REVIEW: Monsoon [2018]

Don’t let one tragedy cause another. The start of Miguel Duran‘s Monsoon is like its own short film. We meet John (Austin Lyon) and Sarah (Katherine Hughes) the weekend the former is supposed to be moving east for Cornell while she remains closer to home in the Arizona desert. They’re best friends and have been since childhood thanks to living next door to one another. There’s an easy rapport between them that flirts with romanticism just before they shake themselves awake to carry on a platonic camaraderie unencumbered by the…

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REVIEW: The Diary of a Teenage Girl [2015]

“And now the making of a harlot” You don’t realize what might be missing from a film until it’s staring you in the face elsewhere. I love The Perks of Being a Wallflower for its universality, authentic emotions, and resonance, but there was something absent I could only see while watching Marielle Heller‘s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner‘s graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl. To say it is honesty would be a disservice to Perks because Stephen Chbosky‘s fictional memoir is honest as far as the subject matter and…

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