It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I return to a film to discover my initial gut reaction might have been a bit too harsh. When I first watched Sean Wang’s emotionally brutal coming of age film “Didi” at Sundance where it won the festival’s audience award I thought his follow-up to his Oscar-nominated animated short […]
Set at a conference for “thought leaders,” “The Way We Speak” is an ambitious drama that puts its cameras on a handful of characters wading into an arena of intellectual combat while dealing with personal challenges that threaten to unravel them. The performances are uniformly excellent. That all the key players (save for the lead)
Before we get too deep into the story of Lou Pearlman, a pop music kingmaker who built his empire on a Ponzi Scheme, something needs to be addressed about Netflix’s three-part docuseries “Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam.” As technology advances, there are going to be deeper and deeper questions about what’s allowed in non-fiction
When many of us think of vacationing on the Mediterranean, the first things that come to mind might be the gorgeous blue-green crystalline waters, the picturesque villages anchored on the shoreline, and the many variations of seafood fare available within walking distance. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired rockstar John Allman (Harry Connick Jr.) to
Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s documentary “Scala!!!” is about a legendary, notorious, hugely influential and long-gone London theater. But it’ll appeal to anyone whose formative moviegoing years were defined by eccentric, usually urban or college-town cinemas that programmed whatever the folks who ran the place found interesting and switched lineups every day or two. There
“Istanbul is a place…where people come to disappear.” This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea’s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she
Within the first two minutes of Apple TV+’s “Lady in the Lake,” we learn that one of the series protagonists is dead. We watch as Cleopatra “Cleo” Johnson (Moses Ingram) is flung from the shoulders of an unnamed man into a lake, until her body disappears beneath the murky waters. Throughout her death, her monologue,
Kei Chika-ura’s “Great Absence” is obviously a personal piece, the kind of drama in which one can sense a connection to the subject matter in the subtlety with which it’s handled. Anyone who has dealt with the deterioration of a parent will find something resonant in Chika-ura’s film, one that can sometimes feel self-indulgent in
When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, you couldn’t avoid the international coverage of the chaos around that major event, one that ceded control of the country back to the Taliban. When the final plane had left and the journalists returned to their home countries, the story didn’t end. And that’s where
In the mode (but not the spirit) of documentaries like “Man on Wire,” “Free Solo,” and “Fire of Love,” “Skywalkers: A Love Story” is less about persistence, curiosity, and daring than it is about two careless adrenaline junkies taking ridiculous risks to get likes on social media. As the title indicates, writer Jeff Zimbalist wants
