The Flight Before Christmas is another inventive, droll effort from the Aardman team, imbuing their familiar stylings with a little misty-eyed holiday cheer. One might be forgiven for assuming that Netflix’s Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas is a feature-length continuation of Aardman Animation’s…
Beans offers good intentions and not much else, demonstrating neither the polish nor dramatic bona fides to pull off such a serious true-life treatment. 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…
If you want your holidays ruined, you should definitely watch Home Sweet Home Alone. When the Walt Disney Company bought out 20th Century Fox in 2019, it was only a matter of time before the mouse started strip-mining Fox’s catalogue for IP ripe for…
Passing‘s insularity is both a blessing and a curse, but its internalized emotions simmering just beneath the surface manage to speak volumes. Based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, Passing is an auspicious directorial debut for actress Rebecca Hall…
Ma Belle, My Beauty is a lovingly realized and mature look at polyamory, but it fails to probe its emotional core sufficiently. Polyamory is a subject that’s not often explored in mainstream films. While other films have touched on it — Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs…
Free Guy is the rare tentpole based on an original idea rather than existing IP, and supplements that present-day novelty with a game cast and genuine emotion. Shawn Levy has mostly built a career out of innocuous action comedies that, while not exactly critical darlings,…
Miller is a talent to watch, but Joe Bell is profoundly tone-deaf, little more than queer cinema for straight people. 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…
The Holocaust has provided the backdrop for so many films that it’s a rather bracing experience to discover one that handles the subject and setting in a way that’s unique. That’s certainly the case with A Radiant Girl, the debut feature by actress Sandrine…
Kid Candidate doesn’t have as inclusive an eye as you’d like, but it still manages a cutting depiction of the institutional rot deep in the core of American politics. Modern American politics are, needless to say, a raging dumpster fire; bad news for the…
The Water Man is a slight film that gets bogged down under the weight of its heavy themes and nondescript myth-making. Let’s just be blunt for a moment: if The Water Man weren’t the directorial debut of actor David Oyelowo, it’s doubtful we would…