Put simply, there’s a reason The War with Grandpa sat on the shelf for three years. Originally slated for release way back in ye olden times of April 2017 (how young and innocent we all were then) Tim Hill’s The War with Grandpa is finally seeing…
All In: The Fight for American Democracy is the kind of political documentary that provides a slick, bland overview of its particular issue without leaving much of an impression on the viewer. This isn’t to say that the film, directed by Liz Garbus and…
Sorkin is as unsubtle as ever, but the high dramatics and contemporaneous relevance of The Trial of the Chicago 7 make for a nice fit with the writer-director’s showman instincts. Aaron Sorkin is a better writer than filmmaker. His collaborations with directors such as David…
It wouldn’t be a film festival without the requisite, ham-fisted coming-of-age drama, and for the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, Tracey Deer’s Beans comfortably fits the bill. Set during the 1990 Mohawk uprising in Quebec, the film follows an Indigenous twelve-year-old girl nicknamed Beans…
There’s a harrowing sense of immediacy to Hao Wu and Weixi Chen‘s new documentary, 76 Days, which provides a fly-on-the-wall look at the early response to COVID-19 in a Wuhan hospital. It may seem awfully soon for a film about an ongoing crisis, but…
Good Joe Bell is the kind of movie that seems designed to make straight people feel better about themselves but does very little for the LGBT people it claims to support. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, the film stars Mark Wahlberg as a grieving…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties (Mignonnes) is, like many such controversies in the era of QAnon conspiracy theories, much ado about nothing. To…
Boys State is an illuminating portrait of the ills of the American electoral process, but somewhat undermines its own power with idealistic platitudes. We live in a politically polarized time, a fact which we are reminded of nearly every time we turn on the TV…
Agnès Varda’s documentaries have often incorporated her immediate periphery – friends (Jane B. by Agnès V.), family (Uncle Yanco), neighbors (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Daguerreotypes), or strangers she finds particularly interesting (The Gleaners and I, Faces Places). While she often takes part in the films…
At this point, the Disney live action remake is a fact of life, a part of the current moviegoing landscape as ubiquitous as superheroes and unwanted remakes. So far, their quality has ranged from solid (Cinderella) to unnecessary (The Lion King) to dreadful (Aladdin).…
