While Cruella de Vil is an iconic Disney villain, is there much potential in showing the origin story of a character whose fashion sense leads to her wanting to skin 101 Dalmatians? The answer is a yes as prominent as the eponymous character’s bi-colored hair, as director Craig Gillespie and screenwriters Dana Fox and Tony…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
The Von Trapp family singing their way across the Alps from Austria to Switzerland in “The Sound of Music” is an iconic image in cinema history. While it has its devoted fans, “The Sound of Music” also attracts criticism for its sugar-coating of one of the darkest chapters in human history. A more somber tale…
Kate Mandell (Mackenzie Davis, “Terminator: Dark Fate”) leaves her teaching job and the coziness of a shared apartment with her friend Rose (Kim Adis, “Krypton” TV series) to take on the role of “personal tutor” to a young girl, Flora (Brooklyn Prince, “The Florida Project”). Her role is emphasized as that of “tutor” as opposed…
In many ways, director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien is a fine film — a definitive sampling of J.R.R. Tolkien’s formative years and a nicely fleshed-out character study. Yet, it also plays as programming you might find on a PBS “Masterpiece” program, with nicely defined Edwardian settings, fine period costumes and impressive performances all around. Still, similar…
In Stray, an orphaned young woman struggles to discover the reasons behind her mother’s death, aided by an indefatigable detective with child-care issues of her own. The plot is also tinged with a bit of the supernatural, which typically would raise this movie a few cuts above your standard police procedural. Instead, the film left…
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser (Poet and physicist) Liyana, directed by the Swaziland-born husband and wife team of Aaron and Amanda Kopp, is a genre bending documentary that follows a small group of Swazi children — residents of Likhaya Lemphilo Lensha, a Swaziland orphanage — as they participate…
