'Happy Face': Film Review

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.

Watch Video: 'MLK/FBI' Director Risked Helping the FBI Tarnish Dr King's Legacy Because Story Was That ImportantAt the same time, these interviews fill in the blanks those files don’t cover, from King’s personal anxiety over the potential revelations of his adulterous affairs to the way that even supportive media outlets turned on the reverend when he shifted his gaze from civil rights to issues like the Vietnam war and poverty in America.We don’t see any of those interview subjects,

A captivity tale whose ostensible Finnish setting serves mostly to put us in mind of grisly old-world folk tales, Alister Grierson's Bloody Hell saves its troll for the very end but offers plenty of peril while we await him.

There's at least one good thing to say about the new Chinese disaster movie directed by Simon West: It doesn't take long for the volcano to erupt. Considering the bloated running times of so many similarly styled American extravaganzas, the admirable efficiency of Skyfire means that you don't have to waste a lot of time sitting through endless exposition.

Also Read: Talking Life, Death and 'Jackass' With 'Dick Johnson Is Dead' Director Kirsten JohnsonAt the beginning of the film, he’s established as a charming, amusing figure: a “hippie businessman” who made work calls on an early mobile phone from the ski slopes of Park City and lived by Nietzsche’s quote, “Don’t trust the flatlanders,” a man for whom every Thursday was “Bob Dylan Day,” and a big spender who owned two Cadillac convertibles but painted them both the same shade of red so his

Perhaps there’ll come a time a few years from now, once the bludgeoning monotony of pandemic confinement has (hopefully) become a fading memory, when the claustrophobic agitation of Doug Liman's smugly self-satisfied heist thingamajig, Locked Down, could be vaguely amusing. Or not.

Class as much as gender constraints obscured the achievements of 19th century English paleontologist Mary Anning, magnificently played by Kate Winslet in Francis Lee's slow-burn elemental love story Ammonite. And class barriers continue to marginalize the work of Ralph Fiennes' self-taught archeologist Basil Brown almost a century later in The Dig.

Watch Video: 'Locked Down' Trailer: Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor Steal a Diamond to Pass Time in COVIDAn utter coincidence happens: Paxton gets rehired to drive goods from London department stores out to storage in the countryside, while Linda is tasked by her superior (Ben Stiller) with taking a diamond that her company has had on display at Harrod’s and shipping it to New York, where its unsavory buyer will keep it locked away in a vault.

Going a step or two beyond the usual worries over what will happen once armies let military robots make trigger-pulling decisions for themselves, Mikael Hafstrom's Outside the Wire introduces multiple kinds of robo-warrior but is still most worried about the here-and-now issue of "collateral damage" in combat.

Kevin Macdonald has sensational nonfiction material in The Mauritanian, based on the best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who spent 14 years incarcerated at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba without ever being charged with a crime.

Watch Video: Jodie Foster Defends Accused 9/11 Terrorist in 'The Mauritanian' TrailerThere’s a moment in which “The Mauritanian” flirts with complicated subject matter, namely by suggesting that even if Mohamedou (played by Rahim) is guilty of being one of the main architects of 9/11, he’s still entitled to legal representation and due process.

Liam Neeson continues the Charles Bronson phase of his lengthy career with Robert Lorenz's action thriller representing the actor's second starring effort in three months. Arriving shortly on the heels of Honest Thief, The Marksman is the sort of solid, unassuming programmer that Bronson pumped out with regularity in the '70s and '80s.