The immensely talented musician and writer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has righted a historical injustice with his debut directorial film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The documentary, about an, until now, almost completely forgotten music festival that took place during the same summer as Woodstock, is a work of infectious exuberance as well as a contemplative examination of why the festival was forgotten in the first place.
Focusing on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove’s picture would be a significant achievement for its restoration and presentation of the festival performances alone. Forty hours of videotape footage of the event sat in a basement for fifty years before producer Robert Fyvolent secured the rights and brought it to Questlove’s attention.
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"I think it's bittersweet. I've had an incredible decade working with my Marvel family. I'm going to miss not seeing them every 18 months or two years, like those kind of milestones I always really look forward to.” It’s fitting that this is how actor Scarlett Johansson described the (seeming) end of her run in the MCU as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow. (MCU overlord Kevin Feige recently said he’s open to Johansson returning to the MCU, if the conditions are right.)
It’s fitting because Black Widow’s standalone movie, delayed for over a year because of COVID, is all about family. Black Widow is a worthy send-off for both the character and Johansson. The picture features some bravura action sequences. I have reservations about a few developments in the film’s last third, but they’re overshadowed by the genuinely fun time I had while watching the latest entry in the MCU.
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Alcohol plays a crucial role in the plot of The Philadelphia Story. I mention that because the film was released in 1940, a mere seven years after the end of prohibition. The Broadway play that served as the source material premièred the year before. As screwball comedies go, this one is about a five on the zany scale, with the full-blast Bringing Up Baby peaking that scale at a ten. It’s an amiable enough picture, relying mostly on the charms of its stellar cast, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.
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Let me tell you a story. Have you heard of the Broadway musical Hamilton? Of course you have. Well, the guy who created it and launched a phenomenon wrote another musical before he set the world on fire with Hamilton. It was called In the Heights, and it was also a success, running a little under three years for 1,184 performances on Broadway. After having seen the touring version of Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway production – the world is waiting for a proper movie version – and listening to the cast recording on repeat (my wife fell in love with it when the show really caught fire in 2016), I felt I had a handle on what creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is all about. After seeing the film adaptation of In the Heights, that assessment is confirmed. LMM is a champion of unabashed optimism and joy.
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The one-line synopsis for director Theo Anthony’s new documentary, All Light, Everywhere, says everything and nothing all at once. The movie “explore[s] issues of subjective perception and fallibility in both human and technological modes of surveillance.” That description is slippery because All Light, Everywhere is about that idea, how humans see things, but it’s explored in a hundred different ways. Anthony takes the epistemological method of dialectics – presenting opposing points-of-view of a topic as a way to uncover its truths – to new heights with his film.
Dialectical montage, the editing technique pioneered in early Soviet silent cinema by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in which two contradictory images are juxtaposed in order to create a new, third meaning, is used to soaring effect in All Light. It doesn’t quite all hang together; by the picture’s last passage, I got the feeling that Anthony might have been ultimately overwhelmed by his material. His film is, overall, an exhilarating experience. It implicates the very act of its own creation in its exploration of the flaws of human observation. All Light, Everywhere destroys the conventional wisdom that “seeing is believing.”
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With A Quiet Place Part II, director John Krasinski has delivered a cinematic experience every bit as exhilarating and taut as the original. At only 97 minutes, this sequel is lean, allowing Krasinski – who wrote this installment solo, without the help of Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the writing team behind the original – to keep the suspense ratcheted up for nearly every minute of the picture. As exciting and thematically rich as Part II is, though, Krasinski’s screenplay also suffers from a few logic problems that the movie can’t quite overcome. Still, this is a hell of a ride, especially as seen on the big screen, where the movie’s thrills come at you larger than life, the way movies are meant to be experienced.
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German director Christian Petzold has put his spin on the centuries-old tale of the undine – pronounced uhn-deen-ah in German; uhn-deen in English – with his new tragic romance. If you aren’t familiar, undines are elemental spirits associated with water, almost exclusively portrayed as female. The legend goes that in order to gain an immortal soul, an undine must marry a human. If the human falls in love with another, the undine must kill him and return to the water. Hans Christian Andersen, and, as we all know, Disney, tweaked the tale with The Little Mermaid. Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan also made a version of the myth in 2009, titled Ondine, starring Colin Farrell.
I haven’t really spoiled anything for you with that first paragraph. After all, the main character’s name is Undine, which is more popular as a name in Europe than in the U.S., and she announces the curse hanging over her within the first five minutes of the picture. In the first scene, we find out that Undine’s love, Johannes, has fallen for someone else. Undine warns him, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.” But then an interesting thing happens; she doesn’t kill Johannes. Instead, she meets and falls in love with Christoph.
