Leila Latif

2 weeks ago | avclub.com | Leila Latif

Rick And Morty has always contained paradoxical multitudes: It’s chaotic but meticulously constructed, cynical yet sentimental, silly and searing in equal measure. But in its eighth season—its second without co-creator and former voice of both leads, Justin Roiland—the show finds itself in a bit of an existential free fall, no longer driven by vengeance or making a comeback post-scandal. Instead, it drifts. It’s clever, imaginative, and hilarious, for sure, but palpably lacking in purpose.

2 weeks ago | hyphenonline.com | Leila Latif

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme opens with a plane crash and a pitch-black punchline. An unsuspecting passenger is blown in two, the panicking pilot is fired mid-air, and Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), a puppet-master industrialist, calmly survives his sixth assassination attempt. He walks through a cornfield with a nasty black eye and a bloodied vestigial organ protruding from his torso, informing the press that reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.

1 month ago | hyphenonline.com | Leila Latif

It’s incredible to think that someone so jovial as Babak Anvari — who describes his collaborators as “amazing” and “wonderful”, and finds interview questions “fascinating” — is capable of dreaming up such twisted nightmares. The British-Iranian director first burst onto the scene in 2016 with his elegant horror feature Under the Shadow, in which a mother and daughter are tormented by a djinn in 1980s Tehran.

1 month ago | hyphenonline.com | Leila Latif

Usman Riaz’s The Glassworker is a meticulous work that marks not just a milestone for Pakistani cinema, but a reminder of the possibility of filmmaking magic when true ambition and fresh perspectives are present in the craft. As the country’s first fully hand-drawn animated feature, The Glassworker is burdened with an enormous weight to prove the mettle of a potential new well of creativity.

2 months ago | hyphenonline.com | Leila Latif

The field of animation allows creatives to truly let loose, and #1 Happy Family USA from Emmy-nominated actor, director and producer Ramy Youssef (Ramy, Mo, The Bear) is no exception, mining the darkest of laughs and the most surreal of images amid news cycles often choked with heartbreak. The new Amazon Prime comedy, billed as being “from the childhood nightmares of Ramy Youssef”, blends autobiographical humour with razor-sharp cultural critique.