‘The Twentieth Century’: Film Review

Filmmaker Rob Beemer is smart enough to know that an esoteric subject demands the presence of celebrities to garner attention. Thus, his documentary chronicling the rise of mindfulness and meditation over the last few decades opens with footage of such familiar faces as Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and actor Patrick Dempsey.

Like the revelation that the dowdy French-cuisine evangelist Julia Child worked for American intelligence operations during World War II, there's something quaint and almost comic about the historical nugget upon which Jonathan Jakubowicz's Resistance is based: Before he became the most famous mime artist in history, Marcel Marceau worked in the French Resistance, forging passports and smuggling Jewish children across borders to save them from Nazi exterminators.

“Tape,” a guerrilla indie drama that confronts some of the ways sexual harassment has been embedded in the entertainment industry, begins with Rosa (Annarosa Mudd) getting ready to go undercover — but really, she’s dressing for battle. After rigging herself up with a hidden camera, she mutilates her body in homage to Lavinia in “Titus Andronicus,” piercing her own tongue and using a razor blade to carve a bracelet of blood around her wrist.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Movies about boys in high school and college spill over with reckless partiers, nerdy loners and aggrieved misfits eager to show the world what they're made of.

In today’s film news roundup, Canada’s largest LGBTQ film festival gets postponed, the commercial industry’s health plan addresses the coronavirus pandemic and Margaret Qualley’s “A Head Full of Ghosts” finds a home.

There will likely be no shortage of movies dealing with #MeToo themes, but Deborah Kampmeir's indie feature scores points by being one of the earliest. A hard-hitting psychological drama about an actress who surreptitiously monitors her former assailant and his current prospective victim, Tape benefits from its well-executed thriller mechanics and terrific performances by its three leads.

By Dino-Ray Ramos

Young Deragh Campbell is a hard actress to forget, even in offbeat roles like an obsessed researcher of family history in MS Slavic 7or its docudrama precursor Never Eat Alone, both by filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz. Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft.

Refreshing as a river dip on a hot day, but also mildly melancholic, as though perhaps it is the last swim of the summer, Guillaume Brac’s wise, witty “À l’abordage” is an optimistic portrait of gentle disappointment, the kind a youthful generation has to experience before growing up a little bit.

Red Heavenis timely in a way that the filmmakers could not have anticipated when they started making the documentary five years ago: It gazes head-on at isolation, confinement, boredom and stress — issues that nearly everyone is confronting in some combination or another as the world goes on coronavirus lockdown. But there's a lightness to the film as it explores weighty matters, along with a dash of reality show dynamics, framing cosmic questions in a familiar format.

Every time a new mental-health therapy arrives, it’s propelled by the ideology — and the testimonials — of a religion. Sigmund Freud’s descriptions of psychoanalysis all point to the miracle-cure mythology of the moment when a patient, at long last, touches the nerve of his or her suppressed trauma and is liberated from it.

Like any good science documentary, “Human Nature” starts with a hypothesis. The filmmakers posit that audiences are bored by the dry format of most science docs, but that there is a better strategy to present complex concepts about biology in such a way that both educates and entertains.

The famous quote from 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi about the place beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing provides the title of I'll Meet You There, writer-director Iram Parveen Bilal's domestic drama set in a Pakistani immigrant community in Chicago.

How many women drummers can most people name? Tomboy pointedly doesn't try to fill that sparse category. Instead, this enlightening but uneven documentary profiles four representative drummers from different generations and with a range of musical styles.

Terminally ill pets and their desperate, distressed caretakers are those that seek Dr. Marty Goldstein’s miraculous help.

The upcoming Netflix film “Uncorked” didn’t end up premiering at the South By Southwest Film Festival since the fest was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but star Courtney B. Vance is thankful families will still have the opportunity to watch the movie from their living rooms when it hits the streaming service on March 27.

You wouldn't think that sex addiction and testicular cancer are topics that could be mined for any but the cheapest of laughs. And Hooking Up would prove you right.

Justin and Hailey Bieber have traveled quite a distance to isolate themselves from crowds amid the coronavirus pandemic!

Two people, each unhappy with their lives, meet and form an unlikely emotional connection. It's a time-honored narrative formula, but Amber McGinnis' debut feature employs it to uncommonly moving and funny effect.

Mayor Musa Hadid is a celebrity of sorts in Ramallah, the historic Palestinian capital in the central West Bank, situated just a few miles north of Jerusalem. But it’s hard out there for this idiosyncratic, handsomely attired and mustachioed character, greeted often by excited kids and curious adults whenever he is spotted in the streets of the bustling town he tries to better for its citizens, burdened by the stifling politics of the region.