Film Reviews
Demi Lovato Shares Hard Truths In Dancing With the Devil: SXSW Review
Editor’s Note: The following review is as part of our coverage of the 2021 South by Southwest Film Festival. Stay tuned for further reviews straight outta Austin — well, virtually, of course. Below, Jenn Adams kicks things off with Demi Lovato’s tragic new documentary. The Pitch: In 2018, singer/songwriter Demi Lovato suffered a near-fatal overdose on drugs and alcohol. She survived, but just barely. This followed six years of very public sobriety in which she was often held up as a poster child for addiction and recovery, a dangerous variation of her childhood spent as the literal poster child for Disney perfection. Directed by Michael D. Ratner, Dancing With the Devil is an honest and unflinching account of her relapse, overdose, and recovery and an open discussion of the sexual assault,...
Tom Petty Breezes Through His Wildflowers Era in Somewhere You Feel Free: SXSW Review
Editor’s Note: The following review is as part of our coverage of the 2021 South by Southwest Film Festival. Stay tuned for further reviews straight outta Austin — well, virtually, of course. Below, Clint Worthington reviews Mary Wharton’s Tom Petty documentary. The Pitch: While Tom Petty’s work with The Heartbreakers gave us some of the most iconic country-rock tunes of the past half-century, Petty purists likely cite his second solo album, 1994’s Wildflowers, as his arguable creative apex. But for all the relaxed charms of songs like “You Wreck Me” and “Only a Broken Heart”, the album was made at a particularly tumultuous time for the artist, including creative struggles with MCA, clashes with Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch, and the end of his first marriage. While Petty...
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché Is Hardly Cliché: SXSW Review
Editor’s Note: The following review is as part of our coverage of the 2021 South by Southwest Film Festival. Stay tuned for further reviews straight outta Austin — well, virtually, of course. Below, Rachel Reeves checks out the new rock doc on Poly Styrene. The Pitch: Marianne Elliott-Said, aka Poly Styrene, is a punk rock icon. She was the first woman of color to front a successful UK punk band. She defied stereotypes and inspired countless women to do the same. She was also a highly flawed individual who struggled with mental health issues, a misogynistic industry, her personal identity and relationships. She was all of these things and so much more. Now, years after her passing, Styrene’s daughter Celeste Bell and co-director Paul Sng have released an incredibly personal tribute to...
Zack Snyder’s Justice League Is An Audacious Mess: Review
The Pitch: Well, it’s finally here: the infamous “Snyder Cut.” The rallying cry of DC fanboys for nearly half a decade, Zack Snyder’s original version of the DC cinematic universe’s Avengers equivalent before studio meddling and a tragic death in the family led the oft-maligned director to step away and let Joss Whedon get his grubby, quippy little hands all over his self-serious, baroque baby. The 2017 version was visibly, obnoxiously, the product of two directors with warring approaches wrestling with a single project: Snyderesque aesthetics clashed mightily with repetitive, snarky repartee that didn’t seem to befit the DC verse’s grumpiest heroes. It was a bit more fun, but incredibly uneven, and featured one of cinema’s most horrifying upper lips. But now, amid enormous, organized...
Kid 90 Is A Personal Portrait of ’90s Teen Celebrity: Review
The Pitch: Comprised almost entirely of home video tapes, audio recordings, and journal entries — interspersed with interviews conducted in the present day — ’90s child star Soleil Moon Frye reflects on her star-studded upbringing in Hollywood and grapples with the nature of growing up in front of the camera as she unearths firsthand accounts of stardom from her youth. Teen Idol: At the risk of speaking too soon, 2021 seems like the year of documentaries about young women growing up in the spotlight. There was Framing Britney Spears, Billie Eilish’s The World’s a Little Blurry, and now kid 90. Though they have the same subject matter, they each tackle coming-of-age for young women in the limelight through three drastically different points of view. Kid 90, crucially, is directed by Frye he...
Coming 2 America Is Not 2 Bad: Review
The Pitch: The king has returned! Eddie Murphy is back to check in on his 1988 invention Akeem, the now-ruler of the fictional African nation of Zamunda. As established in Coming to America, Zamunda is both a lavish and antiquated locale: not a lot of TVs, multitudes of rituals and ceremonies, beautiful interior design that would make a real estate mogul blush, all affectionately anachronistic. Akeem’s content with his three daughters and his loving queen Lisa (Shari Headley) by his side. Yet for the sake of kick-starting a sequel, he needs a male heir to avoid war with General Izzi (Wesley Snipes), leader of Nextdoria (you come up with a better fake name). And as it just so happens, Akeem hooked with up a woman named Mary (Leslie Jones) in the ‘80s, and unknown to Akeem, Mary raised his s...
