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Jan 13, 2025 | 
theasiancut.com | Alisha Mughal
Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is unforgiving. The film, written and directed by Rasoulof, follows the disintegration of a small middle class family in Tehran in the immediate aftermath of the Women, Life, Freedom movement that sparked in 2022.
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Dec 27, 2024 | 
rogerebert.com | Alisha Mughal
Life after death, for the villainess at least, began in 1995 with children's author Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire's novel is a revisionist take on 1939's The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming,and the 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum upon which the Fleming film is based. As its title suggests, Wicked tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, whom Judy Garland's Dorothy kills accidentally with a bucket of water.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
filmdaze.net | Alisha Mughal
There’s something off about Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s Heretic, something rotten at its pit that leaves the film feeling macabre in its subtext in a way that feels unintentional. The film follows two young women, Mormon missionaries Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) as they visit the home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant).
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
filmdaze.net | Alisha Mughal
Velvety shadows cut into the pristine fabric of light like sharp daggers, and faces contort with devious abandon under the weight of a brutal existence. Amidst the cold indifference of a stony city, a warm friendship is first forged and then cataclysmically broken. A visual feast of glorious strangeness, The Girl with the Needle offers us a beautiful, audacious monster, the likes of which we haven’t seen in nigh on a hundred years.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
filmdaze.net | Alisha Mughal
In Melanie Oates’s Sweet Angel Baby, a small fishing town rests calmly against the roiling and raging Labrador Sea. Everything moves with the grain in town — if you grow up here, you either move away or stay forever, marrying your high school sweetheart and aging into your parents, maybe with a bigger and more expensive house.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
filmdaze.net | Alisha Mughal
As you watch Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, you can feel it crawl under your skin and make its way into your blood, hastening its pace until your heart is in your throat and you can taste steel. As you watch Santosh, you can feel it possess you, so much so that when you walk out after the credits, you feel blood on your hands.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
filmdaze.net | Alisha Mughal
I left We Live in Time with tears in my eyes, walking in a bleary-eyed bubble filled with sweetness and love blown by the tender end of the romantic drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. The bubble burst when I overheard a man leaving the theater behind me saying to a friend, “He was such a pushover!” In an instant, the bubble burst, and I was left to consider a wrinkle I felt in the film as I was watching, but that I wrote off as my own cynicism about romance.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
filmdaze.net | Alisha Mughal
In Belkis Bayrak’s Gülizar, Gülizar’s (Ecem Uzun) and her fiancé Emre’s (Bekir Behrem) gazes never manage to meet. As one looks up, the other looks down, and each finds their desire for understanding, for steady ground in the other, frustrated over the course of mere seconds. It’s small and apparently inconsequential, but Bayrak telegraphs this miniature tragedy time and again in the film, and each time it lands with heartbreaking heft within an already heartbreaking film.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
rogerebert.com | Alisha Mughal
Zohra Lampert's Jessica in 1971's "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" smiles as she suffers horrors. Not because she's particularly brave or placid - on the contrary, she's terrified more often than not - but because she knows what will happen if she tells her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman) or their friend Woody (Kevin O'Connor) about what she sees.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
investmentexecutive.com | Alisha Mughal
An advisor working in Quebec with National Bank of Canada (NBC) said of its compliance staff: “They are present but completely disconnected from reality.” This advisor added that the compliance department has “evolved the least” compared with other divisions, based on its use of older tools and “difficult” processes. “I don’t find the compliance department helpful,” said an advisor with Royal Bank of Canada’s RBC Financial Planning division.
