'La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla': Film Review | DOC NYC 2020

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.

There are few film genres as manipulative as the "cancer romancer." Unleashed on the world with 1970's mega-smash Love Story, starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw as a pair of star-crossed Harvardians whose nascent marriage is decimated by her terminal leukemia, this genre later flourished throughout the 2000s, with saccharine releases like Here on Earth, Sweet November, A Walk to Remember, P.S. I Love You, The Fault in Our Starsand Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

Also Read: How Lifetime and Hallmark Finally Made the Yuletide Gay With First-Ever LGBTQ Holiday MoviesIn the film, Jenn and Sol meet in a bar, where she’s intimidating and he’s tongue-tied but endearing. They jog in the park, they walk in the rain and they fall in love in what would be typical rom-com fashion if the com part weren’t so dialed-down.

Watch Video: 'Let Them All Talk' Trailer: Steven Soderbergh, Meryl Streep Reunite on HBO MaxAlice summons her nephew Tyler (Hedges) to act as her assistant on the trip, and she also invites college chums Roberta (Bergen) and Susan (Wiest) to come along, since they haven’t spent time together in decades.

Watch Video: Francis Ford Coppola Previews Recut 'The Godfather Part III' With New Title, Beginning and EndingAn aging Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) wants nothing more than to make himself and his family “legit”; the casinos have been sold off, he has re-branded himself as a philanthropist and humanitarian, and in the film’s new beginning, he makes a deal with the head of the Vatican Bank to exchange an infusion of $600 million for control of a huge European conglomerate.

“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.

As a premise for comedy, a wedding is a fairly foolproof device, allowing characters who would ordinarily never cross paths to meet in increasingly tangled plot strands. You almost have to try to mess that up.

Also Read: Diane Keaton Rom-Com 'Love, Weddings and Other Disasters' Nabbed by Saban FilmsSheen is in short supply in the ugly “Disasters,” and the biggest names are two Academy Award winners so ill-used that their very presence reflects shame on the entire film industry.

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

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.

Alissa Simon Film CriticIt seems unimaginable: a relationship driven more by affection than the dynamics of power between a Jewish prisoner and an Austrian SS officer at Auschwitz? But the taboo romance between beautiful, young Slovak inmate Helena Citron and her not-much-older captor Franz Wunsch is superbly documented in the fascinating “Love It Was Not” from Israeli helmer Maya Sarfaty.

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.

Not to take anything away from filmmaker Dana Nachman, but her new documentary certainly benefits from the timing of its release. The film focuses on the 107-year-old Operation Santa program run by the U.S.

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.

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.

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.