'Happily': Film Review

Dead children, democracy being crushed, senseless Nazi atrocities —there's not much happiness in this year's collection of Oscar-nominated short documentaries, unless you count the man who actually survived racism and homelessness to become a proud, successful grandpa. Each of these long "shorts" finds protagonists to root for; some contain seeds of hope; all boast polish and relevance that make them awards-ready.

Imprisonment, in many senses of the word, is at the center of each of the five nominees for this year's live-action short film Oscar, which is not to say they're a homogenous bunch: Though all have political undercurrents and speak to present-tense issues, their moods and styles vary enough that their one big (mostly) common theme —cops, and how they wield power —stands out only because we've already been thinking about it every day for what feels like forever.

A couple of truly daring visions spice up the expected fare in this year's crop of Academy-honored animated shorts — one of which would be as at home in an art gallery as in the theaters, which, pandemic be damned, will still showcase nominees as a big-screen event. Each candidate has something to offer, including those non-nominees that have been added (as "highly recommended") to stretch the program's running time to feature length.

Just in time for Easter, The Unholy offers up satanic counter-programming to sate the appetites of the religious horror faithful. Almost a decade after getting drawn into a dybbuk haunting in The Possession, Jeffrey Dean Morgan reteams with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures, this time switching from Jewish folklore to Catholic demonology in a tale that tills the soil of Massachusetts for its history of charred witches.

Watch Video: 'The Unholy' Trailer Offers Sinister Horror Take on Faith-Based FilmsHis careless act unleashes the spirt, which possesses Alice (first-timer Cricket Brown), the deaf and mute niece of Father Hagan (William Sadler), whose church is adjacent to the tree.

It takes expert stylistic precision to successfully craft a dark comedy about religious fanatics endeavoring to assassinate a celebrated atheist. Filmmaker Harry Michell doesn't quite stick the landing in his sophomore feature, aiming for a complex mixture of comic irreverence and sensitive character study.

In the wearily predictable 1990s throwback sphere that Every Breath You Take inhabits, the combination of a comfortably upper middle-class family navigating a rough patch while living in modernist real-estate porn invariably means they will repair their frayed bonds by slamming around that house fighting for their lives against a raging psychotic in the final reel.

The cast of Godzilla vs. Kong shows commendable inclusivity for a major studio movie.

Forget red states vs. blue states, liberals vs.

Earlier this week, WeWork, the office-share company, announced that it had lost $3.2 billion in 2020. For WeWork, that was good news: Its losses were down from $3.5 billion the previous year, when its megalomaniacal co-founder, Adam Neumann, was ousted as CEO.

Also Read: 'Nobody' Film Review: Bob Odenkirk Blows His Stack and His Cover in Delirious Shoot 'Em Up“Shoplifters,” though, doesn’t have the vitality of those films; it’s an ensemble coming-of-age film whose characters struggle to get beyond the first Smiths song that serves as a chapter title, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” And while its best moments do testify to the way the right song can make sense of the world, it mostly uses the music as a backdrop for jumbled teen coming-of-age

Irresistibly likable musical Best Summer Ever offers the wholesome tale of Sage and Tony, two teenagers in love, winningly played by Shannon DeVido and Ricky Wilson Jr. respectively.

Proving every bit as charmless and frenetic as its 2018 CG-animated predecessor, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway once again goes about chaotically tossing bunny droppings over the perfectly fertile ground that is the Beatrix Potter source material.

“America has demonstrated its greatness time and time and time again,” proclaims ACLU attorney Jeffery Robinson from a stage early in the new documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, “and America is one of the most racist countries on the face of this earth.” When he continues, “those two things are not mutually exclusive,” the audience erupts in applause.

In the fall of 2015, a 16-year-old girl named Shakara was removed from her math class by school officer Ben Fields with such force that footage of the incident went viral. “Are you gonna come with me, or am I gonna make you?” asks Fields in a video, before flipping over Shakara’s desk with her in it, landing the teenager on her back with the desk overturned above her.

Surprise player Bob Odenkirk enters the middle-aged action hero game in Nobody, Ilya Naishuller's John Wick-y take on the protect-my-family picture. Taking itself much less seriously than the Taken series and its predecessors, it's a wish-fulfillment romp just as ludicrous as any of them but more fun than most.

A curious footnote in pre-World War II British history fails to provide adequate fuel for a gripping espionage thriller in Six Minutes to Midnight, a disappointingly conventional passion project for genderfluid comic Eddie Izzard, inspired by childhood visits to the local museum at Bexhill-on-Sea.

Also Read: 'Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free' Film Review: Ragged Documentary Fits the Man and the MusicSaviano, who wrote a 2016 book about Clark with the same title, and Whitfield use an array of techniques in the film, some of which help tell the story and some of which keep us off balance.