'Friendsgiving': Film Review

In 1976 Clive Cussler published Raise the Titanic!, a novel in which a team of undersea adventurers attempted to bring the famous shipwreck to the surface and recover its treasures. But Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt was late to this game: For the previous six or seven years, the CIA had been secretly attempting something similar in the real world, with a much more dangerous treasure in mind.

The unknown story of a brilliant illustrator who survived the Spanish Civil War only to be interned in a French concentration camp, where he was beaten, tortured and starved to death for several years until he escaped and eventually made it over to Mexico, where he became the lover of Frida Kahlo, after which he moved to New York and frequented painters like Rothko and De Kooning, is definitely one worth telling.

Also Read: Henry Golding Drama 'Monsoon' Acquired by Strand ReleasingEven when he gets to a luxury hotel, Kit doesn’t seem any steadier on his feet. He sits in the hotel room, seemingly disoriented and tired; if we don’t know why he’s there, he doesn’t seem to know either.You could say that the film is built around silences, with minimal dialogue and only the sparest use of John Cummings’ music.

First love sours almost imperceptibly in Make Up, the assured feature debut of Claire Oakley, in which an off-season beach destination is just quiet enough to force an 18 year-old to grapple with questions she doesn't know she needs to ask. Atmosphere plays a large role here, opening up thriller-ish possibilities without disturbing the realism of a setting where teens in the service industry earn a living and don't think much about the future.

They don't make heist movies like they used to. You used to be able to see films like The Killing, Rififi and The Italian Job and simply relish the fiendishly clever methods with which criminals executed their elaborate robberies.

When singer-guitarist Karen Dalton, whose ardent fans in the Greenwich Village folk scene included Bob Dylan, died in 1993 at 55, she had long been off the music-biz grid.

The only thing surprising about Chick Fight is that it took this long for a distaff variation on David Fincher's 1999 classic Fight Club to happen. Not that this Malin Akerman starrer is similar in tone to that film, relying heavily on broad comedy rather than brutal nihilism.

"TV movie" and "nuclear annihilation" aren't readily linked concepts, and they certainly weren't back in the movie-of-the-week heyday of 1983, when ABC took a gamble on the decidedly downbeat The Day After. The Kansas-set drama, an unflinching depiction of the aftermath of an atomic conflagration, aired Nov.

Also Read: How 'Freaky' Pulled Off a Successful World Premiere Amid a PandemicThe other half of the “Freaky Friday” equation is Millie (Kathryn Newton, “Big Little Lies”); she dreams of going away to college but feels trapped at home as caretaker to her widowed mom Coral (Katie Finneran, “Wonderfalls”), whose grief has made her clingy and prone to pass out after finishing a bottle of white wine on her own.

Arriving during an expectation-shattering electoral season, J.D. Vance's 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, hit a zeitgeist nerve.

Watch Video: Paging Oscar? Glenn Close, Amy Adams Act Up an Appalachian Storm in 'Hillbilly Elegy' TrailerHe’s sketchy on the details with girlfriend and classmate Usha (Freida Pinto), not knowing how she will react to his family drama, but the trip home provides the opportunity for multiple flashbacks to J.D.’s childhood, where Bev could be loving but also abusive, encouraging but rarely reliable. And when things get so bad at home that J.D.

Fifty years of killer hangovers condensed into two hours, Crock of Gold chronicles the dramatic larger-than-life story of Shane MacGowan, the Anglo-Irish singer-songwriter who achieved international fame in the 1980s as self-destructive frontman of Celtic-punk band The Pogues. Co-produced by MacGowan's friend Johnny Depp, who also makes a brief cameo, this boozy cinematic bromance could have been an indulgent love letter from one swashbuckling celebrity pirate to another.

“We are at war,” French president François Hollande declared in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist attacks of 2015, rallying his country in a battle cry against an enemy that remained hidden in the shadows of everyday life.

David Wojnarowicz, a key figure of the 1980s art movement that flowered in the pavement cracks of New York's pre-gentrified East Village, died of AIDS in 1992 at age 37. But Chris McKim's defiantly alive collage documentary, Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, is so charged with the words and images of the multimedia artist it could almost be considered self-portraiture, often recalling Jonathan Caouette's remarkable docu-narrative hybrid Tarnation.

In Fatman, the latest film by brothers Ian and Eshom Nelms, Santa Claus is a gruff, defeated man with a drinking problem. Persecuted by those he wants to bring joy to, he at one point suffers a wound in his side, Jesus-style.

Also Read: 'Fatman,' With Mel Gibson as Santa Claus, Acquired by Saban FilmsTimes are hard for Santa: With so many kids misbehaving, he is delivering fewer parents, which, in turn, cuts into the subsidy he gets from the U.S. government.

Watch Video: Gary Oldman Charms His Way Through 1930s Hollywood in David Fincher's 'Mank' TrailerBut starry-eyed fans of American cinema’s golden age who shunned “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” because they didn’t want to know about the sex lives of their favorite leading men and ladies, and who avoided “Trumbo” because they didn’t want to be reminded that the studios aided and abetted the Blacklist, will have to deal with the Finchers’ evocation of the deeply reactionary politics

You have to say one thing about the hapless characters in the new horror film directed by Alastair Orr (House on Willow Street, Indigenous): They at least know exactly what kind of movie they're in. Turning homicidally on each other in the woods with bombs attached to their chests, they manage to throw in joking references to the Saw movies and John Wick, among other things.

The lambs certainly aren't silent in the latest horror film from Bryan Bertino (The Strangers, The Monster). Depicting the fateful reunion that occurs when two adult siblings return home to their family farm on the occasion of the imminent death of their father, The Dark and the Wicked offers supremely atmospheric thrills that will hauntingly resonate with anyone who's ever been faced with a similar situation.