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On the Run Is a Total Franchise Play: Review
The Pitch: It’s another SpongeBob movie—what do you need, a road map? Actually, maybe: This newest adventure is an underwater road trip, with SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and his starfish pal Patrick (Bill Faggerbake) on a mission to save Gary, SpongeBob’s beloved pet snail, who’s being used as part of a skincare regimen for King Poseidon (Matt Berry). This snailnapping was engineered by the scheming Plankton (Mr. Lawrence), who wants SpongeBob to stop (inadvertently) interfering with his plans to ruin the Krusty Krab, the restaurant where SpongeBob happily toils away. There are also two different robot assistants, one amusingly voiced by Awkafina. A Brand New Sponge: This is the third SpongeBob film, following 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of W...
Amy Poehler’s Moxie Unites a New Generation of Rebel Girls: Review
The Pitch: High school junior Vivian (Hadley Robinson) is struggling to find her voice. In response to rampant misogyny and lack of support from her school’s administration, she takes inspiration from her mother’s Riot Grrrl past and creates an anonymous zine called Moxie, attempting to unite students under a banner of feminism. But like many before her, Vivian learns that effective feminist activism requires more than buzzwords and good intentions. Director Amy Poehler attempts to pass the torch from third to fourth wave feminism and delivers an empowering and cathartic look at the complexities of Girl Power. Adapted from Jennifer Mathieu’s inspirational novel, Moxie is a love letter to young people struggling to find their own voices and create the changes they want to see in the world. ...
Andra Day Brings the High Notes to The United States vs. Billie Holiday: Review
The Pitch: Recorded in 1939, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” brought attention to the atrocious practice of lynching, specifically in America’s southernmost states. Its lyrics were created as a response to an infamous, horrific photo of a lynching taken by photographer Lawrence Beitler almost 10 years prior. It’s a magnificent song concentrated on an ugly truth. In some ways, Holiday’s life was similar — all her outer beauty paling in comparison to the pain and suffering that existed beneath the surface of her life. Directed by Lee Daniels and written by Suzan-Lori Parks, The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses on the final decade of the jazz singer’s life — specifically, 1947 to 1959. Based on a chapter of Johan Hari’s 2015 book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Wa...
Tom & Jerry Is Just a Lazy Brand Exercise: Review
The Pitch: Did you read that Vulture interview with David Fincher where he described Alien 3 as making “a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate”? And you know how Scorsese reasonably tsk-tsked the usage of the word “content” because of how media companies and journalists have been using that condescending term to describe works of art? Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the latest piece of content for vertically integrated media conglomerate WarnerMedia’s library, Tom & Jerry. Yes, Tom & Jerry 2021 arrives this weekend on HBO Max, and answers the age-old question of what a Tom and Jerry ‘toon would be like today, and whether they could fight to Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique”. The Short, Short, Short of It: Your kids will probably l...
Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry Offers a Clear Portrait of Teenage Life: Review
The Pitch: When Billie Eilish was 13 years old, she posted a video of herself singing her song “Ocean Eyes”. Three years later, in 2018, she was already on a fast path to superstardom, and director R.J. Cutler somehow knew to pick up his camera. This is the starting point to his Apple TV+ documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. Cutler, whose resume includes documentaries such as The September Issue and Belushi, couldn’t have predicted the kind of year he was about to capture. By circling around Eilish’s 18th year, Cutler documented the writing, recording, release, and reaction of her first full-length album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. He then continued to capture Eilish’s subsequent sold-out shows and festival appearances, radio and magazine interviews, and ...
Tom Holland Is Miscast In the Ambitious, Messy Cherry: Review
The Pitch: “Sometimes I wonder if life is wasted on me,” Cherry (Tom Holland) drawls wryly to us, godlike and incessant in his narration. When we meet him, he’s holding up a bank, and it’s not the first time. But how would a nice young man fall into such disrepute? From there, we rewind to see the life choices Cherry has made that led him to this point — from his furtive romance with a young classmate named Emily (Ciara Bravo) to the torment and torture of his days as an Army medic in Iraq, to the subsequent opioid addiction that would lead him to a life of bank-robbing to fund his drug habit. CHERK ‘Em If You Got ‘Em: In many ways, it’s going to be hard for Cherry to overcome its first real brush with public notoriety — a strangely-glitched version of the poster that messed...
