A gently funny take on the last-day-on-earth microgenre, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein's How It Ends sets its protagonist (Lister-Jones) up with an ambitious to-do list, then slows her down so she can appreciate the journey.
20.01.2021 - 02:53 / hollywoodreporter.com
Two unmoored men in the chilly Chilean boondocks find warmth and solace in each other in The Strong Ones (Los Fuertes), the impressive feature debut from writer-director Omar Zuniga. The film explores the same world and characters as Zuniga’s short San Cristobal, which won the Teddy for best LGBTQ short at the 2015 Berlinale.
And the transition from short to feature feels seamless. The Strong Ones’ unforced naturalism and sense of intimate authenticity have made it a queer festival darling: The
.A gently funny take on the last-day-on-earth microgenre, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein's How It Ends sets its protagonist (Lister-Jones) up with an ambitious to-do list, then slows her down so she can appreciate the journey.
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
Kourosh Ahari's debut feature proves an accomplished psychological chiller that impresses far beyond its historic status as a U.S. production featuring primarily Iranian or Iranian-American talent.
The psychological toll of investigative police work seeps into the bones of John Lee Hancock's gritty neo-noir The Little Things, which captures Los Angeles County's flat urban sprawl and snaking freeways to highly atmospheric effect.
Watch Video: Denzel Washington and Rami Malek Are Out to Catch Jared Leto in 'The Little Things' TrailerOne senses that Hancock (“Saving Mr. Banks,” “The Founder”) wants to bait and switch the audience with what at first seems like a straightforward policier but then pivots into a character study of Deke and Jim — respectively, an aging lawman who’s literally haunted by his mistakes and an ambitious young climber who may follow in Deke’s footsteps for better or for worse.
Just a few months ago, Juno Temple helped give the fledgling Apple TV+ service its first must-see: Ted Lasso, a practically perfect comedy series that radiated decency and hope in a world that...well, you were there. She’s very much on the other side of the coin in her reunion with the streaming service, playing a drug-addicted single mom so neglectful that abandoning her kid to the care of a just-released felon is actually a step in the right direction.
After all the passion and grievances stirred up in Malcolm & Marie, it's a tad on the nose to hear Cee-Lo on the Outkast track "Liberation" sing about the "fine line between love and hate." But it's glorious to watch Zendaya, in a commanding turn that cements her arrival as a grownup movie star, skate along that line with both raw emotionality and the jaded remove of a perceptive woman toughened by experience.
Watch Video: 'Malcolm & Marie' Trailer: Zendaya and John David Washington Have Steamy, Love-Hate RelationshipMarie’s opening salvo is that Malcolm forgot to thank her during his lengthy curtain speech, but that minor betrayal exposes a myriad of fault lines in their relationship, from his ego to her low self-esteem, not to mention the fact that she feels that Malcolm has raided her own past issues with drug addiction and rehab to create the female lead of his film, who’s having issues with drug
A working-class gangster pic whose protagonist is a more reluctant criminal than most, Jeremie Guez's Brothers by Blood adapts Pete Dexter's 1991 novel Brotherly Love. Sharp-eyed readers will have guessed that the action is set in Philadelphia, and the film's feel for its post-industrial, gray-skies setting is one of its main assets.
In a small village in tropical Kerala in the south of India, civilized society breaks down after a buffalo gets loose and the villagers mindlessly join in the hunt. Veteran director Lijo Jose Pellissery returns to the theme of mob violence he handled so well in the 2017 Angamaly Diaries, which pitted local gangs against each other with tragi-comic flair.
The two lovers "meet cute." One has an overbearing mother and an overly garrulous best friend constantly trying to interfere in his love life. The other has deep-rooted family issues.
To find a novel approach to the Holocaust is definitely a challenge, and yet director Peter Bebjak has told an unfamiliar but revealing story in The Auschwitz Report, Slovakia’s submission for best international film of 2020. Samuel Goldwyn Films will release the movie in the U.S., and although it can’t be described as an entertaining watch, it does retrieve a part of history worth honoring.
A cerebral mystery thriller told by an unreliable narrator in a fugue of emotional dislocation, writer-director Lili Horvat's Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time puts a lightly feminist spin on classic screen tropes about hysterical wronged women driven by romantic obsession and fatal attraction.
Even in his pathetic last days, Donald Trump found time to take a trip to the Texas border to check on his wall. His journey only confirms the relevance of the new IFC movie, No Man’s Land, which examines some of the human consequences of the divisiveness regarding immigration.
Watch Video: 'MLK/FBI' Director Risked Helping the FBI Tarnish Dr King's Legacy Because Story Was That ImportantAt the same time, these interviews fill in the blanks those files don’t cover, from King’s personal anxiety over the potential revelations of his adulterous affairs to the way that even supportive media outlets turned on the reverend when he shifted his gaze from civil rights to issues like the Vietnam war and poverty in America.We don’t see any of those interview subjects,
A captivity tale whose ostensible Finnish setting serves mostly to put us in mind of grisly old-world folk tales, Alister Grierson's Bloody Hell saves its troll for the very end but offers plenty of peril while we await him.
There's at least one good thing to say about the new Chinese disaster movie directed by Simon West: It doesn't take long for the volcano to erupt. Considering the bloated running times of so many similarly styled American extravaganzas, the admirable efficiency of Skyfire means that you don't have to waste a lot of time sitting through endless exposition.
Also Read: Talking Life, Death and 'Jackass' With 'Dick Johnson Is Dead' Director Kirsten JohnsonAt the beginning of the film, he’s established as a charming, amusing figure: a “hippie businessman” who made work calls on an early mobile phone from the ski slopes of Park City and lived by Nietzsche’s quote, “Don’t trust the flatlanders,” a man for whom every Thursday was “Bob Dylan Day,” and a big spender who owned two Cadillac convertibles but painted them both the same shade of red so his
Perhaps there’ll come a time a few years from now, once the bludgeoning monotony of pandemic confinement has (hopefully) become a fading memory, when the claustrophobic agitation of Doug Liman's smugly self-satisfied heist thingamajig, Locked Down, could be vaguely amusing. Or not.
Class as much as gender constraints obscured the achievements of 19th century English paleontologist Mary Anning, magnificently played by Kate Winslet in Francis Lee's slow-burn elemental love story Ammonite. And class barriers continue to marginalize the work of Ralph Fiennes' self-taught archeologist Basil Brown almost a century later in The Dig.