‘Curveball’: Film Review

Writer-directors Brett and Drew Pierce (billed as The Pierce Brothers) know exactly what they're doing in the creepy prologue to The Wretched, which unfolds 35 years ago as the camera crawls around a lawn on which old-school kids' toys — a knitted bunny, crayons, model cars, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rubik's Cube — lie abandoned in the rain. Inside the house, a babysitter arrives to find the flowers wilted and the mother of a young family busy committing a gruesome act in the basement.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] An alumna of the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence program who has earned attention with her short films, Israeli writer-director Ruthy Pribar makes an assured feature debut, balancing sobriety with emotional intensity in Asia.

Spike Jonze directs a film version of the Beastie Boys' 2019 stage-show memoir, in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond prove themselves infectious raconteurs of their white-kid-turned-king-of-rock hip-hop saga.

Netflix releases a delightful, sugar-rush animated feature for families about an extremely dysfunctional family, one in which the kids conspired to orphan themselves.

Almost a century before the recent, wildly popular Hilma af Klint retrospective at New York's Guggenheim, the Swedish artist imagined a spiraling white temple, not unlike that Manhattan landmark, as the home for her paintings. Most of what she envisioned for her art was denied her during her lifetime, but af Klint, ever prescient and prolific, understood her work's power and importance and, planning for posterity, she managed, in a way, to have the last laugh.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Israeli director Eytan Fox, who landed on the map with his 2002 gay military romance, Yossi & Jagger, brings sensitivity, restraint and slow-burn sensuality to a story of cross-generational emotional awakening in Sublet.

Shea Whigham plays a man with no name — but with plenty of overly diagrammed sin — in a small-town West Texas drama that's like a reductive bone-dry version of 'The Apostle.'

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] It's fitting that Wake Up on Mars opens in winter. The frozen Swedish landscape is an apt backdrop for this real-life tale of suspended animation: Two teenage sisters, in side-by-side beds, lie in a coma-like condition that's variously known as uppgivenhetssyndrom, apatisk (apathy) syndrome and resignation syndrome.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] With his chameleonic capacity for self-reinvention, his eclectic musical palette and elegant extraterrestrial freakdom, David Bowie would seem ideal subject matter for the kind of freewheeling, stylistically fragmented biopic treatment Todd Haynes gave Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.

A one-joke, bad-taste concept is pulled off with some deadpan panache in this indie comedy "thriller."

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] There are close-ups, and then there are close-ups — frame-filling, heart-stopping glimpses of a soul. In the brief but stirring Stray, those glimpsed souls belong to dogs who live on the streets of a major city.

A biopic about the young David Bowie (but without any Bowie songs) captures him on a 1971 road trip across America, when he was still putting together the insinuating image puzzle that would become Ziggy Stardust.

By Kaleem Aftab

Butt Boy

Coronavirus or not, the German film industry has determined that the show must go on. Germany will still hand out its equivalent of the Oscars, the German Film Awards, in a live ceremony in Berlin on April 24, despite the country being on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

By Tom Grater

Out of the vast universe of nature documentaries, I don’t think I’m alone in finding films about life under the sea to occupy a special place. The very fact that they exist, of course, is amazing — though when you watch one, part of the wonder is that you’re not thinking about how aquamarine filmmakers actually hovered in the ocean depths to shoot this stuff.

By Nancy Tartaglione

About 20 years ago, a collector found something quite rare at a flea market: a group of 55 photos taken on the set of the seminal 1920 German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

With the exception of Flipper from 1960s television, or maybe the talking Fa and Bea from Mike Nichols' 1973 movie The Day of the Dolphin, few cinematic dolphins have displayed quite as much personality as Echo, the main character in Dolphin Reef, Disneynature's new documentary premiering on Disney+, narrated by Natalie Portman.