‘Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road’ Film Review: Frustrating, but the Music Is Transcendent

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment WriterWhile it’s not uncommon for an animation director to make the leap into live-action filmmaking, it is rather rare for that first at bat to be a massive sci-fi blockbuster that isn’t based on any pre-existing properties.

Chris McKay’s thrilling “The Tomorrow War” drops you right into its wartime hell, literally, with an opening sequence that shows Chris Pratt falling from a smoke-filled sky as if he were in an apocalyptic round of “Fortnite.” It’s only the first of many bold screenwriting choices that helps fuel this original Amazon blockbuster, which then jumps back a few decades later to before the death and destruction, at a Christmas party in 2022.

The family that slays together does not necessarily stay together. The dysfunctional superhero family known as the Avengers learned as much when they came to blows fighting out their politics in the 2016 blockbuster Captain America: Civil War.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterWell, they made a sequel to “The Boss Baby.” The 2017 DreamWorks film, extremely loosely based on Marla Frazee’s children’s book series, bet big on the appeal of a dyspeptic, super-intelligent, black-suited infant speaking with the voice of Alec Baldwin while doing un-babylike things, and it was a bet that paid off handsomely, to the tune of half a billion in worldwide box office and an Oscar nomination.

st century for both action films and musicals.)There are moments where “Black Widow” absolutely benefits from having a woman in the director’s chair, particularly a scene in which Yelena gets to be ruefully sardonic when describing the forced sterilization to which all the Widows are subjected; when Natasha brings it up in one of the “Avengers” movies, the moment is played for tears, but here, it’s a moment of brutal candor and a cataloguing of just one of many indignities suffered by the young

Equation to an Unknown (★★★☆☆), originally released in 1980, winds a wild path through a young hero’s love life.Long lost to the vestiges of memory, the film, directed by Francis Savel under his nom-de-porn Dietrich de Velsa, was rediscovered by French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez (Knife + Heart), who commissioned a new print from the original camera negative, resulting in this gorgeous video transfer, now available for streaming on Pinklabel.tv.Dark-haired looker Gianfranco Longhi stars as a

Summer of 85 (★★★★☆) signals a clear warning from the start that whatever friendship or romance blossoms between teens Alexis and David, it won’t end well for at least one of them.

Josef Sommer.) Fishburne can, of course, read the iTunes user agreement and make it riveting, and as the character stuck with the most exposition, that’s essentially what he does here.There’s a decent little B-movie dying to crawl out of this mess, but let “The Ice Road” be a lesson to other mid-budget producers — just because your movie is premiering on Netflix rather than in theaters, as this one is doing, it doesn’t mean you can skimp on making fire look like fire and ice look like ice.“The

Kelly Clarkson is enlisting three generations of Wilsons for her cover of “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys.

terre battue, William Klein’s movie about the 1981 Roland Garros tournament, “The French.”Klein, an American-born, French-identified photographer and filmmaker now in his 90s, had long been lauded for his street-smart, irony-laden, instinctively artistic work.

Reclaiming Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson’s voice and personal narrative, “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road,” is an insightful but breezy introduction to the musical mastermind. Touching on everything from his early career to Beach Boys success and his drug use and mental illness, Brent Wilson and Jason Fine’s film may not reveal much about Wilson that isn’t covered in a Wikipedia article but still allows the musician to reclaim his own narrative.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticEven if you think that Brian Wilson is God — and yes, I do — you could easily say that we don’t need another documentary about him.