'Summerland': Film Review

Also Read: 'Spree' Star Joe Keery on His 'Highly Misguided' Character's Pursuit of Viral Fame (Video)The movie is kind of fun if low-budget horror appeals to you. And the way the film is shot — jumping from one small screen to another and piling different social-media windows in the frame so you can read comments as you watch the action — can be a sometimes dizzying kick.

Also Read: Is 'Greyhound' Based on a True Story?The film, which is being released in some theaters (and virtual theaters) on the Aug. 14 anniversary, will also air on the Discovery Channel on Labor Day weekend, which is closer to the Sep.

When Netflix began promoting its latest entry in the summer-that-never-was blockbuster stakes, Project Power, it was hard to suppress an eye-roll of weary puzzlement at the fanboys eager to slam it as lame and derivative. Sure, it has conceptual similarities to the Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless, to DC Comics property Hourman, to Image Comics'War Heroes.

A Russia-set creature feature whose intensely serious tone belies some awfully silly stuff in its plot, Egor Abramenko's Sputnik locks an Alien-inspired parasite up in the steppes of Kazakhstan and waits to see if humans can figure out how to handle it. Suffering a bit in the charisma department, the film moves sluggishly for the hour or so that it takes to get on its feet, finally giving its humans something interesting to do.

Teen love proves stronger than death in Endless, Scott Speer's tale of a young man (Nicholas Hamilton) who dies in a car crash, but whose spirit clings to Earth to comfort his grieving girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp).

The title may sound incendiary, something left over from the Russ Meyer era, but Danny Wolf’s Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies turns out to be informative and even-handed as well as entertaining. Meyer’s movies are inevitably included in this freewheeling documentary survey of nudity from the silent era to the present.

He's been described as "fashion's invisible man" and the "Banksy of fashion." And true to that reputation, famed designer Martin Margiela doesn't deign to show his face in Reiner Holzemer's laudatory documentary. Like the unseen but heard Marlene Dietrich in Maximilian Schell's Marlene, Margiela protects his privacy while at the same time delivering an emotionally self-probing account of his life and career in Martin Margiela: In His Own Words.

elections. Alumni include Bill Clinton, Neil Armstrong, Bruce Springsteen, Rush Limbaugh, Jon Bon Jovi, Roger Ebert, Roger Ailes, James Gandolfini and Dick Cheney, just to name a few.

It's sometimes possible for a story to have an emotional impact even when there's nary an original element in it. Such is the case with the new indie drama written and directed by Bobby Roth.

In the summer of 1989, less than two months after the release of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a dramatization of racial tensions between Black and Italian Americans in Brooklyn, Yusuf Hawkins was shot to death for being a Black boy in a white neighborhood just a few miles from the film's Bedford-Stuyvesant setting. Sixteen years old, Hawkins was the victim of an impromptu mob in Bensonhurst that had gathered to attack another Black youth rumored to be dating an Italian-American girl.

Serving as a much-belated sequel to the 2007 Australian sleeper hit “Black Water,” director Andrew Traucki’s B-movie influenced follow-up, the blandly titled but effectively executed “Black Water: Abyss” is lean killer crocodile film that upgrades the appropriately lo-fi aesthetic of the original, replacing the expansive swamp setting with a claustrophobic cave descent.

Black,” according to its director and star, Beyoncé. (Or is that Beyoncé Knowles-Carter? She takes the last name for her director’s credit, but goes first-name only for her starring credit.)But it’s unlikely that too many fans will flock to Disney+ for altered semantics.

Maggie Lee Chief Asia Film CriticWho would have thought a romantic comedy on the pain of being different could become such ironic and timely viewing in a global pandemic? In “I Weirdo,” a kooky and innovative debut by Taiwanese writer-director Liao Ming-yi, a couple with OCD trying to fit in to so-called “normal” society now looks like social-distancing heroes in our Covid-hit, locked-down lives. Shot and edited by Liao using the iPhone XS Max, the production looks no less vibrant for it.

Jessica Kiang It’s 1975 and Alice Lamb, played by Penelope Wilton, is cussing at her typewriter and telling cute children to “bugger off.” When we cut back to the same typewriter some 30 years earlier, Alice, now played by Gemma Arterton, is again shouting at local kids and pointedly buying for herself the rationed chocolate bar another saucer-eyed moppet so desires.

Richard Kuipers “A Life Turned Upside Down: My Dad’s an Alcoholic” casts a damning eye on the pernicious role alcohol plays in the working careers and social lives of Japanese men. Narrated by the innermost thoughts of a daughter during the 25 years she spends watching her father drink himself to death, Kenji Katagari’s second feature cleverly plays like a quirky little TV sitcom about an ordinary middle-class family before moving into darker territory.

Maggie Lee Chief Asia Film CriticImagine a Japanese version of “Pygmalion” in which the sculptor continues to caress slabs of marble even after Galatea has come to life. That is the unusual premise of “Romance Doll,” a marital drama in which a sex doll maker’s rapt obssession with his new prototype, leads to rejection of his human muse.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticA cigar is never just a cigar where Sigmund Freud is concerned.

Lisa Kennedy Four Vietnam vets reunite for a mission, one that will lean on their wartime exploits but also expose more than a few old tensions.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticSnarled loops of time travel have proved a surprisingly versatile and rewarding fantasy-cinema trope in recent years, from the big-budget likes of “Edge of Tomorrow” to such enterprising indies as “Predestination,” not to mention comedies (“Palm Springs”), horror (“Happy Death Day”), romance (“Before I Fall”) and more.