'Earwig and the Witch': Film Review

In an uncanny instance of art mirroring life, two major Hollywood movies will premiere just weeks apart, both of which depict relentless campaigns by American government intelligence agencies to silence influential Black voices. They follow closely after an impeachment trial in which the majority of GOP senators showed their complicity in violence from white supremacist groups by voting to acquit the Instigator in Chief.

In Shatara Michelle Ford’s experimental thriller Test Pattern, light and dark are intertwined.The film is a staggeringly impressive debut, blending color, sound and story to create an intricate emotional tapestry. It begins in the moment before a sexual assault occurs.

love your car? And what if it loved you back?“Jumbo,” a movie inspired by the real-life woman who married the Eiffel Tower, claiming she’d fallen passionately in love with it, is Belgian writer-director Zoé Wittock’s fractured fairy tale of a feature debut about a withdrawn young woman played by “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Noémie Merlant, who develops deep emotional feelings for her local park’s newest passenger-spinning, brightly illuminated ride.While it’s easy to imagine filmmakers from

Studio Ghibli released Earwig and the Witch on February 3 in 430 theaters and dropped the animated feature from the legendary studio on HBO Max on February 5. The Goro Miyazaki-directed film with the voice talents of Richard E. Grant, Kacey Musgraves, and Dan Stevens earned an estimated $99,941 on its opening weekend to bring its cume to $132,768

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorStudio Ghibli has been making animated features for over four decades since being co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki, director of “My Neighbor Totoro” and the Academy Award-winning “Spirited Away.”The studio’s latest release is “Earwig and the Witch” now streaming on HBO Max, and an awards contender for animated feature. The story is based on the children’s book of the same name by Dianna Wynne Jones.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticErica Wigg, the main character of Goro Miyazaki’s made-for-TV feature “Earwig and the Witch,” is both a brat and an orphan. Those two traits seldom go together in children’s stories, and the combination provides a modest starting point for this intermittently amusing CG entry from Studio Ghibli — back in business but a shadow of its former glory.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The film was one of the opening-night presentations at the virtual Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, occupying the same position as previous music-focused docs like “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and last year’s “Miss Americana.” No doubt it left some viewers wishing that it had been the Eccles Theatre moving to the

Kourosh Ahari's debut feature proves an accomplished psychological chiller that impresses far beyond its historic status as a U.S. production featuring primarily Iranian or Iranian-American talent.

The psychological toll of investigative police work seeps into the bones of John Lee Hancock's gritty neo-noir The Little Things, which captures Los Angeles County's flat urban sprawl and snaking freeways to highly atmospheric effect.

Watch Video: Denzel Washington and Rami Malek Are Out to Catch Jared Leto in 'The Little Things' TrailerOne senses that Hancock (“Saving Mr. Banks,” “The Founder”) wants to bait and switch the audience with what at first seems like a straightforward policier but then pivots into a character study of Deke and Jim — respectively, an aging lawman who’s literally haunted by his mistakes and an ambitious young climber who may follow in Deke’s footsteps for better or for worse.

Just a few months ago, Juno Temple helped give the fledgling Apple TV+ service its first must-see: Ted Lasso, a practically perfect comedy series that radiated decency and hope in a world that...well, you were there. She’s very much on the other side of the coin in her reunion with the streaming service, playing a drug-addicted single mom so neglectful that abandoning her kid to the care of a just-released felon is actually a step in the right direction.

After all the passion and grievances stirred up in Malcolm & Marie, it's a tad on the nose to hear Cee-Lo on the Outkast track "Liberation" sing about the "fine line between love and hate." But it's glorious to watch Zendaya, in a commanding turn that cements her arrival as a grownup movie star, skate along that line with both raw emotionality and the jaded remove of a perceptive woman toughened by experience.

Watch Video: 'Malcolm & Marie' Trailer: Zendaya and John David Washington Have Steamy, Love-Hate RelationshipMarie’s opening salvo is that Malcolm forgot to thank her during his lengthy curtain speech, but that minor betrayal exposes a myriad of fault lines in their relationship, from his ego to her low self-esteem, not to mention the fact that she feels that Malcolm has raided her own past issues with drug addiction and rehab to create the female lead of his film, who’s having issues with drug

A working-class gangster pic whose protagonist is a more reluctant criminal than most, Jeremie Guez's Brothers by Blood adapts Pete Dexter's 1991 novel Brotherly Love. Sharp-eyed readers will have guessed that the action is set in Philadelphia, and the film's feel for its post-industrial, gray-skies setting is one of its main assets.

In a small village in tropical Kerala in the south of India, civilized society breaks down after a buffalo gets loose and the villagers mindlessly join in the hunt. Veteran director Lijo Jose Pellissery returns to the theme of mob violence he handled so well in the 2017 Angamaly Diaries, which pitted local gangs against each other with tragi-comic flair.

The two lovers "meet cute." One has an overbearing mother and an overly garrulous best friend constantly trying to interfere in his love life. The other has deep-rooted family issues.

To find a novel approach to the Holocaust is definitely a challenge, and yet director Peter Bebjak has told an unfamiliar but revealing story in The Auschwitz Report, Slovakia’s submission for best international film of 2020. Samuel Goldwyn Films will release the movie in the U.S., and although it can’t be described as an entertaining watch, it does retrieve a part of history worth honoring.

A cerebral mystery thriller told by an unreliable narrator in a fugue of emotional dislocation, writer-director Lili Horvat's Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time puts a lightly feminist spin on classic screen tropes about hysterical wronged women driven by romantic obsession and fatal attraction.

Two unmoored men in the chilly Chilean boondocks find warmth and solace in each other in The Strong Ones (Los Fuertes), the impressive feature debut from writer-director Omar Zuniga. The film explores the same world and characters as Zuniga’s short San Cristobal, which won the Teddy for best LGBTQ short at the 2015 Berlinale.

Even in his pathetic last days, Donald Trump found time to take a trip to the Texas border to check on his wall. His journey only confirms the relevance of the new IFC movie, No Man’s Land, which examines some of the human consequences of the divisiveness regarding immigration.