‘Beast Beast’ Film Review: Empathetic Debut Feature Gets Up Close and Personal With Gen Z

The first thing you need to know about Daniel Sivan's feature documentary Dirty Tricks, premiering as part of the Hot Docs festival, is that the title is a pun. You see, it's about a cheating scandal in the world of elite bridge and, of course, a "trick" is the standard competitive unit in the game — as it is in hearts, spades and euchre.

EXCLUSIVE: Melvin Gregg (The United States vs. Billie Holiday), Bradley Whitford (The Handmaid’s Tale), Alice Braga (The Suicide Squad) and Danielle Campbell (Tell Me a Story) have signed on to star in Share, an innovative sci-fi pic from The Traveling Picture Show Company, Wavemaker Creative and award-winning commercial director Ira Rosensweig.

To appreciate the roving, sometimes gauche nature of Viral, a new documentary following seven YouTube vloggers in 2020, one must consider its experimental form. Premiering at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the film, directed by Udi Nir and Sagi Bornstein, is entirely composed of YouTube videos.

Since the shock and gore of his 2003 breakoutHigh Tensionushered him into the Splat Pack, Alexandre Aja has taken an entertaining detour with rip-roaring excursions into creature horror, in the self-explanatory Piranha 3D and the gators-in-a-hurricane disaster movie, Crawl. The French genre specialist abandons that gleefully schlocky B-movie throwback spirit but not the taut storytelling skills in Oxygen, a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller driven by Mélanie Laurent's gripping performance.

David Beckham is feeling the love!

Three young Dubliners find their post-graduation confusion worsened by a nearby tragedy in Here Are the Young Men, an adaptation of Rob Doyle's debut novel directed by model-turned-actor Eoin Macken. Benefitting from a relatively high-profile cast (especially Queen's Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy, though she's not the focus here), the picture has enough polish to draw a small audience.

After all the accusations, conspiracy theories and general misinformation regarding the origins of the coronavirus in China, the sensitive, humanistic Wuhan Wuhan does a fine job depoliticizing the topic. It shows how the Chinese response to the virus outbreak was very similar to those in hospitals around the world, though its interest for viewers, perhaps, lies in ferreting out some of the minor differences.

EXCLUSIVE: Mentorship Matters, an initiative aimed at boosting opportunities for emerging writers of color, has been officially unveiled, along with the participants in its inaugural 2021-22 cycle.

A muddled execution undercuts laudable ambitions in the latest effort from director William Brent Bell, who previously demonstrated his talent for turning low-budget horror films into major commercial hits with such movies as The Devil Inside and The Boy. The filmmaker mines deeper emotional terrain than usual with Separation, which attempts to inject scares into a Kramer vs.

You know you're in the realm of the archetype when a movie's closing credits favor descriptors over character names: The Waitress, The Loner, The Mentor — and, first and foremost, The Virtuoso's nameless title mercenary. Played by Anson Mount in a tight-jawed register, he's a killer for hire whose armor is starting to crack, ever so slightly, after a hit gone wrong.

Far from the consistent critical glory of Sundance contemporaries like Kelly Reichardt and Debra Granik — or even the sporadic critical glory of a Lisa Cholodenko or an Ira Sachs — and not to be confused with more marketable writing-directing duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have forged one of the most perplexing career paths in American independent film.

If you're going to build a new character-driven action franchise — and hang tight for a coda sequence midway through the end credits to see how that would take shape — then you need a charismatic lead to lay the foundations. Tom Clancy's Without Remorse certainly has that in Michael B.

The true pleasure ofThe Outside Storydoesn’t come from its heartwarming message about community or its nostalgic rendering of a mask-less, pre-pandemic New York City, but from Brian Tyree Henry’s exceptional performance in his first big-screen lead role. A few years ago, Henry awed viewers as Paper Boi, the moody, low-key rapper in Donald Glover’s FX hitAtlanta.

LOS ANGELES -- After his film “Another Round” won the best international feature Oscar, director Thomas Vinterberg wiped away tears while dedicating part of his acceptance speech to his late daughter who died a couple years ago.“We ended up making this movie for her, as her monument,” a tearful Vinterberg said from the stage at Union Station in Los Angeles on Sunday night.Vinterberg said his daughter, Ida, died in a highway accident four days into the project.