‘Bad Boys for Life’: Film Review

Every summer, more than 1,000 teens swarm the Texas capitol building to attend Boys State, the annual American Legion-sponsored leadership conference where these incipient politicians divide into rival parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, and attempt to build a mock government from the ground up.

By Nancy Tartaglione

Improvisational theater is described at various times in We Are Freestyle Love Supreme as an adrenalized, unsafe situation and a unique communion among the performers and the audience. That excitement and immediacy comes across in Andrew Fried's lovingly assembled documentary record of the hip-hop improv group's 15-year evolution.

Movie lovers with only a casual interest in compiling a complete set of Oscar-night predictions will likely find their most entertaining evening of short-film viewing to be the Live Action category — a diverse bunch of films, spanning the globe, offering a wide range of emotional experience and just enough topical relevance to feel nutritious.

It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there. The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.

Sultry music swells as the camera swoons over a young couple in a tender nighttime embrace. The 1950s residential New York City street is carefully rain-slicked and lined with shiny classic cars: an obvious stage set.

There’s mannered, there’s manic, and then there’s the malfunctioning pinball-machine delirium that Ben Whishaw brings to “Surge”: a blinking, buzzing, flashing clatter of hyper-accelerated impulses, chicken-fried synapses and staggered hypnic jerks that never culminate in sleep.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla is more popular today than when he died penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Back then, he was the futurist who swore he could summon unlimited, clean, wireless electromagnetic energy from the earth — a neat idea, but surely coal and oil were fine.

Actress Romola Garai makes a distinctive feature directorial debut with “Amulet,” even if this upscale horror drama is ultimately more impressive in the realm of style than substance. It’s some style, though: She hasn’t just created a stylish potboiler, but a densely textured piece that makes for a truly arresting viewing experience to a point. A shame then that the film succumbs somewhat to the more pretentious and silly aspects of Garai’s initially cryptic puzzle of a script.

At the risk of overselling Edson Oda’s ultra-original, meaning-of-life directorial debut, there’s a big difference between “Nine Days” and pretty much every other film ever made. You see, most movies are about characters, real or imagined, and the stuff that happens to them, whereas “Nine Days” is about character itself — as in, the moral dimension that constitutes who a person is, how he or she treats others, and the choices that define us as humans.

Imagine a high-ratings, high-stakes game show that trivializes a convict’s life-or-death fate for public consumption. As wild as it sounds, a version of this reality TV entertainment apparently really exists in modern-day Iran, where writer-director Massoud Bakhshi’s “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness” is set, and where a wildly popular edition of it has been airing for nearly a decade.

Incredible. That’s the word that comes to mind with Benjamin Ree’s “The Painter and the Thief,” a stranger-than-fiction friendship story in which vérité techniques produce unbelievable results.

By Nancy Tartaglione

While “Derry Girls” continues to be the last word in young, raucous female rebellion on the Emerald Isle, “A Bump Along the Way” has a little something to add. Sin the same Northern Irish city as the hit Netflix sitcom, but shedding the ’90s nostalgia for the Snapchat age, Shelly Love’s appealing, unassuming debut feature is a bright reminder that while Derry girls may grow up, they don’t entirely grow out of their antics.

Vanessa Hudgens hit the red carpet for the premiere of Bad Boys For Life on Tuesday (Jan. 14) in a feathery white gown straight out of a showgirl fantasy.