Ali M. Latifi

5 days ago | letterboxd.com | Ali M. Latifi |Cameron Crowe

★★★★★ An aspiring young journalist follows a rock band on tour in a well-written, well-acted movie starring Zooey Deschanel, Frances McDormand, Anna Paquin, Jason Lee, Billy Crudup, Fairuza Balk, Jimmy Fallon (in his single best role), Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kate Hudson as a character named for a Beatles song against a soundtrack of Stevie Wonder, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and Elton John, and including references to David Bowie and Bob Dylan, what's not to adore?...

1 week ago | letterboxd.com | Ali M. Latifi

You know how vintage luxury clothes just look and feel better than modern ones, that's sort of how it is with "classic" films. They just seem so much more artful and thought out than so many of today's mid-budget (which don't really exist anymore), blockbuster or God forbid, streaming productions. There's just something very studied and precise about them.

2 weeks ago | thenewhumanitarian.org | Ali M. Latifi

Republish this article When author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS Morning to promote his book The Message last September he was immediately confronted by journalist Tony Dokoupil. Taking command of the interview from his co-anchors, Dokoupil locked in on Coates and said the section of the book about life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”. By extremist, Dokoupil clearly meant a Palestinian. More precisely, a Muslim...

3 weeks ago | letterboxd.com | Ali M. Latifi |Jonathan Glazer

★★★★ It's a beautiful, artful and intellectual film that recalls elements of Ghost, Titanic (think about it, Anna is Rose, the mothers are well, the mothers, and Joseph is Cal) and the Sixth Sense (Anna is Malcolm, the mothers are well, the mothers and Sean is a much more assured and forceful Cole) but told through a minimalistic auteur's lens. The story is too thoughtful and minimal to be overly dramatic and have a major twist, but it's the artful direction and the careful performances that...

3 weeks ago | thenewhumanitarian.org | Ali M. Latifi

Republish this article When director Bill Guttentag teamed up with Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech entrepreneur and women’s rights activist, to make Rule Breakers, a fictionalised retelling of how Mahboob created Afghanistan’s girls’ robotic team, he said he set out to make an uplifting movie about a group of female long shots who band together to overcome massive challenges and secure an unprecedented victory. All while taking on the patriarchy. Think, A League of Their Own set in western...