Director Alex Lee Moyers addresses the incel phenomenon as a question of loneliness, giving five incendiary attention seekers exactly what they want in this challenging but essential doc.
17.04.2020 - 09:45 / variety.com
A one-joke, bad-taste concept is pulled off with some deadpan panache in this indie comedy "thriller."
By Dennis Harvey
Film Critic
Nobody is going to watch a movie called “Butt Boy” in pursuit of sophisticated wit. That said, this feature spinoff from a prior sketch by the collaborative comedy-video team known as Tiny Cinema does manage to be just about the drollest execution possible of the most juvenile concept imaginable.
While some may be disappointed that the scatological humor isn’t
Director Alex Lee Moyers addresses the incel phenomenon as a question of loneliness, giving five incendiary attention seekers exactly what they want in this challenging but essential doc.
[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] In the hard-hitting and heartbreaking documentary Jacinta, a young mother suffers the effects of heroin addiction that plagued her own mother as well, prolonging a cycle of abuse and incarceration that repeats itself across a generation. Stories of drugs, jail and recidivism are, alas, nothing new in America.
Although it presumably didn't involve much financial risk, it was a gutsy move for Paramount Pictures to pick up the low-budget British teen gang drama Blue Story for domestic theatrical distribution in the current era in which studios concentrate on would-be franchises.
Twice in Clark Duke's Southern crime pic Arkansas, an oddball character played by the director informs strangers that, however off-putting he may be, sooner or later everybody wants to be his friend. The same must be true in real life, since the actor (familiar from The Office and Hot Tub Time Machine) has enlisted a surprising array of talent (not only from Hollywood, but the music world)to assist as he makes his feature directing debut.
Where other docs go deep, Netflix’s Michelle Obama portrait stays shallow, but the former FLOTUS’s inspirational personality comes through loud and clear.
[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] There's plenty of wild and intimate beauty and not a little blood in Kokoloko, the first feature from Gerardo Naranjo since his 2011 international breakout, Miss Bala.
A head-spinning documentary, based on the book by French economist Thomas Piketty, turns the tale of capital in the last 300 years into a financial detective story that exposes our current crisis.
This SXSW-programmed French portmanteau comedy sends up the perils of online living to alternately sharp and slight effect.
A Bulgarian immigrant rails against Brexit-era Britain in Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova's thorny, thoughtful narrative debut.
A daring group of undocumented young people go to extreme measures to liberate immigrants bound for deportation in this hybrid “prison” doc.
Marc Collin's amiable time capsule portrait of a 1970s electronic musician never quite finds the beat.
[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] If nothing else (and there is plenty else) Bo McGuire strikes a campily confident pose. Hirsute of face and loud of shirts, a Virginia Slim always dangling from his lips or fingers, this Alabama-born artist swans his way through his feature debut, Socks on Fire.
For his lucid and perceptive look at Stanley Kubrick's unparalleled body of work, Gregory Monro excerpts a number of archival clips. It's not the filmmaker who's at the center of most of them but his collaborators, testifying to his exacting methods.
The new film The Half of It (Netflix) feels like few other teen movies. Set in the rural, socially conservative town of Squahamish, Washington, it doesn't show anyone shopping, or having sex, or using social media.
[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] What a pleasure to see the underrated Steve Zahn in a leading role that fully capitalizes on the contradictory currents coursing through his screen persona — of mellowness and wired energy, grounded warmth and off-kilter unpredictability.
An unhealthily close bond between mother-and-daughter addicts forms the dark heart of Jessica Earnshaw's gripping, characterful doc debut.
Oakland, California, in recent years has been the setting of a number of bold, stylistically distinctive takes on race, African American identity and social conditioning, from the searing tragedy of Fruitvale Station through the hip-hop swagger of Blindspotting to the gonzo satire of Sorry to Bother You. That makes Black Panther co-writer Joe Robert Cole's reflection on the vicious cycle of gang culture and its toll on families an earnest but unrewarding disappointment.
Hot-button subject matter proves surprisingly less than compelling in Anthony Woodley's The Flood, a film about a British immigration officer interviewing a high-profile detainee. The pic was inspired by the experiences of director Woodley, screenwriter Helen Kingston and producer Luke Healy volunteering in the Calais refugee camp known as "The Jungle," and you can feel the efforts of the filmmakers to pack in all the insights they gleaned.
[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] For those of us whose memory of Hurricane Maria boils down to footage of President Donald Trump scornfully tossing out paper towels to a crowd at a disaster relief center, Cecilia Aldarondo’s documentary Landfall offers up a welcome flipside: images of Puerto Ricans proudly and painfully trying to rebuild their island amid a
A scientist who sacrificed his personal life in order to invent time travel has second thoughts in James vs. His Future Self, a light rom-com that abandons some of the theoretical paradoxes often found in time-travel fantasies.