'Dear Santa': Film Review | DOC NYC 2020

John Patrick Shanley follows Doubt with another persuasive argument against playwrights adapting their own work for the screen in Wild Mountain Thyme, a limp dollop of Irish whimsy that never sparks to life. Shanley's 2014 play Outside Mullingar was a mellow charmer that returned with disarming sentimentality to territory not far from the writer's Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck, demonstrating the same faith that true love will eventually surmount all obstacles.

As the title suggests, the documentary “Queer Japan” is big and broad, not focused.

As venues around the world open and shutter in sync with the fits and starts of local pandemic containment measures, it's reassuring to know that one of London's most cherished institutions, the jazz club Ronnie Scott's, founded in 1959, is still chugging along. (It's reopening after a short lockdown again Dec.

An elegantly composed mosiac of real events and artfully restaged memories, Iranian director Firouzeh Khosrovani's stylized documentary Radiograph of a Family is a personal passion project with rich political and cultural resonance.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” went the voiceover in Jules Dassin’s classic Big Apple-set film noir. Two such stories make up the crux of the documentary Five Years North, which follows a pair of New Yorkers who couldn’t be more incompatible, even if their lives are connected in larger, more meaningful ways.

Joe Leydon Film CriticMore than two years after filming wrapped, “Superintelligence” the latest joint effort of Melissa McCarthy and her director husband Ben Falcone, has finally popped up on a streaming platform — specifically, HBO Max — which arguably is the natural habitat for a lightweight, undemandingly engaging comedy that can be enjoyed either entirely in one sitting, or sporadically in bite-sized chunks.

Also Read: See Johnny Flynn as David Bowie in First Look at Unauthorized Biopic 'Stardust'For better and for worse, “Stardust” grapples with those issues as it follows a 24-year-old Bowie on a promotional tour through the United States in 1971, accompanied by a long-suffering Mercury Records publicist named Ron Oberman.Johnny Flynn plays Bowie, Marc Maron plays Oberman, and the point of director and cowriter Gabriel Range’s film is to trace the seeds of Bowie’s breakthrough character, Ziggy

Netflix's mission to conquer the already oversaturated holiday movie marketplace continues with this sequel to its 2018 hit starring Kurt Russell as a very hip Santa Claus. With Chris Columbus in the director's chair (he produced the earlier film) and Goldie Hawn bumped up from a cameo to a co-starring role as Mrs.

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history. In one of the artfully constructed film's visual motifs, we watch the road itself through a windshield, a not-to-be-ignored Mercedes-Benz hood ornament positioned prominently in the frame.

24kGoldn and Iann Dior made their debut appearance at the American Music Awards 2020 tonight (November 22).The rappers brought their chart-topping collaboration ‘Mood’ to the ceremony, which was akin place at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theatre.The duo performed on what looked like a house turned on its side as lightning cracked on the screen behind them. Watch the energetic performance below now.‘Mood’ scored its fifth week at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart this week.

Prolific, lyrical, and possessed of that entrepreneurial optimism which afflicts some who have seen the worst of what the world has to offer, David Wojnarowicz was a multivalent artist who survived a tormented childhood and decanted that bone-deep fury into his work.

When it comes to baseball sayings that apply to real life, the term "swinging for the fences" couldn’t be more suitable for the three major-league hopefuls at the heart of Sami Khan and Michael Gassert’s gripping new sports documentary, The Last Out.

When Gary Duncan was arrested on trumped-up charges, essentially for being Black, his situation was hardly unique. But his readiness to fight the bogus case was nothing short of heroic, especially in 1966 Plaquemines Parish, near New Orleans, part of a region that one of the interviewees in Nancy Buirski's film calls a "totalitarian nation." The word "totalitarian" is uttered several times in A Crime on the Bayou, and on the evidence of this real-life drama, it isn't hyperbole.

In her 60-some years on Earth, Lorine Padilla has seen, done and endured enough to fill several lifetimes.

Turkish origins to the Icelandic legend of the Yule Cat (Jólakötturinn, who goes by “Jola” for short here) to the Star of Bethlehem itself.Watch Video: Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn Say Christmas Is 'Doomed' Forever in 'The Christmas Chronicles 2' TrailerAlso part of the holiday’s history is Belsnickel, one of Santa’s gift-giving antecedents, but in “Christmas Chronicles 2,” Belsnickel (Julian Dennison, “Deadpool 2”) is Santa’s former right-hand elf, so embittered by the big man’s devotion to

The kind of story at the heart of Baby God is sadly familiar from news reports. As text at the end of the documentary points out, "More than two dozen U.S.

Though he's adept enough at sleight-of-hand and other stage trickery to have earned the admiration of people like Ricky Jay, Penn & Teller and David Blaine, performer Derek DelGaudio bristles at the term "magician." Anyone inclined to think that makes him pretentious can look to Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself, in which Frank Oz documents the singular 2017 off-Broadway show (also directed by Oz) that embodies his ideal: Here, the patter employed by some ambitious illusionists becomes full-blown

Rebecca Danigelis was a 75-year-old housekeeping supervisor at a hotel when she was fired. She had $600 in savings and had cashed in her 401K to send her younger son, Sian-Pierre Regis, to college.

Near the start of Alex Gibney’s documentary “Crazy, Not Insane,” his subject asks the kind of essential question that feels so unanswerable that it is brought up not nearly as often as it should be. Thinking about the nature of evil and recalling her childhood interest in the Nuremberg Trials, she asks very plainly, “How come I don’t kill?” Everyone gets angry.