Reviews
‘Cherry’ Review
The Russo Brothers’ “Avengers: Endgame” encore finds them unburdened and ultimately undone by the air-tight calculations of that superhero enterprise (and perhaps providing clarity as to who the success of the Infinity Saga’s finale ultimately resides with).
‘I Care a Lot’ Review
An occasionally cunning, candy cane-sleek thriller that is far more interesting for where it arrives than how it arrives there, “I Care a Lot” is the kind of movie you come away from unable to reflect on the first 110 minutes because the last five are so ferocious in vying for the spotlight that we feel compelled to at least humor it.
‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ Review
If the story being told in Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” – a mighty impressive sophomore feature chronicling the influence and 1969 police assassination of Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton when he was just 21 years old – was any weightier, it would threaten to burst out of the TV sets that most HBO Max subscribers will likely be watching the movie through upon its Friday arrival.
‘Land’ Review
The new drama “Land” finds the venerable Robin Wright boldly treading into unknown territory to contend with new challenges in more ways than one, and at the project’s center is a self-referential awareness that I’m sure its star must appreciate to a certain extent. Having spent the better part of the last half-decade popping up in high-profile blockbusters and helping to tug Netflix’s “House of Cards” across the finish line sans Spacey, “Land” sees the accomplished actress in the director’s chair of a feature film for the first time.
‘Sator’ Review
Writer-director Jordan Graham did much more than write and direct over the seven-year production of “Sator,” his effectively creepy and unexpectedly personal backwoods tale.
‘At the Ready’ Review (Sundance)
Politics, personal histories and border region complexities tangle in the new documentary from filmmaker and Texas journalist Maisie Crow.
‘The Blazing World’ Review (Sundance)
“The Blazing World” joins the hand-drawn counterculture fantasia of “Cryptozoo” and the nuclear-blasted dystopian rescue mission “Prisoners of the Ghostland” as a strong contender for the most WTF experience to be had at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
‘Life in a Day 2020’ Review (Sundance)
As was the case with its predecessor, the title of “Life in a Day 2020” says it all—even if saying it all in regards to 2020 means something more consequential and ostensibly ambitious.
‘Cusp’ Review (Sundance)
Constructed with a spirit of take-life-as-it-comes open-endedness that feels both invigorating and dangerous, “Cusp” becomes a documentary about three young girls trying to avoid being defined by the boys and men in their lives. Its ultimate accomplishment is that we absolutely come to believe they can, as well as triumph over so much more, despite the tensions lurking in the underbrush of teenage ennui.
‘Cryptozoo’ Review (Sundance)
Molding a bevy of influences into a work so singularly bizarre that you swear you’d imagined the whole thing once it’s over, Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo” – a hand-drawn fantasia of sex, fantasy-tinged espionage and counterculture revolution – is the kind of effort that taps expectations of animation being solely for children on the shoulder before setting it ablaze, gathering the ashes and rocketing the remains into space.
‘One for the Road’ Review (Sundance)
Pitch-perfect needle drops courtesy of Elton John and The Rolling Stones can only get you so far when wading into nostalgic waters, and somewhere soon after the midpoint of Sundance 2021 flick “One for the Road,” it finds itself suddenly submerged.
‘Son of Monarchs’ Review (Sundance)
“Son of Monarchs” is a film as invested in its scientific arcs as the emotional ones of its reserved protagonist, and it’s a contradictory work—rigid and improvisational, didactic and artistic, fully aware of itself and stylistically unmoored. And it’s entirely embracing of those contradictions.
‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ Review (Sundance)
“The Most Beautiful Boy in the World'' showcases an inherent element of nonfiction storytelling that too many documentarians end up disguising in the final work—the idea that the questions we initially set out to answer are not always the ones that are most intriguing later on.
‘The Little Things’ Review
“The Little Things” is a classic old blood/new blood story coursing through clogged narrative arteries, enlisting Denzel Washington as venerable ex-investigator Joe Deacon and a robotic Rami Malek the down-to-business young cop who has been successful up to this point in keeping the ugliness of the occupation out of his cozy home life. Joe hasn’t been as lucky; he’s psychologically worn down by a series of past slayings, the culprit of which remains free. But something else about that history keeps peeling the scab open afresh, and as much as “The Little Things” is about us watching Joe following a killer’s breadcrumb trail, it also fashions us into detectives trying to piece together his past.
‘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.”