Tag: drama
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Champions: Trading Farts for Hearts
Champions starring Woody Harrelson and a winning cast of intellectually disabled adults can be considered the more serious Dumb and Dumber. The Peter and Bobby Farrelly original featured protagonists with more hearts than smarts and lots of fart humor. The Bobby Farrelly directed, Champions amps up the heart, double downs on the smart-ass, and essentially…
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Somewhere in Queens: Getting Beyond the Sticks
Plot via Rotten Tomatoes Leo Russo (Ray Romano) lives a simple life in Queens, New York with his wife Angela (Laurie Metcalf), their shy but talented son “Sticks” (Jacob Ward), and Leo’s close-knit network of Italian-American relatives and neighborhood friends. Happy enough working at the family construction business alongside his father (Tony Lo Bianco) and…
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Sam and Kate: Starring Their Real Life Kids
Info via Rotten Tomatoes: A life-affirming family dramedy starring Oscar®-winners Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek, Sam & Kate takes place in a small town in the heart of the country. Hoffman plays Bill, the larger-than-life father to Sam (Jake Hoffman), who has returned home to take care of his ailing dad. While home, Sam falls…
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Flux Gourmet: A Burnt Offering
Plot via IMDB: Set at an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance, a collective finds themselves embroiled in power struggles, artistic vendettas, and gastrointestinal disorders. I know my wife loves to cook and I know she likes hearing the sounds of all that food prep: the chopping, dicing, oiling, boiling and sometimes the toiling.…
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80 for Brady: Making Me Hate Tom Brady Even More
Plot via IMDB: A group of friends made it their life-long mission to go to the Super Bowl and meet NFL superstar Tom Brady. I’m a Miami Dolphins fan and I unequivocally hate Tom Brady. I hate all the stupid Brady to the Dolphins rumors. I hate his greatness. I hate that he lives in…
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Air: Game Changer
Plot via IMDB: Follows the history of shoe salesman Sonny Vaccaro, and how he led Nike in its pursuit of the greatest athlete in the history of basketball, Michael Jordan. Ben Affleck has proven that he can find drama in the details of negotiation. Air, a sports drama about how Nike not only developed the…
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Rye Lane: Getting Past All the Ex-Misses
Plot via IMDB: Two youngsters reeling from bad breakups who connect over an eventful day in South-London. Rye Lane, streaming now on Hulu, is a romantic comedy that succeeds by breaking all the rules of the genre and dating. Don’t spend the date talking about your exes is the big one, especially if you want…
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A Good Person: The Addiction of Grief
Plot via IMDB: Follows Allison, whose life falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident. Florence Pugh is one of the most versatile actors working today. In A Good Person, since her character doesn’t have to function as a self-actualization figure for a male love interest, Pugh is able to explore her character and…
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The Magician’s Elephant: Soaring to Heights of Childhood Courage and Imagination
Plot via IMDB: The Magician’s Elephant follows Peter, who is searching for his long-lost sister. When he crosses paths with a fortune teller in the market square, he want to know, is his sister still alive? To get the answer, he must find a mysterious elephant and the magician who will conjure it, setting Peter…
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John Wick 4: Same John, Meaner Dog
Plot via IMDB: John Wick uncovers a path to defeating The High Table. But before he can earn his freedom, Wick must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe and forces that turn old friends into foes. John Wick: Chapter Four like its predecessors is an endless kinetic display of…
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As They Made Us: A Different Kind of Big Bang
Plot via IMDB: A divorced mom tries to make peace with her dysfunctional family as she finds a second chance at love Actors trust actors. So Mayim Bialik, The Big Bang Theory and Jeopardy part time host, concentrated on putting together the best ensemble she could find for her directing debut, As They Made Us,…
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The Whale: A Lot of Emotional Blubber
Plot via IMDB: Idaho, 2016. Scarred by the profound wounds of grief and guilt, couchbound Charlie, an online writing instructor living with chronic obesity, now has a crystal-clear view of his secret intentions. And confined to his claustrophobic and musty apartment, the self-destructive shut-in has all the time in the world to contemplate the damaging…
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The Good Nurse: Meds and Murder on the Side
Plot via IMDB: Amy, a compassionate nurse and single mother struggling with a life-threatening heart condition, is stretched to her physical and emotional limits by the hard and demanding night shifts at the ICU. But help arrives when Charlie, a thoughtful and empathetic fellow nurse, starts at her unit. While sharing long nights at the…
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Babylon: Unable to Get Past the Partying into the Art of Moviemaking
Plot via IMDB; An original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled…
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Creed III: Rocky All the Way
Plot via IMDB: After dominating the boxing world, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has been thriving in both his career and family life. When childhood friend and former boxing prodigy Damian (Jonathan Majors) resurfaces after serving a long sentence in prison, he is eager to prove that he deserves his shot in the ring. The…
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Bardo: A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths- Getting Caught in Self Deception’s Indulgent Purgatory
