Everyone should be able to digest a charming love story, right? How can one resist an urban romancer featuring attractive lovebirds coming from different sides of the tracks, the energetic rush of city life and the unsuspecting hands of fate? Well, this is the proposed premise for director Ry Russo-Young’s (“Before I Fall”) young adult…
The most dramatic sequences of 2018’s Best Picture, “Green Book,” involved the piano playing of Doctor Don Shirley. In another recent awards winner, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the recreations of Freddy Mercury’s performances proved to be a high point. These sequences, well-rendered by directors Peter Farrelly and Bryan Singer, respectively, are put into the shade of the…
I’m not totally sure if A Vigilante — the feature debut from writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson — is meant to be soaked up as entertainment so much as a reconciliation between movies-as-art and movies-as-therapy. The small-scale story is interested in a single dominating issue, that of domestic violence, though in ways that feels inconsistently intentioned, despite…
When 38-year-old Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen, “The Disaster Artist”), a sloppy and unkempt-looking journalist, falls for Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron, “Tully”), a highly sophisticated, intelligent, and political savvy politician, we know that we must be in fantasyland or in a Jonathan Levine (“The Night Before”) comedy. While Levine’s Long Shot challenges believability, there are enough…
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…
Dennis Quaid’s perverse Peeping Tom is the central psycho in director Deon Taylor’s home invasion hokum, The Intruder. Formulaic and faceless, Taylor’s (“Traffik”) domestic drama merely echoes the familiar foundations of other generic goosebump-instilling thrillers chronicling the exploits of a stalking menace out to majorly inconvenience the tranquility of a passionate married couple. From yesteryear’s…
A progressive rage simmers at the despondent heart of Little Woods. It isn’t just that writer-director Nia DaCosta spends a busy 95 or so minutes examining how working-class economic anxiety often begets the toppling chain of dominoes in those trapped in it, but more so that she tells her story through the lens of a…
