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…
With Brightburn, David Yarovesky presents a welcomed twist to the superhero genre with his anti-superhero/horror hybrid that presents the perfect elevator pitch of what would happen if Superman wanted to hurt people instead of help them. Affiliated with eclectic director James Gunn (credited as a producer), Yarovesky is no stranger to the superhero genre having…
To describe Booksmart as “Superbad” with girls is to be reductive and overly simplistic. Nonetheless, it is a not inaccurate description of Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, due to its winning combination of coming of age trials and tribulations, the strains upon teenage friendship and profane humor. However, these elements are combined in such a way…
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…
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…
“You think I am waiting to die . . . But I am waiting to be found” — Samantha Reynolds In a mission from which they have little chance of returning, a group of condemned prisoners elect to undertake a voyage to the deepest regions of outer space to attempt to harness the energy of…
