DesertTalkies Film Reviews!

 Whitney Houston:  I Wanna Dance With Somebody [2022] Starring: Naomi Ackie, Nafessa Williams, Clarke Peters Dorection by Kasi Lemmons Language: English And here is the third and final installment of my airplane movie watching. This movie first came on my radar in December of 2022, but I never got the chance to watch it because I was on holiday when it was in theatres, and the country I was visiting wasn't showing the film. By the time I got back, the movie had swiftly exited the movie timetables. This flight was my chance. I have been obsessed with Whitney Houston for years, and I thought it was high time that a biopic came out celebrating her life. I don't care what the critics have said, but I loved this movie. And any true Whitney fan would love it too.  Everyone knows Whitney Houston, one of the biggest music stars in the 1980s and 1990s in the US. A figurehead for African-American representation in the music industry, Houston broke all sorts of records to ascend to ...

 Bi-Madar [2022] Starring: Pejman Jamshidi, Mitra Hajjar, Amir Aghaee Director: Seyyed Morteza Fatemi Language: Farsi 'A finger is sometimes cut by a blade, sometimes with a piece of glass, sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a piece of paper. But all bruises are different from one another. Some cuts are a never-healing pain.' If this little snippet doesn't give you an idea of what this movie is like, I don't know what will.  Nobody knows how to show class divide in a film like the Iranians. Here's installment two of me watching foreign language movies on my flight.  One would think that motherhood is universal, and this movie, if anything, proves that. The story follows Amirali and Marjane, a wealthy couple living in urban Iran. Marjane longs for motherhood, whilst Amirali is passionately against it. However, this changes when Marjane finds a surrogate, Mahrouz, who is a poor, single woman trying to escape from an abusive relationship with her brother whilst sim...

 Love Life [2022] Starring: Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama, Atom Sunada Direction by Koji Fukada Language: Japanese Watching this movie was a product of a) not knowing what else to watch on the plane on the way to my vacation, b) knowing that I would like to start watching movies in languages I have not had experiences with, and c) being too tired to sleep. My first perception of the movie was very different to what I actually thought of it - the movie's poster on my seat's screen was quite colourful, whereas the film explored pretty dark themes of failed marriages and relationships, familial issues, and premature deaths with a lack of acceptance. It was very strange, because I feel like there was nothing completely stand out about the movie: nothing really excelled (in my opinion), but the direction was very cohesive and so everything came together quite nicely. Sometimes, a good watch is not something that has to be 'the best', but something that is good overall.  This...