‘Mass’ Film Review: Four Grieving Parents Face Off in Too-Tidy Tragedy

Let's get something out of the way first: While it has a few incidental felicities to admire, by and large Music is a sentimental atrocity so cringe-inducing it should come with an advisory warning for anyone with preexisting shoulder or back injuries. Now for some background that must be addressed before we can go further.

Much of Erin Vassilopoulos’ moody, something’s-wrong-in-the-suburbs directorial debut, Superior, takes place in a Reagan-era Barbie Dreamhouse come to life. Within its mint and pink-punch walls live Vivian (Ani Mesa) and Michael (Jake Hoffman), a young couple who are dismayed when her estranged twin sister, Marian (Alessandra Mesa, Ani’s own twin), a touring rock musician, drops by unannounced during a thawing winter and asks to stay for a few days.

A sad, gorgeous film about love amid a pandemic, Chad Hartigan's Little Fish features not our real disease (it was in the can before COVID-19) but an invented one in which healthy people lose chunks of their identities —bit by bit or all at once. Think Alzheimer's, but a more aggressive and unpredictable affliction, and one that hits a shocking percentage of the world's population.

The 1969 killing at age 21 of Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton was a potent secondary plot point last year in Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7. That same government hit job gets expanded treatment and wields proportionately explosive impact in Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, a historical thriller with an urgency that speaks even louder more than half a century later.

The Studio Ghibli faithful will unlikely be swept away by Earwig and the Witch (definitely not to be confused with Hedwig and the Angry Inch), a pronounced departure from tradition that proves dispiritingly generic in both appearance and tone.

In the last 20 years, as the internet steadily integrated itself into every facet of our lives, adolescence has been changed radically. No longer forced into interactions with other people their age by circumstance, more and more teens have found themselves alone on their computers, phones and tablets for immeasurable lengths of time.

A group of 20 or so women — young, barefoot and in saris — sit in a circle on the floor in the new documentary Writing With Fire. Comprising the staff of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only all-female newspaper (whose title translates to “waves of news”), the women are told that the publication will expand its online operations soon, and they must adapt.

Fox Mulder made the slogan "I Want To Believe" iconic with his UFO poster on The X-Files, but the reason it has spawned so much memorabilia and so many memes is that it speaks to a very human desire. We're a credulous species, even if we're aware that con men and fraudsters abound.

Debuting writer-director Fran Kranz's years as an actor show in the powerful performances he draws from his tight ensemble in Mass, a drama of searing intimacy that trades the political for the personal in its reflections on gun violence and mental health. With laser focus and unflinching emotional candor, the film approaches the seemingly unending horror of school shootings in America from the viewpoint of devastated parents on both sides of the tragedy, six years later.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The story is specific to one group of women at one particular time, but five decades later, it’s certainly applicable to current questions about the role of religion in society, about the place of tradition and rigor in the Church and about how social justice movements intersect with biblical teachings.

safety when talking about “In the Earth,” because this is a messy, creepy and at times deliciously nasty concoction that takes myth and legend and fuels it with currents of dread that may feel familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention for the last year.The film, which comes into Sundance with distribution from Neon, uses a pandemic – not necessarily our particular pandemic, but maybe – as a jumping off point into a tale of horror in the woods that gets more unhinged the further it goes, and

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.