​Is God Is (2026, directed by Aleshea Harris)
Review by Lauren Malara

Is God Is tells the story of twins Racine and Anaia. As children, they were disfigured in a fire started by their father. As adults struggling to find their place in the world, they receive a message directly from God, their mother. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord. With that, the twins set out on a pilgrimage to murder their father. 

Holy opening sequence. From the start, it is clear we are in for a wild ride. The fast-paced storytelling is complemented by screenwriter and director Aleshea Harris’ visual risk-taking. The film, like the stage play it is adapted from, is poetic and visceral. 

Most refreshing of all, every character is Black, yet there is not a single mention of racism. Thank God! The story is dark, but at the forefront is Black joy and beauty. Think Bill Gunn. The film is delightfully Black, from Janelle Monáe singing Prince’s Thunder to unforgettable dialogue like “YOooooooU AIN’T SH*T DEVIL!”

Then there are the gorgeous images of Blackness. Talking about waist beads, box braids, and drip. Filmed in New Orleans, the twins are serving looks on the levees, beneath the Crescent City Connection, and surrounded by Spanish moss hanging from old oaks in City Park. 

Ultimately, this is a story about what is seen and unseen. Acts of violence are hidden from the audience, until they aren’t. Much like the twins, we are allowed to turn away from the horrors of the past. We are given permission to overlook that which is too painful to see. But how do we heal scars if we ignore them? Is God Is asks us to face ourselves, accept the ugly truths, keep faith and hold on to hope for a happy ending. 
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Is God Is is playing at theaters across the city

​Soul crushing: Obsession
(2025, dir. Curry Barker)

The premise announces itself with disarming simplicity: a lovesick retail worker buys a New Age store novelty 'wishing stick' to win over his friend and colleague. What follows is a meditation on corrosive desire and modes of control dressed up as genre cinema.

Bear (Michael Johnston) works alongside Nikki (Inde Navarette) in the deadened environment of a strip mall music shop. They're best friends, and it’s purgatory for him. When Nikki’s talismanic gem necklace falls into a drain, Bear seizes the moment to employ a strategy, stumbling into the shop and leaving with a replacement stone and his occult geegaw.

The wish, delivered half jokingly to himself, is granted, and immediately delivers a romantic payload with algorithmic precision. Nikki becomes utterly, consumingly his. Her behavior – sexual, social, even spatial – knows no bounds.

The dream inserts itself into Bear’s life with such thoroughness that it begins to collapse under its own weight. Proximity becomes suffocation; devotion curdles into psychosis. Nikki’s personality has been eradicated - like a zoomer Nosferatu, she is appetite.

Director Curry Barker, emerging from YouTube into feature-length narrative, demonstrates no little ability, but this is Inde Navarrette's film. Her transformation – vocal, physical, psychological – charts the dissolution of selfhood with uncomfortable precision. We see personality become pathology, person become possession. Her occasionally-heard screams from the ‘beyond’ suggest something clawing its way up from some hellish ethereal substrata. In among the personalities is character work matching the maturity of Jessie Buckley or Anya Taylor-Joy. 

The violence, when it arrives, is brutal, but much more devastating even are the implications that we’re left with as the heft of the aftermath sits on us. Obsession is a parable about consent and love's totalitarian impulses. It's nasty, effective, and deeply uncomfortable. I can't say I completely enjoyed it, but I couldn't look away (PO).

Obsession is playing in cinemas across the city

Your fiends and neighbors: God of Carnage @ Le Petit Theatre
Review by Paul Oswell

Rhetoric, accusations, and various liquids are all airborne in Yasmina Reza's lauded God of Carnage (playing at Le Petit Theatre through May 17th). A Broadway sensation and Tony Award winner following its 2009 debut, it’s a single-act powder keg. Two couples engage in an escalating war of ethics that lays bare the self-interest lurking beneath bourgeois parenthood, and exposes the brittleness of human empathy.

Alan (Conrad Ricamora) and Annette (Julie Lake) are guests in the Brooklyn home of Veronica (Marie Lovejoy) and Michael (Joshua Mark Sienkiewicz), there to discuss an incident between their 11-year-old children. Alan and Annette's boy has attacked Veronica and Michael's son with a stick, dislodging two teeth in the process.