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The Woman in the Window is so indebted to the work of director Alfred Hitchcock that a scene from one of the Master of Suspense’s movies is incorporated into the film itself. It’s the most avant-garde sequence Hitchcock ever directed, the dream sequence from Spellbound in which he collaborated with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. The other two central touchstones in Joe Wright’s adaptation of the bestselling novel by pseudonymous author A. J. Finn are Rear Window and Psycho. Those movies never make an appearance in Woman in the Window, but you can feel their presence hanging very heavy over every element of the new thriller.
As talented a director as Joe Wright is – I remember quite liking his adaptation of the novel Atonement and his thriller Hanna, less so his Oscar bait-y Darkest Hour – he’s no Alfred Hitchcock. Woman in the Window is cheap Hitchcock pastiche. By the gory final reel, it becomes rather distasteful Hitchcock pastiche. Its twisty nature is derivative and it presents a troubling, retrograde vision of mental illness.
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Despite my efforts, my cynical tendencies did their best to control my thinking about the music documentary With – A Journey to the Slow Life. I try to stay open to any message a film and a filmmaker are attempting to convey. Sometimes I worry that this approach causes me to shut down my critical thinking. In the end, I enjoyed and respected much of what I saw in With, even while harboring a suspicion that the picture was a clever marketing tool and that the message comes from a place of privilege.
With is a personal project from poly-hyphenate Rami Mekdachi. The Beirut-born perfumer-photographer-musician is based out of Paris. His company, Lola James Harper (his kids came up with the name, and it gets a credit in Mekdachi’s film), sells candles, perfumes, and other hipstery products that promote taking joy in the simple things in life. He’s selling a brand, and his brand is heavily tied into the Slow Movement, which emphasizes exactly that – slowing down, taking time to enjoy and appreciate life instead of hectically running from one thing to the next. As the old cliché goes, “take time to stop and smell the roses.”
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There’s a chilling moment late in the indie movie Test Pattern that acts as its thesis statement. It’s a flashback to before the day-or-so period that makes up the bulk of the movie. In the scene, Renesha and Evan, the couple at the center of the story, are reading in the back yard when Renesha notices Evan looking at her. When she asks what he’s thinking, Evan, a tattoo artist, tells Renesha he’s thinking about what he’s “going to design next and brand on you; because you’re mine.” She smiles and responds, “I’m yours.” The actor playing Evan, Will Brill, plays the scene with a hint of aw-shucks awkwardness. You get the feeling Evan thinks he’s being sweet, but the ominous background score, as well as what we’ve seen Renesha go through in the past hour of the movie, makes him appear in this moment as anything but sweet.
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With her second feature film, director Garrett Bradley has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary for Time, her searing portrait of struggle in the face of injustice. What makes her movie so effective is how personal it feels. Bradley didn’t have a prior connection to her subject, but her picture put me in mind of another Oscar nominated film, the extraordinary documentary from 2018, Minding the Gap. That movie’s director was the subject of his own film, and Bradley imbues Time with a similar sense of personal connection, despite telling someone else’s story.
In 81 brief minutes, we get to know Sibil Fox Richardson, who also goes by Fox Rich, and the hell that was her life for two decades. In 1997, when the small business that she and her husband, Rob, opened together ran into serious financial trouble, the two became desperate and committed the armed robbery of a bank. Fox served three and a half years for the crime. After a series of botched plea deals and his lawyer dropping out of the case when the Richardsons couldn’t pay him – none of which the film covers – Rob faced trial. He was sentenced to 60 years in Angola State Prison, without the possibility of parole.
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If you're planning on watching the Oscars on Sunday, but you didn't have a chance to play catch-up with most of the nominees, I'm here to help. It's no fun when you watch an awards show but you know next to nothing about the movies that are up for the big awards. So, I've collected my reviews for all eight Best Picture nominees, and I've also ranked them in order of what I'd like to see win. Number one is what I most want to win, number eight is what I least want to win. I haven't provided any commentary besides the ranking, because if you want to know what I think of each one, you can just click the link and read my original review. I've also included links to my reviews for movies nominated in other categories. Happy reading, and happy viewing!
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When David Lynch mined more weirdness from his iconic television show in 2017 for Twin Peaks: The Return, David Nevins, the CEO of Showtime, where the new season aired, described it as “pure heroin David Lynch.” If you prefer your outlandish comedy to have the same level of straight, uncut weirdness, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar won’t disappoint. Barb and Star is pure heroin Kristen Wiig.
Wiig wrote the film, about two lonely midwestern women who travel to Florida for a life-changing vacation, with Annie Mumolo. The two also co-wrote the smash-hit comedy Bridesmaids, and they star as the eponymous Barb and Star in the new film. While Bridesmaids is hilarious, and has its share of outrageous moments – Maya Rudolph defecating in the street in a wedding dress, for example – it’s fairly straightforward comedy territory. Wiig and Mumolo’s off-kilter sketch-comedy sensibilities are totally unleashed in Barb and Star.
