Reviews
‘No Man’s Land’ Review
Jackson Greer is both a fish out of water and a man out of time in Conor Allyn’s contemporary Western “No Man’s Land,” although you wouldn’t know it by the way Jake Allyn’s handsome Texas rancher reckons with having killed a migrant boy in the heat of confrontation by cheerily swigging beers at a Mexico bar. This is a movie of inelegant craft, five-cent metaphors and stilted convictions, though its most self-defeating attribute is how it cheats itself into having a short memory.
‘Identifying Features’ Review
As if responding to the pair of notable December releases with surrogate father-daughter storylines – Paul Greengrass’s “News of the World” and George Clooney’s “Midnight Sky” – Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s feature directorial debut “Identifying Features” briefly unites a woman and a young man on parallel searches for long-lost relatives. She is Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), who is beginning to believe her son may be dead. He is Miguel (David Illescas), who is hoping against hope that his own mother is not. And while they’re together for only a few heartbreaking scenes in Valadez’s striking drama about searchers who become wanderers (called "Sin Señas Particulares" in Spanish) , the bond is emotionally informed to a sharper pitch than either of those two aforementioned Hollywood projects.
‘One Night in Miami’ Review
You’d be hard-pressed to deny that Regina King knows a thing or two about captivating her audience. Having spent the last three decades shaping an acting career on screens big and small – her consistency capped off by collecting an Oscar, a Golden Globe and two Emmys since 2018 – the Los Angeles native now embarks on a new career branch that’s looking as sturdy as any other with her electrifying feature directorial debut, “One Night in Miami,” an adaptation of Kemp Powers’s stage play about Black resilience and responsibility (he returns to adapt his own story for the screen).
‘MLK/FBI’ Review
If the history explored in Sam Pollard’s relatively straightforward yet revelatory “MLK/FBI” were in danger of emanating a certain obviousness about the United States’s infrastructural hypocrisies pertaining to its treatment of Black citizens, recent events render those concerns moot. Having premiered at September festivals with images from a summer of protest still fresh in viewers’ minds but the thought of a deadly siege at the nation’s governmental heart too dystopian for most to consider, this documentary takes on renewed significance as it prepares to wide-release on Friday—just nine days after a group of largely pro-Trump radicals stormed the U.S. Capitol, looting souvenirs, kicking back at political leaders’ desks and asserting fiery reality for anyone still denying that America can afford to delay its reckonings.
‘The Dig’ Review
“It speaks, doesn’t it—the past?”
So suggests Ralph Fiennes’s self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown in Netflix’s earnest but scattershot new period drama “The Dig,” and while it’s one of those parabolic lines of dialogue (courtesy of screenwriter Moira Buffini) delivered in such a way that you expect it to blow open massive new craters of ideas and meaning to be explored, “The Dig” struggles to intuit what exactly it is the history of this movie’s setting – place: a quiet, vast stretch of England land; time: the volatile weeks preceding World War II – would whisper.
‘The Reason I Jump’ Review
Tell someone that the documentary they’re about to watch is an education on the experiences of those diagnosed with autism, and their expectation may be a movie of convention—of clearly defined talking head subjects and a rigid structure that more effectively snoozes rather than informs.
Not so in the case of director Jerry Rothwell’s captivating and occasionally cosmic new effort “The Reason I Jump.”
‘I Blame Society’ Review
In the playfully rebellious new movie “I Blame Society,” the young filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat steps in front of her camera to give one of the most unpredictably self-aware performances since, well...whatever it is the last thing Nicolas Cage did. Whether that makes it a great performance is a different question. But if one barometer of an actor’s effectiveness is how confidently they skate right up to the edge of incredulity without slipping over, then the answer is leaning towards the affirmative.
‘News of the World’ Review
Words carry a heavy burden in Paul Greengrass’s shaky new pseudo-Western “News of the World.” They can bring communities together for the possibility of shared knowledge, and they can forge bonds where bonds aren’t expected to be forged. They can also spread fear and prejudice, deliver a threat as precursor to bloodshed. The movie understands these truths as well as a simpler one: When Tom Hanks speaks, you listen. And it synergizes them for a picture that is – in its best, rarest, unfussiest stretches – gently intuitive about the world-changing potential of sharing stories and communication.
‘Another Round’ Review
Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round” opens with a scene that splits the difference between ethereal and anarchic, and over the following two hours this Danish drinking dramedy tasks us with determining what exactly that difference consists of. The primary tool in that endeavor? Shots. Lots and lots and lots of shots, along with some swigs of wine, beer and vodka for good measure.
‘Soul’ Review
“Soul,” if you allow it metatextual leeway, shows Pixar wrestling with questions becoming of the 25-year-old studio’s priorities and standards. But taken on its own terms, it’s also a serviceable, pretty funny, slightly ostentatious movie concerned with some of the most spiritual concepts a movie can possibly concern itself with.
‘Farewell Amor’ Review
Dance can be a most liberating (and cinematic) form of self-expression, as a large swath of 2020’s better films have attested to. In Steve McQueen’s evocative “Lovers Rock,” young Black people groove and jive to the sultry step of their souls. In Levan Akin’s devastating “And Then We Danced,” an aspiring Georgian dancer’s dream of joining the national troupe gives him purpose. In Fernandro Frías’s melancholy “I’m No Longer Here,” a Mexican teenager relies on cumbia to sustain his identity after he’s forced to flee across the U.S.-Mexico border. Dance is vital to Ekwa Msangi’s “Farewell Amor” as well.
‘Let Them All Talk’ Review
Jazzy melodies underscore a montage of characters embarking the regal ocean liner Queen Mary 2 early in Steven Soderbergh’s newest movie, “Let Them All Talk,” and you can owe it to the presence of acting royalty Meryl Streep confidently striding through the ship’s spacious confines if you find yourself thinking back to images of a suave George Clooney surveying the Bellagio ahead of an ambitious heist in “Ocean’s 11.” “Let Them All Talk” is also a heist movie of sorts, although one in which the thing to be heisted isn’t gold bricks or poker chips but the minutiae of ambiguous agendas.
‘Anything for Jackson’ Review
What the highly effective “Anything for Jackson” proves is that, for all his time in Christmasmovieland, Justin Dyck clearly found time to remain versed in the language of modern horror. This is a small-scale tale of Satanic suspense that finds success in how self-aware it is. Two committed lead performances anchor the movie, and the range they’re asked to cover (and cover it they do) is wonderfully summed up with this line: “We have to keep up appearances.”
‘Mank’ Review
Comedy may be the best lens through which to experience Fincher’s newest movie, “Mank”—a phantasmal and fantastically entertaining work of deep irony, deeper relevance and ever-deepening contradiction that suggests he’s not only embraced his reputation as a storyteller who strives to meet no one’s standards aside from his own, but that he is also ready to weaponize it for his amusement. Ours, too, if we’re willing to humor him.
‘Nomadland’ Review
An earnest portrait of a country and a subtle inquiry into the direction it’s been heading, “Nomadland” shepherds us to snow-capped mountain ranges and dry plains, derelict towns and lonely roads, redwood forests and gulf-stream waters. Traversing these spaces – captured with a necessary sense of majesty – is Frances McDormand’s Fern, and it’s in her that “Nomadland” emphasizes the truth in that American hymn’s most important lyric, as well as its contradiction: This land may be made for you and me, but what about the structures physical and economic raised over more and more of that land? Who are they for?