Plot via IMDB: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is an epic, visually stunning and immersive experience set against the intimate and moving journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to…
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Triangle of Sadness: Going Just a Little Beyond Gilligan’s Island
Plot via IMDB: In Ruben Östlund’s wickedly funny Palme d’Or winner, social hierarchy is turned upside down, revealing the tawdry relationship between power and beauty. Celebrity model couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), are invited on a luxury cruise for the uber-rich, helmed by an unhinged boat captain (Woody Harrelson). What first appeared…
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Eo: Transfiguring the Suffering of Every Living Thing
Plot via IMDB: The world is a mysterious place when seen through the eyes of an animal. EO, a grey donkey with melancholic eyes, meets good and bad people on his life’s path, experiences joy and pain, endures the wheel of fortune randomly turn his luck into disaster and his despair into unexpected bliss. But…
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Blonde: Going too Far Up the Skirt of the Blonde Dream
Plot via IMDB: From director Andrew Dominik, and based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Blonde’ boldly reimagines the life of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons, Marilyn Monroe. From her volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, ‘Blonde’ blurs the lines of fact and fiction to…
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Tar: Going Beyond the Counterpoint and Dissonances
Plot via IMDB: Women at the height of their powers and prestige can fall and be corrupted just as easily as men. That is the premise of Tar, a film directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett, as a woman who is the conductor of the most prestigious orchestra in the world, the Berlin…
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Empire of Light: Living Within the Flickering Light
Plot via IMDB: Hilary (Olivia Colman) is a cinema manager struggling with her mental health, and Stephen (Micheal Ward) is a new employee longing to escape the provincial town where he faces daily adversity. Together they find a sense of belonging and experience the healing power of music, cinema, and community. Empire of Light takes…
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To Leslie: An Honest and Worthy Oscar Performance of One Person’s Sobriety Journey
Plot via IMDB: Having squandered every single dime of her lottery winnings on liquor and drugs, defeated West Texas single mother Leslie Rowlands finds her way back home six years after the life-altering event. But now the money is gone, the already few friends are lost, and her long-suffering family has moved on with their…
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Women Talking: Getting to Exodus
Plot via IMDB Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave. In 2010, the women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling a brutal reality with their faith. “What follows is an act of female imagination,” is the opening title card to Sarah Polley’s talking debate drama Women Talking. The eight Mennonite woman gathered in…
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All Quiet on the Western Front: Getting Beyond 1917
Plot via IMDB A young German soldier’s terrifying experiences and distress on the western front during World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front, Germany’s official Oscar submission, echoes not only its Erich Maria Remarque source novel, but Sam Mendes, 1917, another World War I film. This is the first German language version of…
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Aftersun: Building to All Our Mournful Memories
Plot via IMDB Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t. AfterSun, a subtle debut feature from Charlotte Wells, shows how…
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Sundance: The Tuba Thieves
Plot via Sundance:A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story…
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Sundance: Mami Wata
Plot via Sundance:In the oceanside village of Iyi, the revered Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) acts as an intermediary between the people and the all-powerful water deity Mami Wata. But when a young boy is lost to a virus, Efe’s devoted daughter Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) and skeptical protégé Prisca (Evelyne Ily Juhen) warn Efe about unrest…
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Sundance: When It Melts
Plot via Sundance:Eva struggles with human connection. Now that her younger sister Tess is moving out, and long estranged from her neglectful parents, the fragile Eva is finally truly alone. Already reeling, she’s instinctively revulsed by a social media post announcing the memorial celebration for a long-passed childhood friend. She emotionally recalls her sensitive 13-year-old…
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Sundance: Girl
Plot via Sundance:Mother-daughter duo Grace and Ama have established a deep bond that’s protected them from outsiders, but as they start anew in Glasgow, things begin to change. Ama’s burgeoning puberty and curiosity set off reminders of a past that 24-year-old Grace has been running from. The comforting fairytale-like origin story that Grace has been…
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Sundance: Scrapper
Plot via Sundance:Following her mother’s death, a resourceful 12-year-old girl, Georgie (Lola Campbell), continues to live alone in their London-outskirts flat. She makes money stealing bikes with her friend, Ali (Alin Uzun), and keeps the social workers off her back by pretending to live with an uncle. It works like a charm until Jason (Harris…
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Sundance: La Pecera (The Fishbowl)
Plot via Sundance:After years of remission, Noelia’s cancer has returned and is spreading quickly. Exhausted by relentless treatment plans and pills that do more harm than good, she seeks another way out. Brushing aside her boyfriend Jorge’s well-meaning but suffocating gestures, she heads back to Vieques, the blissful eastern Puerto Rican island where she grew…
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Sundance: Mama Cruz
