'Boss Level': Film Review

Watch Video: 'Operation Varsity Blues' Trailer: Watch Matthew Modine as College Admissions Scandal MastermindMatthew Modine plays Singer in the reenactments, and he captures the man as described by various interviewees — someone without much of a sense of humor, prone to exaggerated self-promotion, and skilled at salesmanship.

The fantasy trope of Time Loops is all the rage again. Obviously, we all know Groundhog Day, which did it perfectly.

Most people know Frank Grillo from his role as Crossbones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Even though it’s moving at a slower pace than many would like, the vaccine rollout is starting to gain some traction and in turn, moviegoers are going to start setting foot in theaters — safely of course. That said, the specialty box office space might be hearing some more coin drop into its piggy bank in the forthcoming months. It’s been quite a journey, but we’ll get there slowly yet surely.

Unless you’re a fan of video games, particularly those of generations past, the term that inspires the title of Joe Carnahan’s latest action film, “Boss Level,” might be lost on you. That means you may not be familiar with the time spent playing a section of a video game over and over and over again (sometimes for hours on end), trying your damnedest to reach the final battle, only to be killed by the bad guy and forced to start once more at the beginning.

Not long into I'm Your Man, Dan Stevens' character, a genial android named Tom, arranges a perfectly contrived combination of romantic clichés for his would-be partner, Alma. The rose petals are "artfully" strewn, the candles flicker, and flutes of bubbly are ready for sipping beside the bubble-filled tub.

There’s a brief shot early on in Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s wondrous romance and Berlinale competition entry What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?) that might seem to illustrate something quite mundane. The male protagonist’s soccer practice session has ended.

Like a blind date who starts off the evening by making a self-deprecating joke, the sequel to Eddie Murphy's smash hit 1988 comedy Coming to America takes pains to deflect the most obvious criticism that might come its way. "American cinema is the best," a character declares at one point in the unimaginatively titled Coming 2 America.

Also Read: Neon Acquires Celine Sciamma's Berlinale Contender 'Petite Maman'Overcome by grief, Marion returns to the city, leaving Nelly and Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne, “Godard Mon Amour”) to finish with the house. Nelly goes to play in the woods, where she encounters a young girl (Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine’s real-life sister), who is building a tree fort out of branches.

There's sardonic self-deprecation in the part Daniel Brühl has chosen for himself in his first feature as director, that of a European movie star sweating over an audition for a Hollywood superhero film that stands to push his fame — and his bank account — to the next level. But celebrity entitlement is only one part of the package.

This review of “La Llorona” was first published following its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. For his third and most tonally adventurous feature to date, socially perceptive writer-director Jayro Bustamante repurposes one of Latin America’s most ubiquitous supernatural legends to fiercely examine genocide against indigenous people in his native Guatemala.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIt’s not every action star who could be considered up-and-coming at 55, but it happens. Frank Grillo has been around for a while, but he didn’t start to break out until he was featured in a couple of “Purge” sequels (the first in 2014), where he played a lean-and-mean cop.

Toward the end of Tina, the revealing documentary tribute by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin for HBO, Tina Turner is seen in an extended concert clip performing the Beatles' "Help" as a decelerated ballad — intimate, melancholy and full of feeling.

Opening with a very real-looking hardcore sex tape, and climaxing with a deranged orgy featuring super-sized dildos, Romanian writer-director Radu Jude's latest taboo-busting polemical comedy is refreshingly untroubled by tasteful restraint. Shot during COVID lockdown last summer, with cast and crew all wearing anti-viral masks, the snappily titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a scattershot attack on sexual hysteria and political hypocrisy in an era of online slut-shaming.

Most cop movies — and most movies in general — spend the first reel setting up a story that usually kicks off after an “inciting incident,” to quote various screenwriting manuals, which takes place within the first ten or 15 minutes. For the rest of the film, we then watch how that incident unravels and affects the lives of all those involved.

Hungary’s most recent contribution to the implacable flow of war films pouring out of Eastern Europe is a far cry from the Russian tank operas and spectacular disaster films like Battle of Leningrad. Denes Nagy’s sensitive first featureNatural Light (Termeszetes feny), bowing in Berlin competition, is the opposite of these: a slow starter high on atmosphere but low on action, whose horrific main event takes place discreetly off-screen.

ever do nothing nice and easy,” she said in a sultry snarl. “We always do it nice and rough.”“Tina,” the documentary about Turner that premiered at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, has moments where it tries to be nice and easy, sliding over difficult portions in Turner’s life in an attempt to find a celebratory tone.

The premise of Netflix's new teen drama Moxie— of a present-day 11th-grader taking inspiration from her mom’s Riot Grrrl memorabilia to make her school more hospitable for girls through an anonymous feminist zine — is at once wholly plausible and a transparent Gen X fantasy of its cultural relevance to Gen Z.

The underseen but arresting 2016 documentary feature Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait of a flinty Vermont loner and his volatile relationship to the land that has consumed him for more than three decades. Its director, Tony Stone, now blurs the line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking to depict another solitary man inseparable from his natural environment in Ted K, a piercing psychological probe into the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

Three bright, talented young people in their 20s struggle to find their place in a rotten society, scarred by Germany’s defeat in World War I and menaced by the rising tide of Nazism, in Fabian — Going to the Dogs (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde.) This second screen adaptation of Erich Kastner’s now classic 1931 novel (the first was directed by Wolf Gremm in 1980) marks a stylistically daring attempt to capture the zeitgeist by director Dominik Graf, who returns to Berlin competition where