Film Reviews
George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky Blandly Goes Where Plenty of Sci-Fi Has Gone Before: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2049, and the Earth is plagued by a mysterious apocalyptic event – details are scarce, but it seems as though the world is in its last gasps, and time is running out. Perhaps the only man left on Earth is Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), an astronomer dying of cancer who chooses to stay behind while the rest of the personnel evacuate their observatory in the Arctic Circle. As he whiles away the days and weeks waiting for the world to end, two events force him into action: the arrival of a mute girl (seven-year-old newbie Caoilinn Springall) seemingly left behind in the evacuation, and the realization that a spaceship called the Aether is on its way back to the planet. They’ve spent the last few years scoping out a new planet for humanity called K-23, and are comin...
Alex Wheatle Is A Rare Stumble for the Small Axe Anthology: Review
The Pitch: Before he was an award-winning author of books like Brixton Rock and Island Songs, Alex Wheatle (Sheyi Cole) spent a short time in prison following his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots, an explosive confrontation between the police and the neighborhood’s Afro-Caribbean community. There, with the help of his Rastafarian cellmate Simeon (Robbie Gee), Alex looks back on his life — a childhood marred by mistreatment in foster care homes and bolstered by his budding career as a DJ in Brixton — and tries to figure out what to do, and who to be, next. Short But Sweet: Of the five films in writer/director Steve McQueen‘s anthology about the West Indian communities of London from the ’60s to the ’80s, Alex Wheatle is by far the shortest (clocking in at 65 minutes). Th...
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart Is the Bee Gees Doc You’ve Been Waiting For: Review
The Pitch: Three Australian brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb formed the most formidable musical and songwriter trio this side of Holland-Dozier-Holland when they became the Bee Gees. Musical chameleons, they rose to fame during the late-staged British Invasion of the 1960s, recalibrated for the singer-songwriter era of the early-1970s, and rose to a level of fame during the height of disco not seen since The Beatles. Director Frank Marshall captures it all in his new HBO documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, mixing spine-tingling isolation tracks and archival interviews with the brothers Gibb to tell a captivating story of a sibling trio who, despite their differences, thrived due to their deep love. To Love Somebody: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart finds the B...
The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone Is Tighter, Leaner, and Self-Aware: Review
The Pitch: The Godfather trilogy has to be the most beloved hated idea in popular cinema. The Godfather, about the semi-reluctant rise of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) to become the head of his family’s criminal organization, is one of the most watched and venerated American movies. The Godfather Part II, about Michael leveraging the last bit of his soul for control that isn’t his to take, broke a rule it could just as easily have created: it’s a sequel every bit as good as the original. The third Godfather movie, which sees Michael’s past replay itself in a violent burlesque? That’s a movie over which people are still personally aggrieved. They’ll come out of the woodwork to tell you The Godfather Part III sucked. Go ahead and post about it on social media, someone will find you and tell y...
Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock Is Joyfully Intoxicating: Review
This review originally ran in September 2020 as part of our coverage of the 2020 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: In London’s West Indian community in 1980, a house party brews. The men haul furniture out to the backyard and bring in huge speakers to replace it, while the women crowd into the kitchen, cooking goat curry and plaintains while singing and laughing with each other. Men and women file in one at a time, paying the bouncer while the DJ pumps in the songs of Carl Douglas, Sister Sledge, Janet Kay — romantic reggae, “Lover’s Rock”. This is the setting for Steve McQueen‘s Lovers Rock, a glimpse into the Blues parties that served as an important space for Black Londoners of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s to find community, solidarity, and love, as a rotating ensemble of characters s...
Bowie Biopic Stardust Commits Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide: Review
The Pitch: It’s 1971 and David Bowie (Johnny Flynn) is about to make it big. Well, actually, he already kind of had. He’d just released “Space Oddity”, which would have become legendary even if he’d never released another album. We’d still be hearing it in commercials like we do Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” regardless, so the “what if?” at the center of the movie isn’t quite as pulse-pounding as writer-director Gabriel Range and his co-scribe Christopher Bell seem to imagine it to be. Anyway, Bowie’s about to be famous, but he’s concerned that the US doesn’t like or get him and that the record label doesn’t know what to do with him. So, they send him to the US to introduce himself, which is about all he can do because his visa doesn’t allow him to play shows. So, he just ...
