Weddings are to romantic comedies what CGI-heavy final acts are to the superhero genre. They’re the place where emotions culminate, heartfelt speeches are delivered, and true love (almost) always wins out. Part of the reason they’re a natural fit is that these are the days that we start planning from a young age. I can…
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…
“I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed. I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, way down the road” — Woody Guthrie According to Yann Martel, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Life of Pi,” “stories are important because everything is in how we perceive it and nothing is really real until we say…
“It get me down sometime. It get me down but only, a little look around and I find that I am not so lonely. We in the same boat brother! We in the same boat brother!” — Don Cooper, from the song “My Images Come” In his 1948 study “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,”…
Dead Squad: Temple of the Undead is a full-fledged assault on your brain, particularly the pleasure center parts that produce serotonin and dopamine. If you have the endurance to stick it out to its conclusions, your only happiness will be derived from the arrival of the end credits. I know it seems like I’m hedging…
Baronesa is the ironic title of Brazilian director Juliana Antunes’ documentary or docu-drama, a film that presents life in the Brazilian favelas through a number of scenes that primarily focus on the daily lives of two of its residents, Andreia (Andreia Pereira de Sousa), a manicurist/beautician, and her friend, Leidiane (Leid Ferreira). The title’s irony…
Two ex-convicts working at a dead-end diner are given an opportunity to change things around when a lawyer proposes a heist, unaware that larger antagonistic machinations are hard at work. While this plotline is fairly standard as far as heist capers are concerned, Hadi Hajaig has cranked the tonal voltage up to eleven by infusing…
