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Ezra
Reviews Ezra Last month, I was a juror in the Narrative Feature…
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Bad Behaviour
Reviews Bad Behaviour “Never give in to hope.” Lucy (Jennifer Connelly) writes…
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If
Reviews If If you’re lucky enough to attend an early screening of…
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Dìdi
Reviews Dìdi It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I return to a…
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Action
The Convert
Reviews The Convert In his latest movie “The Convert,” director and co-writer Lee Tamahori returns home to New Zealand for a look at a fraught chapter in the country’s history. Bringing his action movie bona fides from the James Bond entry “Die Another Day” and “xXx: State of the Union,” Tamahori hews intense dramatic moments over battlefields and tense conversations as two factions of indigenous Māori wrestle for control while British colonists set up one of their first claims on the nation. Our main character enters these most turbulent times advocating for peace and finds few listeners. This is not…
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Horror
Oddity
Reviews Oddity “Caveat,” Damian Mc Carthy’s directorial debut, was unnerving in the extreme. So, too, is his follow-up, “Oddity”. “Oddity” is, if anything, even more unsettling. In “Caveat,” Mc Carthy created a creeping sense of dread and outright terror, sometimes from merely pointing the camera at a slightly ajar door. Mc Carthy has patience as a filmmaker. He can wait. He doesn’t try to overwhelm with easy jump-scares. He allows the sense of uneasiness to build and build. Both “Caveat” and “Oddity” share a fascination with potentially supernatural objects, maybe cursed, but also maybe sentient. In “Caveat,” it’s a toy…
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Drama
The Way We Speak
Reviews The Way We Speak Set at a conference for “thought leaders,” “The Way We Speak” is an ambitious drama that puts its cameras on a handful of characters wading into an arena of intellectual combat while dealing with personal challenges that threaten to unravel them. The performances are uniformly excellent. That all the key players (save for the lead) are not yet in-demand names is even more impressive. They carry themselves like stars (or known-quantity character actors) even if we don’t know them. Faith versus Reason is the main attraction: a middle-aged writer named Simon Harrington (Patrick Fabian of “Better…
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Documentary
Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam
Reviews Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam Before we get too deep into the story of Lou Pearlman, a pop music kingmaker who built his empire on a Ponzi Scheme, something needs to be addressed about Netflix’s three-part docuseries “Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam.” As technology advances, there are going to be deeper and deeper questions about what’s allowed in non-fiction filmmaking, and the creators of this series wade into what I would call some professionally murky waters. Pearlman himself died in 2016, but he published an autobiography titled Band, Brands, & Billions and the series uses passages from…
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Comedy
Dìdi
Reviews Dìdi It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I return to a film to discover my initial gut reaction might have been a bit too harsh. When I first watched Sean Wang’s emotionally brutal coming of age film “Didi” at Sundance—where it won the festival’s audience award—I thought his follow-up to his Oscar-nominated animated short (“Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó”) was, at best, a carbon copy of the kind of tropey, saccharine mining of memories that’s become Sundance’s forte. I could see passing references to “Eighth Grade,” “Skate Kitchen,” “Mid90s,” “Minari,” and “Minding the Gap”—better films that seemed to capture…
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Amazon Prime
The Idea of You
Reviews The Idea of You Tell me if this sounds familiar: A romantic couple, one American, one British, one the proprietor of a small, very narrow business, happy with family and friends but lonely and a little lost, one a global superstar, but lonely and a little lost. Both are spectacularly beautiful. And there’s a reason the star has to visit the ordinary person’s home, where a disgusting beverage is offered, plus a gift of a painting that carries a lot of meaning and constant predatory paparazzi. Yes, you will recognize a lot of the elements of “Notting Hill” in “The…
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Action
My Spy The Eternal City
Reviews My Spy The Eternal City The original “My Spy” from 2020 was a surprisingly amusing romp with a sly, subversive streak that set it apart from the usual family-friendly, action-comedy fare. Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman had solid chemistry, with Kristen Schaal serving as a wonderfully weird sidekick. And it came out on streaming a few months into the pandemic, so it felt like a welcome diversion during a difficult time. Four years later, “My Spy The Eternal City” arrives, and it takes this playful story in a strangely darker direction. It’s hard to tell who this movie is for: It’s too silly for adults, yet way…
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Comedy
The Fabulous Four
Reviews The Fabulous Four If you’re a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you’re typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or a daring drug mule (Clint Eastwood). But distinguished older actresses get cast in simple-minded comedies about old friends having silly adventures that make the lightest-weight beach read seem like Remembrance of Things Past. “The Fabulous Four” follows in the unfortunate tradition of…
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Amazon Prime
Space Cadet
Reviews Space Cadet You can almost hear the elevator pitch: “Legally Blonde” in space, an under-rated ditz who doesn’t dress or talk like the snobbish types with the gilded resumes but shows she has the right stuff. Then maybe add a little bit of “The King’s Man” for some action, and here we are. Emma Roberts plays Rex, happily “living the Florida life”: parties on the beach, wrestling gators, tending bar (she’s very good at remembering a lot of different complicated drink orders), and, sometimes, wistfully watching NASA rocket launches. She used to watch them with her late mother and dream…
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Action
Customs Frontline
Reviews Customs Frontline Last year, Hong Kong filmmaker Herman Yau directed at least two of the best action movies of the year. In the 1990s, Yau (“Ebola Syndrome,” “The Untold Story”) helmed sensational black comedies and/or true-crime thrillers about psychopathic skid row loners, some of which are now finding new audiences on American Blu-ray boutique labels. Today, Yau directs Hong Kong and/or mainland China-financed action movies, often focused on a team of diligent, but stressed-out law enforcement officials. “Customs Frontline,” a Hong Kong procedural that pits the local customs department against a ring of international weapons dealers, continues this trend.…
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Action
Deadpool & Wolverine
Reviews Deadpool & Wolverine “Deadpool & Wolverine” exists because Hugh Jackman, who has played Wolverine nine times and had supposedly retired the character after 2017’s “Logan,” loved the Deadpool series and was friends with star Ryan Reynolds. He wanted the mutant with the adamantium claws to team up with the Merc with the Mouth, preferably in a buddy movie modeled partly on R-rated 1980s action flicks like “48 Hrs.” The end product is true to the spirit of the franchise while pushing its self-aware humor and fourth wall-breaks until it all seems like the result of a dare: how big…
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