‘The League’ Review: Doc Filmmaker Sam Pollard Remembers Baseball’s Negro League With Sharp Clarity

Biz Markie was a hip-hop legend. There are just no two ways around it.

Charity Lawson has some regrets. At the conclusion of Monday night's episode of , fans got a peek at what's to come on the rest of the season, and it's safe to say the drama's only getting started.All is well at the start of the preview, as Charity says, «This is what I've been waiting for my whole life.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “The Miracle Club” may not be a faith-based movie in the traditional sense (that is, a film made with an explicitly evangelical Christian agenda), but this Ireland-set art-house offering is a movie about faith all the same — specifically, about the conviction that drives four women to make the pilgrimage from Ireland all the way to Lourdes, France, where the waters are believed to have holy healing powers. If “The Miracle Club” were an overtly religious film, audiences would know from the outset what to expect from the trip (namely, a miracle), whereas director Thaddeus O’Sullivan doesn’t presume to play God, focusing more on mending the relationship between his main characters.

Michael Nordine author There’s no shortage of great movies about baseball, but there is a severe lack of films about the Negro leagues. The fifth inning of Ken Burns’ expansive “Baseball” covers them with admirable reverence, but feature-length projects — whether narrative or documentary — are vanishingly rare. “The League” is therefore something close to required viewing for devotees of our national pastime just by virtue of its existence, so it comes as a relief that Sam Pollard’s documentary (exec produced by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson) is also quite good on the merits. Given his résumé, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Pollard’s prior work as director includes “MLK/FBI” and “Citizen Ashe,” and he’s also edited several Spike Lee joints; in addition to a Peabody Award and career achievement prize from the International Documentary Association, he shared an Oscar nomination with Lee for 1997’s “4 Little Girls” about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Rather resembling a blaxploitation-based cousin of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a deeper sense of social consciousness, They Cloned Tyrone is a predominately grim yet intriguing account of constrained, little-hope lives victimized even further by nefarious secret attempts to transform them into obedient, well-behaved zombies. Set in what appears to be the late ‘60s-early ‘70s based on the period cars, outfits and outlandish hairstyles, Juel Taylor’s feature directorial debut, which he wrote with Tony Rettenmaier, delivers live-wire performances from the young cast but nonetheless remains notably dire, even forlorn in its depiction of small-town lives momentarily confronted with a bizarre enemy found right in their midst. This Netflix offering opens theatrically July 14 for a week prior to its move to home tubes July 21.

Anything that brings Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney together for a smart and engaging movie that will lift your spirits these days is a miracle all by itself. Indeed, The Miracle Club is a reason to celebrate this summer, if only for the chance to see a sterling and beloved cast get roles worthy of their many talents.

There are more shocks and surprises in store as Love Island returns on Tuesday night, as the teaser shows that the islanders will be rocked by an unwelcome text message in tonight's show which will leave some vulnerable.

While ghosts by themselves are frightening, the idea that they can hurt the very people we love is several shades scarier. “The Conjuring” and “Insidious”—the two James Wan joints that have spun the two most successful and sophisticated supernatural horror franchises of the last decade—understood this timeless fear at a deep level.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Sam Pollard’s “The League” Is Not Your Typical Baseball Doc. The documentary filmmaker grew up in the 1960s watching the St. Louis Cardinals, whose roster of players included Black or Latino players including Bill White, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda and Lou Brock, but did not know much about the Negro Leagues that existed when the sport was still segregated. “I knew who Jackie Robinson was and that it was because of him Blacks had integrated the Major Leagues in 1947,” says Pollard. “But what I did not know much about in 1964 at the age of 14 was that he had come out of the Negro Leagues and that the Negro Leagues had been home to Black and Latino ballplayers who had to play segregated baseball during the height of the Jim Crow era.”

