Ryan Bordow

Seattle

Freelance Film Critic at AZ Big Media

Film critic @AZBigMedia, member of @SeattleCritics, theology devotee, and beloved household name (may depend on household).

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Articles

Review: 'Challengers' is pure, sexy fun

Apr 26, 2024 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

Challengers, an erotic sports drama from Call Me by Your Name’s Luca Guadagnino, feels like a movie reverse-engineered from tennis grunts sounding like sex noises. Tennis is sex, the film screams—or, in the verbatim words of one of its leads, “tennis is a relationship”—and every bead of sweat, lustful glance, and loud, sharp thwack springs from that idea, spicing up a love triangle with paddles, balls, and nets. For what is love but a round of game, set, match?
Here's what to watch at Phoenix Film Festival

Apr 1, 2024 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

Another year, another Phoenix Film Festival! The biggest event for AZ movie lovers is back, and it runs from April 4th to April 14th at the Harkins Scottsdale 101. I caught up with festival director Jason Carney to find out what’s exciting this year:READ ALSO: Read all of Ryan Bordow’s movie reviews hereRyan Bordow: What are some of the movies people can look forward to this year? Jason Carney: Obviously our opening night movie Sing Sing.
REVIEW: 'Dune: Part Two' is undeniably awe-inspiring

Mar 1, 2024 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

Dune: Part Two begins just like Part One: alien throat singing piercing the darkness before the studio logos appear. It surprised me the first time, and it also did the second time, because much of Part One had vanished from my mind in the last two and a half years. It’s an impressive film, daunting in scale and potential, but its subtext felt as incomplete as its narrative—a syllabus for a course yet to play out. We’ll unpack holy wars and space messiahs when the semester really starts.
Review: Here’s why ‘Madame Web’ gets zero stars

Feb 16, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Ryan Bordow

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Review: Here's why 'Madame Web' gets zero stars

Feb 16, 2024 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

Madame Web could never have gotten off on the right foot. It’s coming amid a superhero bust, for one—the MCU has overworked itself into a soulless content mill, DC is honoring its source material by starting all over again, and Sony is still floundering in the corner, dropping Marvel-adjacent duds like Venom and Morbius. (To my dismay, this universe too has an acronym: the SSU, “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.” There’s a Wikipedia page for it.
Review: 'May December' is a thought-provoking take on Mary Kay Letourneau story

Dec 1, 2023 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

May December is not an easy film to parse. There’s the backstory, based on a true story, of a teacher who “fell in love with” (heavy on the quotation marks) her 13-year-old student, bearing his children while serving time for child rape and later marrying and settling down with him when her prison sentence ended.
Review: There’s an emptiness to 'Priscilla' that needs real character

Nov 3, 2023 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

Priscilla Presley is precisely the kind of person you’d expect to write a memoir—marry one of music’s most public public figures and your life is narrativized, sensationalized, co-opted by the world until you tell your story yourself, preferably with “True Story” somewhere in the subtitle (in this case The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N’ Roll).
Review: 'Killers of the Flower Moon' is the work of a master

Oct 20, 2023 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

The first of many to die in Killers of the Flower Moon is seen dying from above. He’s an Osage Native American, poisoned, writhing on the floor and foaming at the mouth, the camera watching from above like a bystander god.
Review: 'Mister Organ' leaves a lasting impression

Oct 13, 2023 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

“Mister Organ.” (Images are courtesy of Madman Entertainment)David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist with a nose for the bizarre, came to mainstream attention with the documentary Tickled, which starts as an investigation of “competitive tickling” videos and ends up exposing a global, decades-long extortion operation forcing boys into making fetish content.
Review: 'The Creator' thuds from its rare heights

Sep 29, 2023 | azbigmedia.com | Ryan Bordow

The Creator. (Images are courtesy of 20th Century Studios)The most interesting thing about stories about AI (not stories by AI, which are much less interesting) is the mirror they hold up to human existence. If consciousness can arise from wires and nodes, are we any more than neurons and impulse? Not if we’re of intelligent design—but if computer intelligence can turn against humans, could human intelligence turn against God? The subject begs theological questions.