We begin with polite, if emotionally wary, cooperation. Alan and Annette emanate a cynically corporate, materialistic ethos as they navigate Veronica and Michael's more bohemian, everyman sensibilities. Michael, a purveyor of kitchen and bathroom fittings, appears to be an almost cartoonishly easy-going husband, while Alan repeatedly abandons the discussion, loudly addressing an escalating company matter on his cell phone. 

Minor quibbles about the precise wording of a legal statement soon metastasize, and masks slip as social cohesion strains against the pressures of self-interest, lubricated by an open bottle of rum.

The cast deftly navigates the emotional whiplash as hostility mounts. Ricamora juggles manipulation and fraying control, while Sienkiewicz remains charismatic even as his bonhomie is tested to its breaking point. Marie Lovejoy's Veronica appears superficially the most vulnerable, yet excavates reserves of strength to weather a tornado of aggression. Julie Lake pivots brilliantly between being hilariously indignant and inappropriately amorous before delivering a viscerally emphatic bout of nausea.

A.J. Allegra's direction maintains momentum from the opening moments, and the staging - a sunken lounge overlooked by an imposing work of art - proves striking without overwhelming the action. I won't spoil the pointed visual commentary embedded within the set design, but there's a wickedly effective Easter egg for the observant.

The careening drama may prove uncomfortable viewing for the conflict-averse, and while the themes don't descend to the abyssal depths of, say, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, there are moments of genuine intensity. Marital fissures test both couples, who become privileged adults wielding playground insults with guileless brutality.

That’s possibly the extent of the subtext in God of Carnage. I wondered about, say, a geopolitical metaphor, but Reza says in interviews that it is a straight dramatization of a real-life incident related to her by a friend. You may cringe imagining which awful details are possibly real, but the reassurance of at least some of it being fictional is a positive relief when the confrontation on stage is at its most lurid. 

God of Carnage is playing at Le Petit Theatre through May 17th. Click here for show information and ticketing 

​Movie Review: The Christophers (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

Steven Soderbergh returns to London after his recent spy caper Black Bag, although here the city recedes into the background, the scope being much more personal. Whereas Black Bag reveled in its Guy Ritchie-adjacent high jinx, The Christophers is a more delicate, intimate proposition.

The film is held together by two very different, complementary performances. Ian McKellen is Julian Sklar, an aging artist who was lauded in his heyday, but who has darkened his name with misanthropic behaviour that became his trademark. Lori (Michaela Coel) is a younger art restorer currently employed at a food truck. 

Sklar is entering his final years, beset by ill health and bouncing around his crumbing townhouse. His two children (so one-dimensional that they could have been played by anyone, but are Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning and, I’m so sorry to report, James Corden) have an eye on their inheritance, including some potentially valuable unfinished works from a series dedicated to Sklar senior’s old love: works collectively called The Christophers. 

The works have gained a near-mythical reputation in the art world. Sklar’s daughter - who formerly went to art school with Lori - concocts a scheme for Lori to become Julian’s new assistant. She would then have access to the unfinished paintings and could finish them herself for a cut of the inheritance. Lori tentatively agrees and is installed in the chaotic Sklar household. 

What follows is a touching two-hander; a talkative, play-like film that examines artistic life, what ownership of artworks or what ownership of ideas looks like, and the nature of family and the art world in general. 

McKellen is in his element, turning up the bitchiness and camp but with a script that is intelligent enough to dodge tackiness. Cole - who I have not seen since her incredible TV show I May Destroy You - is more nuanced and reserved. She moves with canny instincts through a moral quagmire, and the multiple twists in their relationship keep you engaged in the story. 
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The Christophers shows us that Soderbergh, even at this stage of his career, isn’t out of tricks or new directions. If he can still pull off pseudo-camp spy thrillers as well as deft character studies like this, then we can hopefully look forward to a solid couple of decades of unpredictable but loveable work. (PO)

The Christophers is showing at ​Prytania Theatres at Canal Place