'She Paradise': Film Review | AFI 2020

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

The lame-duck days of America's reality-TV presidency are an appropriate time for a documentary about Tekashi69, the rainbow-haired rapper willing to say or do any stupid thing in order to keep the world's eyes on him. In the view of Vikram Gandhi's 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez, music is nearly entirely beside the point: Those who don't know the songs that drew millions of YouTube streams will barely hear them here, and that's probably just as well.

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.

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.

The unknown story of a brilliant illustrator who survived the Spanish Civil War only to be interned in a French concentration camp, where he was beaten, tortured and starved to death for several years until he escaped and eventually made it over to Mexico, where he became the lover of Frida Kahlo, after which he moved to New York and frequented painters like Rothko and De Kooning, is definitely one worth telling.

Also Read: Henry Golding Drama 'Monsoon' Acquired by Strand ReleasingEven when he gets to a luxury hotel, Kit doesn’t seem any steadier on his feet. He sits in the hotel room, seemingly disoriented and tired; if we don’t know why he’s there, he doesn’t seem to know either.You could say that the film is built around silences, with minimal dialogue and only the sparest use of John Cummings’ music.

First love sours almost imperceptibly in Make Up, the assured feature debut of Claire Oakley, in which an off-season beach destination is just quiet enough to force an 18 year-old to grapple with questions she doesn't know she needs to ask. Atmosphere plays a large role here, opening up thriller-ish possibilities without disturbing the realism of a setting where teens in the service industry earn a living and don't think much about the future.

They don't make heist movies like they used to. You used to be able to see films like The Killing, Rififi and The Italian Job and simply relish the fiendishly clever methods with which criminals executed their elaborate robberies.

When singer-guitarist Karen Dalton, whose ardent fans in the Greenwich Village folk scene included Bob Dylan, died in 1993 at 55, she had long been off the music-biz grid.

The only thing surprising about Chick Fight is that it took this long for a distaff variation on David Fincher's 1999 classic Fight Club to happen. Not that this Malin Akerman starrer is similar in tone to that film, relying heavily on broad comedy rather than brutal nihilism.

"TV movie" and "nuclear annihilation" aren't readily linked concepts, and they certainly weren't back in the movie-of-the-week heyday of 1983, when ABC took a gamble on the decidedly downbeat The Day After. The Kansas-set drama, an unflinching depiction of the aftermath of an atomic conflagration, aired Nov.

Also Read: How 'Freaky' Pulled Off a Successful World Premiere Amid a PandemicThe other half of the “Freaky Friday” equation is Millie (Kathryn Newton, “Big Little Lies”); she dreams of going away to college but feels trapped at home as caretaker to her widowed mom Coral (Katie Finneran, “Wonderfalls”), whose grief has made her clingy and prone to pass out after finishing a bottle of white wine on her own.

Arriving during an expectation-shattering electoral season, J.D. Vance's 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, hit a zeitgeist nerve.

Watch Video: Paging Oscar? Glenn Close, Amy Adams Act Up an Appalachian Storm in 'Hillbilly Elegy' TrailerHe’s sketchy on the details with girlfriend and classmate Usha (Freida Pinto), not knowing how she will react to his family drama, but the trip home provides the opportunity for multiple flashbacks to J.D.’s childhood, where Bev could be loving but also abusive, encouraging but rarely reliable. And when things get so bad at home that J.D.

David Wojnarowicz, a key figure of the 1980s art movement that flowered in the pavement cracks of New York's pre-gentrified East Village, died of AIDS in 1992 at age 37. But Chris McKim's defiantly alive collage documentary, Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, is so charged with the words and images of the multimedia artist it could almost be considered self-portraiture, often recalling Jonathan Caouette's remarkable docu-narrative hybrid Tarnation.

A 30-year-old “salaryman” — the Japanese equivalent of an office employee — is getting bored with his two girlfriends at work when a dangerous, unpredictable femme fatale overturns his life. Originally produced by Japan’s Nagoya TV as a 10-part series, this comic book adaptation directed by acclaimed filmmaker Koji Fukada was edited down to a mere 233 minutes for its theatrical release in Japan in October.

Reza Dormishian is one of the most original directors in Iranian cinema, and No Choice (Majboorim) is another example of his ability to enthrall with hard-hitting social critique.

If you take a look at Forbes’ annual list of the highest paid athletes in the world, at least two or three of the top five spots are usually occupied by soccer players — and usually the same ones: Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar.

Only some of Italian footballer Francesco Totti’s 334 career goals (307 scored with Roma, the only team he ever played for outside the nationals) are shown in Alex Infascelli’s bio-doc My Name Is Francesco Totti (Mi chiamo Francesco Totti). Nor is there very much aboutthe icon’s private life; there are no attempts at intimate revelations or powerful insights.

Kelly Oxford’s debut feature Pink Skies Ahead is the kind of coming-of-age comedy that is destined for cult status, if not full-on indie success. It has all the necessary ingredients of an upper-middle-class coming-of-age comedy: a young woman trying to find herself, a pair of worried, coddling parents, and a crew of comical friends.