover and JoiStarr radiating positive energy that the rest of the piece was lacking. In a movie touching upon a full bingo card of melodramatic plot threads, the father/ daughter, teacher/ student, friendship dynamic was screaming to be explored further.

Strive will be released later this year.

Men In Black: International: The BRWC Review.

The Men in Black franchise is one that has definitely declined in quality with every sequel and I think that most people can agree with that. Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1997 blockbuster original film was an extremely clever, hilarious, and exciting picture that won the hearts of many upon release and is still beloved decades later. Its eventual sequel was not received as highly though. It was certainly not as good as its predecessor, but still had its moments, whereas the third installment fell short on practically every level. For many years, audiences thought that Men in Black 3 would be the final entry in the exciting series until now.

As far as similarities go between the original trilogy and Men In Black: International, one of the biggest is its sense of chemistry between its two lead protagonists. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were remarkable as Agent J and Agent K, respectively, and the exact same thing can and should be said about Hemsworth and Thompson here. This does not mark the first time these two actors have been on screen together, as they have shared the screen together in Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame most notably. The chemistry they exude in this film is some of the best of the entire year so far. They are lightning in a bottle.

Long time fans of the series as well as general moviegoers can expect to see some over the top, zany action sequences that the franchise has become known for at this point. However, do not get your hopes up thinking that there will be dozens of these moments because they are rather limited this time around. It definitely would have been nice to have seen more of the wacky chaos that we are used to thus far. There are really only a handful of these scenes which was a bit of a disappointment, especially considering that this is a series of films in which agents wear sunglasses, tote around gigantic futuristic weaponry and attempt to crack down on other worldly threats.

In addition, some of the computer generated imagery looked somewhat unfinished which is weird considering that this is a film being released in 2019, and the visual effects in the aforementioned films do not look too much different than this one. There is one character in Men In Black: International named Pawny, who does work quite well in a few scenes, and he is one of the only CGI characters that does not look too bad. It is the other creatures shown in various moments that just seemed off.

Some of the acting here can be a bit off and sometimes just downright weak as well, most notably from Liam Neeson who portrays High T, the head of the United Kingdom branch of the Men in Black organization. Most of the time he is on screen, his acting comes off as a bit wooden sadly.

The humor here is one of the biggest problems. The original two movies are consistently comedic throughout the entire running time. It is rather apparent that writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway were really making an effort to make Men In Black: International a hilarious film with a sense of cleverness to it much like the others but there are never any moments of true comedy shining through. Furthermore, the story was never one that is not all that intriguing, mostly because all of the eventual plot twists are ones that many will be able to see coming from a mile away.

Mari. By Fergus Henderson.

At the start of Mari, written and directed by Georgia Parris, we witness an extraordinary, kinetic dance sequence, the kind that reminds you of the sheer primal power of dance as an art form. Charlotte (Bobbi Jene Smith) is choreographing and leading a performance which she hopes will finally put her on the map and break her out of obscurity (as well as the expectations she has of herself). From what we see of her dance, she is ready to take off.

In this opening sequence Parris takes us on a tour de force of filmmaking and storytelling, alternating between electrifying flights of movement and moments of stillness, as Charlotte realises that she is pregnant. Immediately after this revelation she receives a phone call: her grandmother Mari is about to die. She must reunite with her family, whom we sense she is not all that close to, as they wait by comatose Mari’s bedside. From here on the film slows to a glacial pace, confined mainly to dimly lit interiors. From movement to stasis.

For a while this change of pace is very effective. Anyone that has been in this situation, waiting for the inevitable death of a loved one, knows that the world suddenly becomes a very different, barren place, where one is rendered mute by sorrow. Parris observes the tentative bringing-together of Charlotte’s family, all struggling with the situation and with each other. This family has not been happy for a while, we sense.

Parris uses Smith’s physical dexterity to foreground themes of embodiment and mortality, focusing on the tactile response Charlotte has to the experience, demonstrating great psychological insight for how our mind searches for the physical to make sense of the metaphysical. We find out that Mari was also an artist like Charlotte, which provides a sense of lineage, a passing on of vision, which whilst abstract in concept is rendered lucidly by Parris’ economical script. Charlotte’s estranged sister Lauren, who as we learn is experiencing her own private grief, is played with nuance by Madeline Worrall, while their mother Margot (Phoebe Nicholls) alternates between expansive magnanimity and insular anger. 

Unfortunately, for all the depth and relatability on offer, the film’s slow pace does eventually begin to wear, as does its less-is-more approach to characterisation. Mari’s dialogue follows in the vein of realism that presupposes that in the real world people never say what they think until pushed to their limits and that silence is more realistic than communication. 

The film relies on gesture and inference to such an extent that we begin to feel as if we’re being held at arm’s length, shown things we can understand but never brought fully into the characters’ worlds. As a result the film’s emotional climax, whilst resolutely well-observed, does not feel like a catharsis. We are left to wonder what has really happened to the hearts and souls of the characters we have been watching for the last hour and a half. Perhaps this ambiguity is the point, and there is plenty to admire in Mari, but it does not hit quite as hard as it could.