'The Informer': Film Review

You can't say that Buddy Games doesn't immediately let you know what you're in for. Within the first few minutes, we see a man's testicles being ripped to shreds by a paintball burst.

Also Read: See Johnny Flynn as David Bowie in First Look at Unauthorized Biopic 'Stardust'For better and for worse, “Stardust” grapples with those issues as it follows a 24-year-old Bowie on a promotional tour through the United States in 1971, accompanied by a long-suffering Mercury Records publicist named Ron Oberman.Johnny Flynn plays Bowie, Marc Maron plays Oberman, and the point of director and cowriter Gabriel Range’s film is to trace the seeds of Bowie’s breakthrough character, Ziggy

Watch Video: Alan Ball Found His 'Inner Tennessee Williams' to Write 'Uncle Frank'Except he doesn’t: Crashing a party at his apartment one night, Beth learns that Frank is gay, and his partner of ten years is Walid (Peter Macdissi, “Here and Now”). She’s barely begun to process all this new information when Frank gets a call that his father, and Beth’s grandfather, Daddy Mac (Stephen Root) has died.

Soft-hearted, middle-of-the-road comedies — that is the brand Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone have established in their three previous films together. With McCarthy as star and sometimes co-writer, and Falcone as director and writer, the real-life married couple have turned out the innocuous, mildly funny Life of the Party (2018), The Boss (2016) and Tammy (2014).

Netflix's mission to conquer the already oversaturated holiday movie marketplace continues with this sequel to its 2018 hit starring Kurt Russell as a very hip Santa Claus. With Chris Columbus in the director's chair (he produced the earlier film) and Goldie Hawn bumped up from a cameo to a co-starring role as Mrs.

It sounds fun on paper —sort of: The kitchen staff of a high-level California restaurant was to be whisked off to France, where they'd bring their chef's vision to restaurants in three different picturesque locales, pairing his food on each occasion with that of a locally revered restaurateur.

Also Read: 'Showbiz Kids' Movie Review: Child Stars Tell Troubled Tales in Sobering DocumentaryWhile many members of Zappa’s family and his band are on hand to reminisce about the famously driven, often cantankerous and always demanding musician and composer, much of the story is told through materials from the Zappa’s personal archives, to which Winter had access.

It's been seven years since DreamWorks spliced the DNA of the Ice Age franchise with The Flintstones and gave us The Croods, an amiable adventure whose vibrant 3D visuals and zippy slapstick action helped disguise the lack of smart humor in its storytelling. You might be forgiven for wondering who asked for a sequel to a film that didn't fossilize much of an impression in the animated landscape.

The sixth time around the paddock is decidedly not the charm for the latest live-action feature incarnation of Black Beauty, based on the enduring Anna Sewell-penned equine adventure.

admirers of 2013’s “The Croods” quite possibly never thought about it again until the announcement of “The Croods: A New Age,” opening in theaters for Thanksgiving and coming soon to streaming platforms.

Shawn Mendes, the 22-year-old Canadian folk-pop singer with the velour trill, is a bard of puppy love. Throughout his prolific oeuvre — three studio albums since 2015 — the male ingénue guilelessly croons about budding romance and sweeping passion and blossoming youth like a modern-day Romeo hopping from muse to muse.

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history. In one of the artfully constructed film's visual motifs, we watch the road itself through a windshield, a not-to-be-ignored Mercedes-Benz hood ornament positioned prominently in the frame.

For those of us old enough to remember, in 1995 the majority of teenagers in the developed world were almost as ignorant and bigoted as their parents about gender and sexual identity — or at least decidedly not the enlightened folk most Gen-Z kids seem to be these days.

Viola Davis burns a hole in the screen projecting the indomitable pride and hard-won self-worth of the legendary early 20th century blues singer named in the title of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, one of 10 plays that comprise August Wilson's epic cycle depicting 100 years of African American experience. But it's Chadwick Boseman as a cocky trumpeter brutally demeaned by the white recording industry who delivers the most explosive thunder and searing pain.

Watch Video: 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' Trailer: Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman Sing the BluesMa’s band, who arrives at the studio well before she does, has its own internal struggles: veterans Toledo (Turman) and bandleader Cutler (Domingo) are there to follow Ma’s lead and to give her what she wants, no questions asked, while brash and talented horn player Levee (Boseman) tries to sprinkle jazz riffs into existing songs while arranging new versions of other ones over Ma’s objections.

Not to take anything away from filmmaker Dana Nachman, but her new documentary certainly benefits from the timing of its release. The film focuses on the 107-year-old Operation Santa program run by the U.S.

When it comes to baseball sayings that apply to real life, the term "swinging for the fences" couldn’t be more suitable for the three major-league hopefuls at the heart of Sami Khan and Michael Gassert’s gripping new sports documentary, The Last Out.

There's one question you're likely to ask yourself while watching Nick Sarkisov's drama about the contentious relationship between an egomaniacal MMA fighter and his sensitive, 18-year-old son: Who the hell is Stephen Dorff's trainer and how much does he charge? That's because it's otherwise hard to sustain interest over the course of Embattled, in which Dorff plays the lead role of the monstrously self-absorbed Cash.

In one of the more amusingly uncharitable moments of a character whose brittle undercarriage keeps peeking through the fastidiously composed veneer of the warm, welcoming homemaker, Mary Steenburgen says as her daughter's guest for the holidays stomps angrily out of the room, "She is very heavy-footed." Fortunately, the opposite applies to co-writer and director Clea DuVall; her light touch with both comedy and drama is essential to what makes Happiest Season so captivating.

“Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas” a decade ago — and bemoaned the lack of LGBT stories being told in the seasonal sub-genre — I never could have predicted the bumper crop of 2020, which is offering queer-centric (or at least gay-inclusive) new movies from Lifetime, Hallmark, Paramount Network, and Netflix, as well as the arrival of “Happiest Season,” an all-star Christmas comedy with a major studio behind it.