Plot via Sundance:Devoutly religious Cruz leads a routine existence with her husband and precocious granddaughter Viky, while her daughter Carlota chases her dream of becoming a professional dancer in Vienna. A single errant click while attempting to navigate the internet momentarily exposes Cruz to online pornography. She’s mortified but suddenly reminded of her own desires.…
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Sundance: Slow
Plot via Sundance:Contemporary dancer Elena meets Dovydas when he is assigned to interpret via sign language in a class she is teaching to deaf youth. Their connection is immediate, kinetic, and frictionless. As they gravitate toward each other, resisting the forces and interventions of their separate daily lives, their bond deepens from platonic to romantic.…
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Sundance: Bad Behaviour
Plot via Sundance:Lucy seeks enlightenment. The former child actress makes a pilgrimage to join her guru, Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw), for a silent retreat at a beautiful mountain resort with a Tesla-crammed parking lot. Before she shuts off her phone to the world, Lucy reaches out to her daughter, Dylan — a stunt person training…
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Sundance: Heroic
Plot via Sundance:Eighteen-year-old Luis (Santiago Sandoval Carbajal) enlists as an infantry cadet in the Heroic Military College in the hopes of becoming an officer and supporting his struggling family. Tucked away in the mountains and surrounded by statues honoring Aztec gods, the school is constructed from giant slabs of stone and ruled by even more…
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Sundance: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Plot via SundanceTender caresses and enveloping embraces are portals into the life of Mack, a Black woman in Mississippi. Winding through the anticipation, love, and heartbreak she experiences from childhood to adulthood, the expressionist journey is an ode to connection — with loved ones and with place. Review notes: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt…
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Sundance: A Thousand and One
Plot via SundanceStruggling but unapologetically living on her own terms, Inez is moving from shelter to shelter in mid-1990s New York City. With her 6-year-old son Terry in foster care and unable to leave him again, she kidnaps him so they can build their life together. As the years go by, their family grows and…
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Sundance: The Starling Girl
Plot via Sundance:Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling struggles to define her place within her fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. Even her greatest joy — the church dance group — is tempered by worry that her love of dance is actually sinful, and she’s caught between a burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality and an instinctive resistance…
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Sundance: Fair Play
Plot via SundanceHot off the heels of their new engagement, thriving New York couple Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) can’t get enough of each other. When a coveted promotion at a cutthroat financial firm arises, supportive exchanges between the lovers begin to sour into something more sinister. As the power dynamics irrevocably shift…
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Sundance: Fancy Dance
Plot via SundanceSince her sister’s disappearance, Jax (Lily Gladstone) has cared for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) by scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma. Every spare minute goes into finding her missing sister while also helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow. At the risk of losing custody to Jax’s father, Frank (Shea…
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Sundance: Mutt
Plot via Sundance:Feña, a young trans guy bustling through life in New York City, is afflicted with an incessantly challenging day that resurrects ghosts from his past. Laundromats, subway turnstiles, and airport transfers are the hectic background to this emotional drama that overlaps past, present, and future. Settling the disharmony of transitional upheaval in relationships…
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Sundance: The Accidental Getaway Driver
Plot via Sundance:Long, a Vietnamese driver in Southern California, answers a late-night call for a ride. Already in his pajamas, he reluctantly accepts, picking up a man, Tây, and his two companions. But the men, recently escaped convicts from an Orange County jail, take Long hostage at gunpoint, thrusting him into their getaway plan. When…
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Sundance: Magazine Dreams
Plot via SundanceKillian Maddox lives with his ailing veteran grandfather, obsessively working out between court-mandated therapy appointments and part-time shifts at a grocery store where he harbors a crush on a friendly cashier. Though Killian’s struggles to read social cues and maintain control of his volatile temper amplify his sense of disconnection amid a hostile…
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A Man Called Otto: Tom Hanks Gets a Little G(r)umpy
Plot (Sony Pctures):Based on the # 1 New York Times bestseller “A Man Called Ove,” A Man Called Otto tells the story of Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), a grump who no longer sees purpose in his life following the loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted…
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Missing: Google How to Overwrite a Thriller
Plot (from Wikipedia)When her mother disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. However, as she…
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“Flavors of Youth” Explores the Essentials of Identity
Flavors of Youth points out how memory is essential to all identity. How it is the source of all art and creativity.
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“Zama”: A Long Hard Slough About Colonial Waiting
Zama is about waiting— not the Waiting for Godot or Guffman kind— but the Colonial kind, which is historical, eloquently long and wonderfully filmed, cryptically acted and so broadly elliptical that it could mean anything while seemingly meaning everything. The kind that is either literary fraud or masterwork.
