'The Wolf of Snow Hollow': Film Review | Fantastic Fest 2020

A holiday plan for two lifelong friends to drown their sorrows in pie turns into something much more sociable in Friendsgiving, the writing-directing debut of comic actress Nicole Paone. Jam-packed with familiar names, it is most interested in those besties (played by Malin Akerman and Kat Dennings), whose exasperated complaints about failed relationships don't deliver the laughs they seem intended to.

Set against the majestic backdrop of Ireland's wild west coast, Pixie is a trigger-happy comedy road movie that relies more on boorish energy than wit or charm. It marks the self-produced solo directing debut of veteran British producer Barnaby Thompson, whose long lost of credits includes the Wayne's World movies, working here from a screenplay by his son Preston.

A middle-class couple who can’t have children turns to an adoption agency for a baby, only to find their happiness threatened years later when their son’s biological mother shows up and demands him back. Though the story is based on a novel by mystery writer Mizuki Tsujimura, True Mothers (Asa ga Kuru) is a true Naomi Kawase film: a lush visual reworking of parental angst and despair, offset by frequent interludes of communing with that great healer, Mother Nature.

The macabre humor of Roald Dahl survived even a sweetened ending that irked the famed British children’s author in Nicolas Roeg's delectable 1990 film of The Witches, thanks in large part to the glorious villainy of Anjelica Huston.

Documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi says that the purpose of her latest film was to "take the temperature of how people feel about America today." Judging by the alarming footage on display in American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself —premiering Friday on Showtime — the country is suffering from a high-grade fever.

In The Boy Behind the Door, a gripping twist on the home-invasion thriller, first-time feature directors David Charbonier and Justin Powell plunge two tween boys into escalating peril, relentlessly intensifying a cascading series of lethal threats over the film’s excruciating runtime.

The most openly expressive character in the on-the-lam drama I'm Your Woman is a baby. That makes sense; he's the only one who hasn't a clue what a mess of danger is closing in around him.

Long before the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement, people of color had been dying at the hands of white law enforcement officers for centuries. The British filmmaker and political activist Ken Fero has been documenting U.K.

There are undoubtedly superfans out there who think otherwise, but not every film from the Pixar Studio is perfect. Some fall on the spectrum somewhere between merely adequate and fitfully delightful (like the last, the sweet but underwhelming Onward, or the okay but entirely unnecessary Toy Story 4).

Playing a 65-year-old New York high-society widow who burns through her savings and moves to Paris with her son in Azazel Jacobs'French Exit, Michelle Pfeiffer sucks the juice from each line like a Louisianan devouring a crawfish. It's a full-on diva turn — a smorgasbord of side-eye and shade, of lacerating one-liners dispatched between drags on cigarettes and slurps of martinis.

Also Read: Pixar's 'Soul' to Skip US Theaters for Christmas Day Disney+ DebutJoe Gardener (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is a middle school band teacher in Queens, New York.

This year’s AFI Film Festival is unlike previous years in a few major ways. Of course, the biggest way is how the event is virtual, with passholders being able to purchase tickets for online screenings of this year’s selections.

Also Read: Regal Cinemas and Cineworld Movie Theaters to Close All US, UK Locations This WeekWe open with an interviewee who will provide some of the most damning testimony along the way – Dr.

Also Read: AFI Fest 2020 to Close With Errol Morris Documentary 'My Psychedelic Love Story'The Grand Jury Award winners for Live Action and Animated Short will be eligible for the 2021 Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short Academy Awards. Jurors this year include film critic Carlos Aguilar, filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison and Film Festival Alliance Executive Director Lela Meadow-Conner.AFI Fest 2020 will run from Oct.

Dino-Ray Ramos Associate Editor/ReporterAs we enter into the spooky month of October, it’s only appropriate that Fantastic Fest and Fangoria host a watch party event for the forthcoming Welcome to the Blumhouse series of thrillers from Amazon Studios and Blumhouse Television.

Even without yet having seen all five of the original films in Steve McQueen's riveting Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, which surveys two decades of West Indian experience in London, it seems appropriate that the series concludes with a story of Black resistance embodied in the determination of one idealistic man.

In a Mexico City recording studio in 1999, the planets aligned. At the center of the jubilant cross-cultural, intergenerational music sessions was Francisco Fellove Valdés, stage name El Gran Fellove, who half a century earlier had combined Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz to create a new style of scat singing.

Steve McQueen's ravishing Lovers Rock summons a potent sense of a community gathering that caresses and cocoons those present, shutting out the hostilities of the city outside. The second movie to premiere at the New York Film Festival from the director's Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, Mangrove, which is set a decade earlier, in 1968-70, shows how another regular gathering place for the same immigrant community provides a cherished home away from home.

Machetes, myths and murky storytelling all find their way into Tragic Jungle (Selva Trágica), the lushly made, if highly enigmatic, fifth feature from Mexican writer-director Yulene Olaizola (Fogo), which screened in the main slate of the New York Film Festival after premiering in the Horizons section in Venice.

It's become unfashionable to express fondness for vintage Woody Allen films, but think back to how pleasurable they could be before all the off-camera baggage muddied those memories and you have some idea of the warmly satisfying experience of On the Rocks.