An Eritrean refugee pleads for U.K. asylum in this low-key but eventually potent drama.
10.04.2020 - 04:23 / variety.com
A pair of charming leads and a picturesque setting can't save Vicky Wight’s Hallmark-y romantic drama in desperate need of more romance.
By Tomris Laffly
There are worse things one could do than indulge in a cozy little romance these days, when we are all cooped up at home craving some meaningful human contact. If only writer-director Vicky Wight’s on-demand drama “The Lost Husband” could have filled that void by audaciously embracing some of the more syrupy, maybe even steamy elements of an
An Eritrean refugee pleads for U.K. asylum in this low-key but eventually potent drama.
The couple met in 1947, at a hockey rink in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Terry Donahue had recently moved to the U.S.
There’s a lovely friendship at the center of Alice Wu's sweet, sincere high school Cyrano story, revealing what we've been missing from teen movies.
Road trips are a comedic narrative staple that are as reliable as they are formulaic. That's why you'll find Will Dennis' first feature enjoyable, even as you're all too aware of its narrative gears moving too heavily.
In 2004, when she was 16 years old, Cyntoia Brown shot and killed a man she alleges had picked her up hours earlier in a Nashville parking lot intending to pay for sex. Despite claiming self-defense, Brown Long, who has since changed her surname to reflect her marriage, was tried as an adult and convicted of murder in the first degree, and eventually sentenced to 51 years in prison.
Producer-director Maria Finitzo’s feature documentary The Dilemma of Desire was robbed, like so many other works, by the coronavirus pandemic of its moment in the spotlight when its premiere at SXSW was cancelled in March. That fate seems extra cruel given that the movie is all about celebrating female sexual pleasure and especially the much-misunderstood clitoris in defiance of patriarchal efforts to silence, stifle and suppress female desire.
An exceptional documentary that separates fact from myth while telling the story of Johnny Cash’s first wife.
Mo Scarpelli, a director and cinematographer with a knack for hybrid cinema, likes to turn her camera on people wielding cameras. In the 2015 documentary Frame by Frame, she and her co-director followed a handful of photojournalists in Afghanistan.
Elizabeth Lo’s sharp-eyed study of Istanbul strays is both the ultimate love letter to dogs and a multifaceted moral inquiry into humanity.
Produced by Ryan Murphy, Chris Bolan's heart-clutching Netflix documentary looks back on a lesbian couple's storied 70-year romance.
[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] The Brazilian government's efforts in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics to clean up crime in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a program dubbed "pacification," were part of a widely reported broader sweep to hide the city's poor from international visitors.
Vampire grrrls rule the L.A. club scene in this polished but skin-deep indie genre spin.
As many amateur cooks are now discovering, spices are best used in moderation. The same can definitely be said of quirkiness, the overuse of which is a problem afflicting many first-time filmmakers.
[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] Whether the Storage Wars crew would have recognized the value of a box of letters discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2014 is open to debate. But it's a good thing that directors Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera did.
Angus MacFadyen returns to the embattled King of Scotland role he played in 'Braveheart,' only this time the movie is all heart and no spine: a medieval historical drama that mostly just sits there.
To say that Robert the Bruce suffers from poor timing would be an understatement. Not only does this film about the medieval Scottish king arrive a very long 25 years after Braveheart— of which it is a sort of unofficial spinoff — but it has the misfortune of following the recent, superior Netflix film Outlaw King, starring Chris Pine as the same character.
[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] An uncompelling spinoff of the director's 2017 film about women sentenced to death row, Sabrina Van Tassel's The State of Texas vs. Melissa interviews the family and supporters of Melissa Lucio, a woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.
[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Joshua Leonard's 2011 feature debut, The Lie, explored a sort of identity crisis that resulted when a new parent (Leonard) used his baby as an excuse to ditch work. The crisis starts earlier in Fully Realized Humans, which again sees Leonard and Jess Weixler playing a couple who perhaps shouldn't be trusted with a baby.
Imagine a Roald Dahl-type story of clever children circumventing monstrous adults, wrapped in a gothic tone of morbid absurdism not unlike Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Now add a visual sensibility that lands somewhere between Edward Gorey and Wes Anderson, air-drop the result into the "Sugar Rush" videogame from Wreck-It Ralph and press play.
A teenage murder case recently relitigated on social media is sympathetically traced in Daniel H. Birnam's urgently felt Netflix doc.