‘Wake Up: Stories From the Frontlines of Suicide Prevention’: Film Review

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” is like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch — a very thin one, a daffy but leaden final-third-of-the-show one — that’s been stretched out, for no reason at all, to two hours.

Watch Video: 'Where's My Roy Cohn?' Director Explains How McCarthy's Counsel and Trump Are 'Cut From the Same Cloth'It is unsurprising that Meeropol would lack the objective distance needed to deal with the part of this story that is personal to her, but her attempt midway through the film to contrast her father’s taste for folk music with Cohn’s lust for the disco hits at Studio 54 backfires; the leftist sing-a-longs described here sound far less attractive than the hedonism at that club.

Julia Reichert's now classic and still inspiring Union Maids, chronicling three women in the 1930s labor movement, was released in 1976. While she was making that film, a group called 9to5, devoted to obtaining equal rights and fair conditions for women office workers, was gaining momentum.

While a new deadly pandemic continues to grip attention worldwide — understandably — the documentary Wake Up: Stories From the Frontline of Suicide Prevention throws the spotlight back on an ancient and no less complex scourge: suicide. A major contributor (along with substance abuse) to the inexorably rising number of deaths of despair in the United States, suicide is now a leading cause of death for several demographics, particularly young men.

Also Read: Pete Davidson Spars - Then Bonds - With Bill Burr in Judd Apatow's 'King of Staten Island' Trailer (Video)And however much of Davidson’s autobiography is here, the movie still feels Apatow-esque.

Early in “Judy & Punch,” a wife who’s just helped her husband perform a vigorously slap-happy puppet show in a desultory corner of 17th century England poses the question, “Do you think the show really needs to be that punchy?”

A hijacked drug deal's messy aftermath ensnares an entire family in Christian Sparkes' effective if overloaded crime drama.

Pushed over a metaphorical cliff, the two nonconformists in Josephine Decker’s “Shirley” — her follow-up to the mind-bending “Madeline’s Madeline” — bond over the maddening submissiveness expected of them, which they both come to furiously abhor. Their strange alliance makes for a psychologically layered portrait of unapologetic womanhood that’s dangerously sensual and sumptuously rebellious.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Hot Docs festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] In 1970 New York City, a series of ground-shifting, life-saving events took place in relatively quick succession. It's astounding that they aren't more widely known.

A film about a L.A. black lesbian strip club is smart, intimate and eye-popping — a documentary that both PornHub and the Criterion Channel could get behind.

The latest film from iconoclastic Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald proves at least one thing: The only thing better than Stephen McHattie in a movie is two Stephen McHatties. Playing both a heroin-addicted jazz trumpet player and a hitman who develops a conscience, the veteran character actor — you'll immediately recognize his face even if his name doesn't ring any bells — grounds Dreamland in emotional depths it otherwise strains to achieve.

A riotous, rule-ignoring Ugandan romp in which giddy exuberance obliterates amateurish filmmaking and a threadbare child-kidnapping plot.

Sharon Liese's documentary follows the contrasting trajectories of four transgender children in Kansas City with engrossing, sometimes surprising results.

This year's Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was scheduled to take place last week, was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 may well have been the only force capable of preventing an Indian American competitor from winning the contest for the 13th year in a row.

Murderous escaped cons are no match for the wrath of a 13-year-old girl in this over-the-top yet effectively taut thriller.

This time it’s personal as Lynn Chen puts Asian actresses front and center in her winning conclusion to the 'Surrogate Valentine' trilogy.

It's too little too late in this tedious biopic of Anglo-Irish modernist designer Eileen Gray and her antagonist Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

A young New York homeless woman is the focus of Andrew Wonder's confident, intriguing narrative debut feature.

A portrait of a struggling New Yorker who bites every hand that tries to feed her, Andrew Wonder's Feral follows a homeless woman (Annapurna Sriram) who splits her time between the streets and the filthy nest she has made for herself deep within the city's subway tunnels.

You’ve seen Kevin James play a Queens delivery man, a mall cop, a retired cop, a biology teacher turned MMA fighter, a zookeeper (in Zookeeper), the president of the United States, an animated Frankenstein, and a straight firefighter pretending that he’s gay. But it’s fairly certain that you’ve never quite seen him as he is in Becky, a stylish and very gory home-invasion thriller from the directing duo of Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott.