'Slay the Dragon': Film Review

This Icelandic psychological thriller about a grieving widower's search for revenge reveals director Hlynur Palmason to be a major talent.

Jacqueline Wilson's 2012 kids' book cleverly remixed a century-old classic; this mostly flavorless adaptation retains the least distinctive elements of both.

Brian Cox gives one of his finest performances in this familiar but affecting drama about a cantankerous Scotsman facing his journey’s end.

Starring Sean Hayes as the sad-sack heroine, this tepid comedy is a drag in more ways than one.

A drama about the drug scourge that's ravaging the heartland — a bit of sociology with a touch of vigilante — feels like a rough indie sketch for the powerful contempo drug movie we have yet to see.

There are few more insidious and less democratic tools in the political toolbox than gerrymandering. The concept of essentially fixing an election to assure you win/your party stays in power indefinitely is inherently against what the United States is meant to stand for.

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.

A juvenile gag that just might have been funny as a minute-long entry in its makers' online filmography —other short works include Nip Slip and Saint Dick — Tyler Cornack's Butt Boy imagines the crime spree that ensues when a man's newly discovered appreciation for prostate massage goes absurdly awry. Soon, bars of soap and TV remotes aren't enough, and he's doing naughty things only dreamed of in Eddie Murphy's 1982 song "Boogie in Your Butt.

Farce is not a genre we commonly associate with the Germans, but then, as “Curveball” reminds us at the outset, this wildly atypical Teutonic satire — which plays like a cross between “Wag the Dog” and “Dr. Strangelove” in its portrayal of incompetence at the highest levels — is “A true story.

Feeling beaten down by the news? Why not watch a documentary on gerrymandering to cheer you up?

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.