West Side Story 2021 might just be a perfect film. This is no mean feat considering the stunning stage musical as well as the equally perfect big screen adaptation from 1961. The new version proves equal to the challenge of adapting the beloved property, as 60 years after Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins delivered their…
The second of his 12 plays dramatizing the Black experience in America during the twentieth century, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a haunting and powerful experience that focuses on Gertrude “Ma Rainey” (Viola Davis, “Widows”), known as “The Mother of the Blues,” one of the first popular Black blues singers to gain acceptance…
Most Christian faith-based films mean well and have the best of intentions in terms of the inspiration it preaches to its targeted audiences. However, filmmaking brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin (“I Can Only Imagine”) go so much further, delivering with odd conviction, a saccharine-coated, religious-themed love story that taps more sap than that found in…
There’s only one movie in theaters this holiday season where you can see tap, ballet, hip-hop, and other dance styles performed by CGI cat-people (or are they people-cats?) and you can bet it’s not the latest Star Wars movie. It’s also not exactly good, at least in the way that nearly everyone who watches movies…
A franchise’s future often lies in its past. The narrative need to look back upon the legacy of a series starter and the history of its characters provides a clear entry point for many sequels that may otherwise struggle to justify their existence beyond merely financial reasons. It’s a strategy used to moving effect in…
If you haven’t heard of Liam Gallagher, previously of the band Oasis, then you must have been hiding under the largest rock imaginable. He and his brother Noel, were the catalyst behind the incredibly successful band, that is until it all came to a screeching halt ten years ago, traced back to a fateful 2009…
Depending on your tolerance for redundancy, there’s a surprising amount of fun to be had in Disney’s Guy Ritchie-helmed Aladdin remake. That’s a far cry from the disaster this could have been and seemed destined to be at one point, considering a laundry list of potential issues ranging from the source material that casually mixes…
