Film Reviews
Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers Crams 50 Years of Art Pop Into Two Giddy Hours: Sundance 2021 Review
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: Sparks has been around for just shy of 50 years, and have influenced just about every major pop act since the 1970s –from New Order to Weird Al Yankovic. They’re one of the greatest bands of all time, but you probably haven’t heard of them. That is, of course, unless you’re Edgar Wright, pop culture vagabond and Sparks superfan, who brings his giddy, high-tilt cinematic energy to a two-and-a-half-hour chronicle of two California-born brothers who made it to the top of the pop charts, and have spent the last several decades reinventing themselves with every new album and experimentation. Along the way, he talks to artists and fans who’ve grown up with their work (Jason Schwartzman, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Fred Armisen), and i...
Jerrod Carmichael’s On the Count of Three Is A Harsh and Bold Bromance: Sundance 2021 Review
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: Longtime best buddies Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) love each other about as much as they hate living. The latter is in a mental institution after his latest in a lifetime of attempts to kill himself; the former is deeply depressed, with a dead-end job and a fractious relationship with girlfriend Tasha (Tiffany Haddish). After Val breaks Kevin out of the joint, they hatch a scheme: live one last day to the fullest, finish their business, then shoot each other at the same time with a pair of handguns Val picked up. It’s a murder-suicide pact born of a lifetime of trauma and love, and that bond will be tested in more ways than one by the time the day is done. It’s a Great Day to Be Alive: Directo...
Knocking Offers Plenty of Style, But Not Nearly Enough Narrative: Sundance 2021 Review
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: After a traumatic incident involving her girlfriend Judith (Charlotta Åkerblom), Molly (Cecilia Milocco) emerges from a one-year stint in a psychiatric ward, ready to rejoin the world. She moves into a housing development, but almost immediately, her life is disrupted by a strange knocking from the floor above. No one – not super Peter (Krister Kern), not shifty neighbors Kaj (Ville Virtanen) or Per (Albin Grenholm) — believe her. As the knocking persists, Molly’s paranoia increases as her grip on reality decreases. Is the knocking a cry for help or has she lost her mind? Familiar Territory: Knocking is an adaptation of Swedish novelist Johan Theorin’s text of the same name (his work was previously adapted into 2013’s Echoes Fro...
Summer of Soul Is Questlove’s Thrumming Ode to Black Music and Culture: Sundance 2021 Review
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: In 1969, the same summer as Woodstock, a different music festival played just 100 miles away in Harlem. It was the third annual Harlem Culture Festival, a weeks-long celebration of soul, Motown, blues, and gospel where nearly 300,000 people gathered and celebrated the sounds of Stevie Wonder, Mavis Staples, Nina Simone, and a host of other Black artists at the time. But the festival was more than, as it would be haphazardly marketed, the “Black Woodstock”. It was a nexus around which so many facets of Black life at the time would intersect, from Afrocentrism to the Black Panthers (who would provide security for the event) to the renewed reclaiming of the word “Black” to identify themselves in print and in person. The music ...
Censor Is A Hallucinatory Look at the 1980s Video Nasty Phenomenon: Sundance 2021 Review
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) is an uptight film censor with a tragic past. After becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that the press link to a violent horror film she edited, Enid becomes obsessed with Alice Lee (Sophia La Porta), an actress who bears a striking resemblance to her missing sister, Nina. Her pursuit of Alice leads Enid into the shadowy world of underground horror films and the company of questionable men like smarmy producer Doug Smart (Michael Smiley) and director Frederick North (Adrian Schiller). As Enid’s obsessive hunt for the truth intensifies, she begins to lose track of what is real and what is a movie as both her sanity and her life come under threat. Video Nasty: The most intriguing aspect of Censor is ho...
The Night Is a Terrifying Twist on The Shining: Review
The Pitch: Driving home from a night out with friends, exhausted Iranian immigrants, Babak and Neda Naderi (Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Noor), decide to spend the night at a nearby hotel with their infant daughter Shebnam (Leah Oganyan). They quickly realize that there are dangerous secrets lurking within the walls of the mysterious building and the seemingly endless night soon spirals into reality bending terror as they find themselves trapped in a nightmarish hell of their own creation. The Night made headlines as the first US produced Iranian film to secure a theatrical license in Iran after the country’s 1979 revolution. Though set in LA’s landmark Hotel Normandie, this is an Iranian story told predominantly in Farsi and including Iranian Americans or Iranian Immigrants both in front o...