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“Summer 1993”: An Authentic Sketchbook of Childhood Grief
Summer 1993 feels lived in, breathed, authentic but never nostalgic. There is not a lot of drama but plenty of life on display.
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“Madeline’s Madeline” Isn’t Quite WTF Enough
The titular heroine, who may or may not be going mad, is played by newcomer Helena Howard. Don’t take her disaffected scowl for serious acting. Three quarters of runway models can produce and sustain the same look.
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“A Prayer Before Dawn” Is Pure Testosterone and Rage
A Prayer Before Dawn is a pure example of testosterone and rage filmmaking. It leaves you beaten down and shattered.
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“The Rider”: The First Great Western of Our Time
The Rider is a heartbreaking portrayal of those who can and cannot give up, of those living broken lives with broken dreams and broken hopes.
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“Brij Mohan Amar Rahe” Is Too Squalid for Bollywood
Brij Mohan tries to give its audience something more substantial than the usual light Bollywood fare. It ends up to squalid for that audience to watch.
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“Blindspotting” Is There There
Blindspotting is pure Oakland, pure there there. It drills down into the city’s essence and finds not just a physical place but the perfect metaphor for a divided and disenchanted America struggling and resisting change.
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“Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot” Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Sadly, Callahan’s cartoons vividly animated and sketched are receded as the art becomes background to the Oedipal drama of a son successfully overcoming his abandonment issues and alcoholism.
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“The Warning” Is a Memento of a Beautiful Mind
It’s a Memento meets A Beautiful Mind thriller about a Basque man who discovers that there is a mathematical correlation between a convenience store shooting tragedy and the same spot’s past, present and future.
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“You Were Never Really Here” Is One of the Best
Lynne Ramsey who made the hallucinogenic school violence themed fantasmagoria We Need to Talk About Kevin returns to direct after a five year hiatus. Like Kevin, Here is an impressionistic tonal assault of over saturated images, amped up acoustic exaggeration and minimalistic acting.
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“Father of the Year” Is a Bad Dad Every Other Time
Adam Sandler produced Netflix movies aren’t about the quality. They are about how much stuff they can get away with, the more sexual the better. The plots are just setups for the gags. Father of the Year excuse is about an idiot long haired alcoholic father (David Spade) attempts to impress his valedictorian son that…
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“Damsel” Isn’t in Distress
Damsel is probably the best of a trio of feminist Westerns to grace the big and and small screen this year.
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“Isle of Dogs”: Wes Anderson’s Unbearable Lightness of Being an Abandoned Canine
The sorrowful wisdom brought by their abandonment can be heard in the dialogue (spoken in English by a talented American voice cast), a disaffected whine two hopes, a pat and a cheerful compliment removed from love.
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“The Skin of the Wolf” Is Beneath Just Barely a Man
There is no explanation, no backstory just observation enshrouded in mythic layers of beautiful cinematography. Everything is left to interpretation, which is both besides the point and probably is the point.
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“Boundaries” Knows Where Those Are
Boundaries implies it’s a film with no boundaries or trying to find it boundaries.
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“The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter”: A Different Kind of Deer Hunter
When the expected Deliverance moment comes it is both false and awkwardly right. They all get through the rapids not shattered, just a little bit better men, friends and maybe understanding and appreciative parent and child.
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“Lean on Pete” Races Out the Quarter Mile of Adolescent Dreams
Director Andrew Haigh doesn’t elevate the story with sappy sentiments and phony triumphs. Instead he delivers an elegiac rendering of the death of childhood.
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“King of Peking”: Father and Son Create Their Buddy Film
King of Peking (streaming on Netflix) proves that the best buddy films are created by fathers and sons.
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“First Reformed”: An Anguished Meditation on a Corrupted World.
First Reformed is one of Schrader’s finest films. It is his redemption, and a perfect fit for his transcendental style
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Sunday’s Illness: Healing a Broken Mother-Daughter Bond
It is all so emotionally and nakedly obvious. And that not only makes Sunday’s Illness good but near great.
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“All I Want” Tries to Get Pass “The Big Chill”
All I Want, a smart little indie co-written by the actress Melissa Center and debut director West Liang, is the millennial attempt to beat The Big Chill.
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“Hotel Artemis” tries to keep the cons conned
Foul mouth and over confident gangsters, international female assassins, domestic hit men with fuckup siblings, kingpins with hot triggered heirs that have daddy inferiority complexes, a city in riot mode, and Dave Bautista channeling Drax 2X, make for an over emoting ensemble that tries to keep up with the overheated plot.
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“Hereditary” Bringing Up the R Baby
Hereditary is a smart reminder that the horror movie hasn’t entirely forgotten it’s past.
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Stepping “Outside In” to Free Themselves from Their Personal Prisons
Every director strives for honesty, but few achieve it so sincerely as Lynn Shelton does in Outside In.