'Schoolgirls' ('Las Niñas'): Film Review

A tone-deaf attempt to recreate the nasty comic vibe people associate with certain '80s buddy cop films, Michael Dowse's Coffee & Kareem names a key character for director Walter Hill, just to make sure we know what it's going for. Then it tweaks the Eddie Murphy-era format by pairing a white cop with a distractingly foul-mouthed black 12-year old.

Can bullying be defeated by self-bullying, or public threats of self-harm? That's the premise of Paul A. Kaufman's Butter, in which a lonely, obese teen tries to shock classmates into silence by threatening to eat himself to death.

Sure, the premise is puerile, but the humor is decidedly inappropriate for young viewers in this Netflix action comedy pairing Ed Helms with a 12-year-old.

A gang of highly dysfunctional, co-dependent teenagers face down encroaching adulthood in Melanie Waelde's erratic but often electric debut.

It's hard to imagine exactly what Sean Hayes was thinking with his new comedy about a middle-aged woman slacker. While the actor, who co-wrote the script, thankfully doesn't demean the titular character with his occasionally amusing portrayal, his casting still seems an utterly tone-deaf choice for this pic lacking the outrageous campiness of, say, the Tyler Perry Madea films.

Subhead: To have or have not? So goes the dance in this slight romantic comedy centered on a gay male couple and their gal pals.

German-born, Austin-based director Bastian Günther has crafted an artful but unnaturally pessimistic retelling of Texas' infamous 'Hands on a Hard Body' competition.

The blockbusters will be postponed, the indie films in many cases will head straight to streaming. But even before the apple cart of movie distribution got tipped over, “Blue Story” had traced an unlikely path.

Probably no film project should be called "lucky" in April of 2020, but a couple come close —like Charlie Buhler's Before the Fire, a drama set in a flu-struck world bearing at least a couple of similarities to the one we're suddenly living in. The story of an Angeleno who gets stuck waiting out a pandemic in the rural community she fled years ago, it starts off with moments provoking a nearly uncanny sense of recognition.

Out of the vast universe of nature documentaries, I don’t think I’m alone in finding films about life under the sea to occupy a special place. The very fact that they exist, of course, is amazing — though when you watch one, part of the wonder is that you’re not thinking about how aquamarine filmmakers actually hovered in the ocean depths to shoot this stuff.

With the exception of Flipper from 1960s television, or maybe the talking Fa and Bea from Mike Nichols' 1973 movie The Day of the Dolphin, few cinematic dolphins have displayed quite as much personality as Echo, the main character in Dolphin Reef, Disneynature's new documentary premiering on Disney+, narrated by Natalie Portman.

A riveting and radical act of empathy, with actress Deragh Campbell’s unforgettably embodied portrayal of mental instability as the eye of its storm, Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s astonishing third feature (after “How Heavy This Hammer” and “Tower”) is a brief, bracing burst of microbudget indie filmmaking at its most powerful.

Refreshing as a river dip on a hot day, but also mildly melancholic, as though perhaps it is the last swim of the summer, Guillaume Brac’s wise, witty “À l’abordage” is an optimistic portrait of gentle disappointment, the kind a youthful generation has to experience before growing up a little bit.

By Tom Grater

The postponement of the Cannes Film Festival from mid-May to the end of June has elicited a mix of sadness and scepticism among international film executives.

Official Competition, the new film that re-teams Pain & Glory stars Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, has become the latest production to fall victim to the coronavirus. The new feature from Argentine directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat (The Distinguished Citizen) halted shooting in Spain on Thursday, producer Mediapro confirmed.

Production on the Spanish set of Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas’s new movie has been halted to protect cast and crew members from the threat of the coronavirus.

With his perverse (and some might say perverted) look at the early life of Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister W. L.