MLK/FBI Sure Feels Like a Film of the Moment: Review
The Pitch: What we publicly and historically know about Martin Luther King Jr. is as follows. The reverend was a pacifist and advocate for civil rights who rose to prominence in the 1960s. A champion for Black Americans, Dr. King was an oratory master, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning voice for a still-maligned class of citizens, and a firm believer in non-violent protest and demonstration. What many people don’t know – unless they’ve maybe seen movies like Ava DuVernay’s Selma — is that the goddamn Federal Bureau of Investigation dogged King for the entirety of his public life as a speaker and organizer. We’re talking wiretaps, plants, offensive leaks and letters pertaining to MLK’s infidelities, all to discredit a “communist” and an “agitator” under the auspices of J. Edgar Hoover’s square-ja...
Synchronic Splices Together Sci-Fi, Heart, and Humor For One Hell of a Potion: Review
This review was originally part of our coverage of the 2020 Beyond Film Festival. The Pitch: Paramedics Dennis (Jamie Dornan) and Steve (Anthony Mackie) work together in the same ambulance and are also longtime best friends. Running the Garden District route in New Orleans, the two run into a string of incidents linked to a new synthetic designer drug, Synchronic, which is having preternatural effects on users. When a one-two punch of personal tragedy afflicts the friends, their lives are thrown into turmoil as they become inextricably linked to the dangerous narcotic. The Best Time Travel Stories Are Not About Time Travel: Time travel in film is usually best used when it’s a plot device but not the coda of the movie. Genre vets Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are magicians here, using th...
Locked Down Masks Up for a Charming Enough Romantic Caper: Review
The Pitch: At the outset of COVID-19 lockdown in London, Linda (Anne Hathaway) and her longtime partner Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) have broken up. Unfortunately, they’re still quarantined together, and they’re both experiencing career crises — hers over a heartless but lucrative corporate job, his over what he sees as dead-end prospects. Their various neuroses come together when they’re presented with an unusual opportunity to pull off a daring heist. COVID: The Movie: Locked Down is the second big-studio-style movie conceived, produced, and released entirely during the pandemic, after last year’s woeful Songbird. Screenwriter Steven Knight wrote it in the fall; director Doug Liman shot it in the fall; and now it’s hitting HBO Max just months after principal photography wrapped. Though some...
Regina King’s One Night in Miami Is a Quiet and Powerful Meditation on Race: Review
This review was originally part of our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. The Pitch: On the night of Cassius Clay’s (Eli Goree) historic win over Sonny Liston in 1964, the man who would become Muhammad Ali gathers his friends — Muslim Brotherhood activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), football player Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) — to celebrate, debate, and plan for a new world. Play It Again, Sam: Based on real events, Kemp Powers’ 2013 play is a speculative consideration of what happened when the four African American icons gathered together for one night in 1964. Historically, this is the year that Cooke would be murdered; Malcolm X would be assassinated the following year in 1965. Expanding upon his original source material, Powe...
Vanessa Kirby Stands Tall In Netflix’s Shrugworthy Pieces of a Woman: Review
This review was originally part of our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival . The Pitch: Pregnant couple Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and Martha (Vanessa Kirby) go through a dangerous labor with a new midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), only for the worst possible outcome to occur. In the months that follow, they each process their grief and anger in different ways. Meanwhile, Martha’s mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn), pushes for legal justice that may or may not offer the closure that the family needs. Labour Pains: When people discuss Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, the discussion will inevitably be broken into two parts. Most will focus on the film’s first 33 minutes, which takes place entirely on September 17th and follows – in one long, mostly uninterrupted take – the night...
Wonder Woman 1984 Is Gold Plated Positivity: Review
The Pitch: Wonder Woman is back — this time, in Washington DC, circa 1984 — to once again save the world from destruction. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is joined by her magically resurrected boyfriend Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and new frenemy Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) to stop a destructive cycle of wish fulfillment and delusion run amok. In her second outing with the character, director Patty Jenkins once again leans into sentimentality, this time to extoll the power of honesty and sacrifice for the greater good. It’s a timely message, and though it takes some major suspension of disbelief to navigate the often clumsily connected dots, Wonder Woman 1984 is ultimately an uplifting story of hope in the face of pain and fear. I Wanna Know What Love Is: If you recall, 2017’s Wonder Woman focu...