The Christmas Chronicles 2 Completely Wastes the Magic of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn: Review
The Pitch: It’s been a couple of years since Kate (Darby Camp) and Teddy (Judah Lewis) helped save Christmas, with the help of a bedraggled Saint Nick (Kurt Russell). This time around, they’re twiddling their thumbs on a beach resort Christmas vacation hosted by their mother Claire’s (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) deeply-vanilla beau… Please click the link below to read the full article. The Christmas Chronicles 2 Completely Wastes the Magic of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn: Review Clint Worthington You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and hel...
Steve McQueen’s Mangrove Is a Courtroom Masterpiece: Review
This review originally ran in September 2020 as part of our coverage of the 2020 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: In 1968, Notting Hill was a slowly-growing hub of Black culture in London, filled with West Indian immigrants of various stripes who congregated at Frank Crichlow’s (Shaun Parkes) Mangrove Restaurant… Please click the link below to read the full article. Steve McQueen’s Mangrove Is a Courtroom Masterpiece: Review Clint Worthington You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.
Hillbilly Elegy Is Basically a Demo Reel for a Young Republican’s Congressional Bid: Review
The Pitch: Legal scholar and author James Donald Bowman (pen name J.D. Vance) was the product of a Kentucky-and-Ohio-bred upbringing. And he’s just got something to say about that. Hillbilly Elegy is Ron Howard and Vanessa Taylor’s adaptation of Vance’s book about his life in Appalachia, specifically how a.) he defeated Southern legacies of “economic anxiety” or whatever the hell that means to b.) grow up into a Yalie. (You can just hear the “now I’m just a Southern Lawyer in the big city” maxims already, can’t you?) Vance is portrayed in dueling narratives, as a young fuckup in Kentucky (Owen Asztalos) and as a struggling law school student (Gabriel Basso) trying to take care of his ma back home. Both stories are marked by his strained relationships with his mother and his “Mamaw”. His mo...
Fatman Is Another Lump of Coal for Mel Gibson: Review
The Pitch: Mel Gibson is the Fatman. No, the name isn’t a reference to the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. It’s one of the surlier nicknames for Santa Claus, played by Gibson as a disheveled, world-weary man named Chris Cringle, just trying to make ends meet in a world losing its Christmas Cheer©. If you feel you came into possession of Fatman by mistake, and would like to learn more about the “Fat Man” portions of the Manhattan Project, safely visit your local library or consult Wikipedia. Or perhaps watch Roland Jaffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy, a 1989 film about the invention of the atomic bomb by desperate American scientists. Why waste precious bits of the word count talking about Fat Man and Little Boy? Because I seriously have no idea what the hell to do with the latest lame-ass G...
David Fincher’s Mank Is a Dense, Technically Marvelous Ode to Old Hollywood: Review
The Pitch: Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) was the script whisperer of the 1930s — at the height of the studio system, he was one of its most sought-after names, punching up many of the era’s most famous films with his signature wit and effortlessly fast-paced dialogue. But he was also a man plagued by personal foibles, a hefty drinking problem, and the struggles of being a card-carrying socialist in one of the most capitalistic industries in American history. In the spring of 1940, Mankiewicz — but please call him “Mank” — was tapped to pen the script for Hollywood’s most famous piece of outsider art: Orson Welles’ sprawling, ambitious epic Citizen Kane. Recovering from a car crash in a private estate with a helpful nurse named Rita (Lily Collins) and a 90-day deadline to get...
The Dark and the Wicked Is Visceral, Bleak, and the Perfect Horror Movie for 2020: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Two siblings venture out to their remote family farm, where their father is slowly dying and their mother is unraveling from grief. Something else is happening, though. There’s a darkness behind the sorrow, an evil slowly poisoning the soil… Something Wicked This Way Comes: Grief is on the mind. Thanks to our ensuing pandemic — and really, the collateral damage of our current administration — we’re a populace poisoned with misery. So much so that it’s become an appendage of our day-to-day, something we’ve had to deal with to check in and check out without losing our minds. In a timely twist of fate, grief has also informed some of this year’s most affecting films, be it Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods or Nat...