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Airplane! and I both turned 40 last year. This is one of those films that made me who I am today. Because of my parents’ HBO subscription – it was an add-on to your cable package before it was an app, kids – and our shiny new VCR (on which we taped EVERY MOVIE EVER), I don’t really remember a time when I hadn’t watched this brilliantly crafted spoof of ’70s disaster movies at least 1000 times. It was one of the first DVDs I ever bought to begin my movie collection back in the very late ‘90s (what I was shocked a few days ago to learn that teenagers today are referring to as “the late 1900s,” which makes me feel like I lived through the Civil War).
Airplane! also has the distinction of being the very first movie my now-wife and I ever saw together. She should have been clued into the fact that the rest of her life would be dominated by movies when I suggested a late dinner, then a midnight screening of Airplane! at the historic Inwood Theater for our first date. Her cool points multiplied by five when her response to my suggestion was, “I love that movie!”
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And so, in Godzilla vs. Kong, we come to a natural culmination of Legendary Entertainment’s stab at a Marvelesque shared cinematic universe. I phrase it that way not because we actually have come to an end to the MonsterVerse, but because a movie centered around the two biggest draws of that universe, squaring off like Ali and Frazier, seems like a logical end point. Fans can take heart. The pocketbooks behind the franchise have assured us that if enough money rolls in, we’ll be getting more stories featuring MUTOs – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms. A brief bit of research reveals that a Skull Island series is in development over at Netflix, and Guillermo Del Toro has expressed interest in the MonsterVerse crossing over with his Pacific Rim franchise.
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A great amount of ink has already been spilled about the incredible performances from Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman in The Father. There’s good reason for that. Hopkins received his sixth Oscar nomination, including one win for the iconic rendering of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, for his portrayal as an octogenarian battling dementia. This is Colman’s second nomination after winning an Oscar in 2019 for her work in The Favourite. Both nominations are richly deserved. But what struck me about The Father, the debut film from director Florian Zeller, based on his own 2012 stage play, is the audacious storytelling.
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With this entry in my 100 Essential Films series, I’m now a tenth of the way through the list. (If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.) At this rate, I should be finishing the project up sometime around 2039… As Jack Nicholson once said, “So much to do, and so little time.”
Film number ten is a movie about the Great Depression made while it was still very much happening. Although FDR’s New Deal policies had started to turn things around in America, the country had not yet entered World War II in 1940, and the economic precarity of a huge swath of the American people (as I note in the review, the more things change, the more they stay the same) was the main concern of the country.
The novel The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books of all time. I was introduced to it by one of the best teachers I had in high school, Terry Taylor, who taught American History. I’m happy to say that the movie mostly does the book justice. For this screening, I rented Wrath through Amazon Prime. The transfer looks great; Gregg Toland’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography is stunning. He shot the movie a year before his seminal work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
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Prince Akeem has a problem. When he becomes King of Zamunda, he’s troubled by the centuries-old tradition of his kingdom which dictates that only a male heir can inherit the throne. Akeem has three daughters and no sons. Luckily for Akeem (and the movie), it is revealed that he does in fact have a male heir, albeit an illegitimate one, living in America. Unfortunately for us, Coming 2 America leans on an outmoded story of Akeem being desperate to cement his legacy through his son, only to make an enlightened realization, in the movie’s final minutes, about his daughters. (This barely counts as a spoiler, since it’s painfully obvious what’s coming within the first fifteen minutes of the movie.) It’s a story that might have felt progressive had it been made in 1988, the same year this sequel’s original installment was released.
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The fatal flaw of documentarian Errol Morris’s latest film, My Psychedelic Love Story, can be summed up in one quote from the movie’s subject, Joanna Harcourt-Smith. At one point during an interview, Harcourt-Smith is relating that one of her lovers died. She says that she felt like the man was killed, then immediately follows up that assertion by saying, “You know, don’t ask me for any proof.” If that caveat doesn’t bother you, then you’ll most likely enjoy My Psychedelic Love Story. If you enjoy listening to someone spin conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory without being bothered to offer the slightest shred of evidence to corroborate any of it, Harcourt-Smith’s tale will be a wild, irresistible ride. If, like me, the prospect of listening to a string of unrelated stories so outlandish that they might have come straight from a QAnon message board makes you want to tear out your hair, avoid Morris’s movie at all costs.
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Judas and the Black Messiah is like a drink of water after days in the desert. It exists and was made to upend the kind of fascistic patriotism that demagogues like Donald Trump and the recently departed Rush Limbaugh wallow in like so many pigs in shit. While their ilk pushes a cretinous version of history that worships power and the violence that flows from that power, truth-tellers like director Shaka King and screenwriters Will Berson and the Lucas brothers are making art that exposes state-sanctioned terror.
King has also made a riveting morality tale about loyalty and betrayal within a revolutionary movement. His picture is incendiary and features performances from two of the best actors working today, Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield. Kaluuya and Stanfield’s performances couldn’t be more different, but they are both wonders to behold, each in their own way.
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