'The Map of Tiny Perfect Things': Film Review

The premise of Netflix's new teen drama Moxie— of a present-day 11th-grader taking inspiration from her mom’s Riot Grrrl memorabilia to make her school more hospitable for girls through an anonymous feminist zine — is at once wholly plausible and a transparent Gen X fantasy of its cultural relevance to Gen Z.

The underseen but arresting 2016 documentary feature Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait of a flinty Vermont loner and his volatile relationship to the land that has consumed him for more than three decades. Its director, Tony Stone, now blurs the line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking to depict another solitary man inseparable from his natural environment in Ted K, a piercing psychological probe into the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

Three bright, talented young people in their 20s struggle to find their place in a rotten society, scarred by Germany’s defeat in World War I and menaced by the rising tide of Nazism, in Fabian — Going to the Dogs (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde.) This second screen adaptation of Erich Kastner’s now classic 1931 novel (the first was directed by Wolf Gremm in 1980) marks a stylistically daring attempt to capture the zeitgeist by director Dominik Graf, who returns to Berlin competition where

If you're not a marine biologist and you haven't yet seen My Octopus Teacher, chances are good that you have no strong feelings about eight-armed cephalopods. You might associate their tentacles with horror movies or appetizer plates — but likely not such stirring matters as interspecies communication or physical renewal after dire injury, to name two of the indelible turning points in this winningly unorthodox nature film.

Add Disney’s new animated feature Raya and the Last Dragon to the list of 2020 and 2021 movies you’ll desperately wish you could see on the big screen.

Okay: It's getting a little ridiculous with the time-loop movies, right? Unless you subscribe to the movies-mirror-reality idea, in which stories of waking up every day to an uncontrollable but numbingly familiar set of horrors feel about right.

You have to wonder about the shelf life of all the compact film productions being stitched together around COVID pandemic restraints, particularly those in which the visual field is limited to computer desktops.

A real-life architectural gem is the centerpiece of The Affair — and, in many ways, its most compelling character. The building is a modernist masterpiece, completed in 1930, when the term "modernist" embodied the thrill of risk-taking in a new age.

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The tragedy of the Lebanese civil war extends far beyond the 1980s and into the third generation of a family resettled in Canada in the affecting drama Memory Box. It marks the first film in nine years from the award-winning team Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, whose work has ranged freely over feature films, docs, installations and performance art.

Watch Video: SpongeBob Squarepants Looks for Gary in 'Sponge on the Run' Trailer - And Finds Keanu ReevesIt’s just another day under the sea, with the always-upbeat SpongeBob (voiced by Tom Kenny) hanging out with best pal Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) and putting in a full day’s work at the Krusty Krab, much to the consternation of his irritated neighbor and co-worker Squidward (Rodger Bumpass). The scheming Plankton (Mr.

There's a touching dedication on the end credits of The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run to Stephen Hillenburg, the marine biologist-turned-animator who created the series that grew into a $13 billion franchise and died in 2018.

Setting out to be the Traffic of the opioid era, Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis presents a trilogy of storylines whose tendrils involve everyone from big-pharma execs to undercover cops to addicts at various stages of despair.

Kylie Jefferson credits for helping shape her into the woman she is today: legendary dancer, choreographer and producer Debbie Allen. At just six years old, Jefferson — who made her onscreen debut in Netflix's ballet drama and is a featured dancer in  -- was the youngest student to be accepted into the famed Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, where she trained under the tutelage and mentorship of Allen as a young, aspiring ballet dancer.

What would you do if your forever was a single day? In most films about time-loops, we watch characters struggle to escape repetition and eventually find a hole in the plot allowing them to slip back into their regular lives. In “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” directed by Ian Samuels, this idea pivots by changing the motivations of the two teens stuck in the loop.

It’s hard to find a new spin on a story that’s been told before. This week, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things seeks to traffic in material that we saw done to classic effect in Groundhog Day, not to mention brilliantly spun last year in Palm Springs.

Courtney Howard authorBefore we’re even out of the opening credits of “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” director Ian Samuels and screenwriter Lev Grossman waste no time clueing us into its premise revolving around a time loop that will teach its teen protagonists to accept life’s little gifts and major detours. This John Green-lite fantasy for the young-adult crowd holds many sequences that sparkle and shine, but a few that stumble and sag as well.

“12 Dates of Christmas.” All that’s left for “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” to mine is a narrative that places teens in the center of the universe and allows them to know more than anyone else in the room. At first, anyway.That’s probably the core of the film’s appeal, and it does have appeal, even if this is ground that’s been trod over with some frequency in recent years.

The trailer for Kathryn Newton‘s new movie has been released!

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The film was one of the opening-night presentations at the virtual Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, occupying the same position as previous music-focused docs like “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and last year’s “Miss Americana.” No doubt it left some viewers wishing that it had been the Eccles Theatre moving to the