Murtada Elfadl What if you managed a bank, and your fiancée’s folks turned out to be notorious bank robbers who saw their prospective son-in-law as the perfect patsy for their next hit? Not a bad setup for hijinks and hilarity. That’s what the filmmakers behind “The Out-Laws” are hoping, anyway. Produced by Adam Sandler (among others) and directed by Tyler Spindel, the not-so-original Netflix original plays like “Meet the Parents” crossed with “Fun with Dick and Jane.” Seeing as how the former inspired several sequels and the latter a remake, the situational comedy on offer is hardly fresh, though it still could (and should) have been funnier. As Owen Browning, Adam Devine takes the mantle from Sandler to play a schlubby everyman partnered with a gorgeous woman (Nina Dobrev) out of his league. Naturally, he’s kind-hearted and willing to sacrifice all for his one true love. And that’s how the audience knows he’s worthy of her. On the week of their wedding, her long-absent parents (Ellen Barkin and Pierce Brosnan) show up after many years of estrangement. It’s quickly revealed that they were in hiding from their former partner (Poorna Jagannathan), after relieving her of large sums of money. Conveniently, their future son-in-law manages a bank, and so a scheme is set in motion. This being a comedy, no one will get hurt and the sweet guy will keep his beautiful woman.

In 1979 Peter Falk and the late great Alan Arkin made the perfect odd couple in the classic action comedy, The In-Laws. It even spawned a not-bad remake with Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks in 2003. The difference between those films, and a bit of an attempt to do something similar in the cleverly-titled The Out-Laws, which starts streaming on Netflix today, is that those movies were genuinely funny, particularly the Arkin-Falk teaming, but this one, also a kind of Meet The Parents on steroids, relies far too heavily on non-stop and incessant action scenes to carry us through its 95 minute running time.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Halfway through “Insidious: The Red Door,” there’s a moment that encapsulates why the movie isn’t more insidious. Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), the father from the first two “Insidious” films (this one is number five), has just dropped his son off for his freshman year at college. The son, Dalton, is once again played by Ty Simpkins, who was just a spooked kid in the earlier films; now he’s a spooked surly emo art student draped in hippie hair. Eight years ago, Dalton and his father were hypnotized so that they would lose all memory of the Further, the spirit zone Dalton got sucked into as an astral projection of himself. The hypnosis worked; they’ve forgotten the living nightmares they saw. But now the visions are coming back.

Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth installment of the Insidious franchise and helmed by actor-turned-director Patrick Wilson, promises a dive into the haunted memories of the past, but the script by Scott Teems delivers little more than a stifling yawn. Alongside Wilson, the film stars Ty Simpkins, Rose Bryne and Sinclair Daniel. 

The fifth film in the franchise and a direct sequel to 2013’s “Insidious: Chapter 2,” “Insidious: The Red Door” is a confident and satisfying addition to the series.  READ MORE: The 25 Most Anticipated Horror Films Of 2023 Picking up ten years after the events of the second film, the Lamberts are a fractured family in mourning. Patrick Wilson returns as Josh Lambert, a father struggling with the loss of his mother, Lorraine, and keen to mend the relationship with his oldest son, Dalton, again played by Ty Simpkins.

The fourth season of FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” was undeniably funny, but it felt at times like the writers were on the verge of losing their way, either with increasingly ridiculous plotlines that hid some of the strengths of the ensemble—while the “new Colin” arc was clever, it wore out its welcome—or repetitive bits that felt like echoes of things done better in the past. The good news is that the first four episodes of the new season—all that was sent to press for review—are consistently funny in a way that feels like the creative prime of the show again.

A new brainteaser may leave you scratching your head, but will give your brain a good work out.

Spoiler alert: This review contains key plot points for the final episode of The Idol. When it was first announced, The Idol seemed like a natural progression for the Weeknd.

Greater Manchester has been ranked as the bottom city in Europe of 42 surveyed for a new study assessing cleaner green transport.

Selome Hailu Goodbye, angels. “The Idol” — or at least its first season — came to a conclusion after five episodes on Sunday night, but not without the usual dose of darkly sexual ups and downs for its jewel-eyed, rat-tailed stars. Titled “Jocelyn Forever,” the episode begins with Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) at her home, working on a song with prolific Mike Dean (played by himself). As she sings lyrics Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye) prompted her to write — “My kinda love / Force me, choke me ’till I pass out” — it becomes clear that the ex-pimp’s coke habit has caught up to him. Sweating, with his hair beginning to fall out of his famous rat-tail, he interrupts the jam session to give some notes. Jocelyn lets him know he isn’t welcome to do that anymore.

When Midnight Cowboy came out in 1969, Miami Herald critic John Huddy heralded its arrival with a string of superlatives: “Staggering, shattering, heartbreaking, hilarious, tragic, raw and absurd.”