'Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story': Film Review

Film critic and filmmaker Dan Sallitt's fourth feature tracks the ebb and flow of young female friendship with exquisite specificity and grace.

Proximitywears its old-school sci-fi heart on its sleeve, beginning with the Close Encounters-quoting pow of an opening and flipping through a catalog of movie references. The homage, however endearing, proves limiting too for this tale of alien abduction, wide-eyed innocents and covert government baddies.

Just over 50 years after their debut on Saturday morning TV in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, the four teen sleuths of Mystery Inc. and their talking Great Dane sidekick return for another action-packed crime-busting mission.

A naive housewife takes surprising steps to reclaim her independence after discovering that her husband blew their savings on escorts in this well-acted French-language drama.

Debuting on demand, rather than in theaters, this attractive but calculated attempt to connect 'Scooby-Doo' to other Hanna-Barbera characters abandons the show's fun teen-detective format.

An inventive parable, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña's breathtaking animation continuously redefines reality in startlingly timely ways.

A snowbound bag-of-cash thriller set in the vast North Maine Woods, John Barr's Blood and Money casts Tom Berenger as an ailing hunter trying to escape from bank robbers who want their money back. A solid B movie whose pleasures aren't diminished much by the screenplay's dicey dialogue — plenty of the film has no dialogue at all — it's a welcome vehicle for its star, who has been underused by filmmakers for decades.

Brian Levin's debut feature is being billed as a Southern Gothic thriller, but only the first part of the description applies for this effort that gives new meaning to the expression "slow burn." Heavy on foreboding atmosphere but light on narrative momentum, character development and thematic coherence, Union Bridge requires considerable patience to cross.

A mediocre Hawaii-set comedy targeted at the limited demographic of middle-aged white guys who dig wish-fulfillment rom-coms, Tyler Spindel's The Wrong Missy finds David Spade juggling the attentions of three attractive women, one of whom is psychotically bent on either fulfilling his every need or killing him in the attempt.

"We're in beautiful downtown Mossville," says Stacey Ryan, the central figure in the documentary Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, as he waves his arm toward the supremely ugly petrochemical plants and construction projects surrounding him. "Population of one," he adds bitterly, essentially summing up the central theme of Alex Glustrom's powerful film concerning the environmental ravaging of a once-thriving community.

We can’t believe it’s been a year since Hannah Brown accepted a proposal from Jed Wyatt on The Bachelorette. Time flies when you’re trying to forget painful old memories!

Clementine

Although it presumably didn't involve much financial risk, it was a gutsy move for Paramount Pictures to pick up the low-budget British teen gang drama Blue Story for domestic theatrical distribution in the current era in which studios concentrate on would-be franchises.

Thomas Rhett and his wife Lauren Akins join Kelly Clarkson for the latest at-home edition of “The Kelly Clarkson Show”.

If you don't know the basic facts of the case, here they are: On Aug. 6, 2004, Cyntoia Denise Brown was 16 when she shot and killed Johnny Mitchell Allen, a 43-year-old man whom she said had paid to have sex with her at his Nashville home and whom she thought was about to pull a gun on her.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] Whether the Storage Wars crew would have recognized the value of a box of letters discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2014 is open to debate. But it's a good thing that directors Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera did.

A teenage murder case recently relitigated on social media is sympathetically traced in Daniel H. Birnam's urgently felt Netflix doc.

A native of the place strangers call Easter Island amplifies a call for self-rescue in Eating Up Easter, Sergio M. Rapu's eco-themed documentary.

Spike Jonze directs a film version of the Beastie Boys' 2019 stage-show memoir, in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond prove themselves infectious raconteurs of their white-kid-turned-king-of-rock hip-hop saga.