'We Summon the Darkness': Film Review

Produced by Ryan Murphy, Chris Bolan's heart-clutching Netflix documentary looks back on a lesbian couple's storied 70-year romance.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] The Brazilian government's efforts in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics to clean up crime in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a program dubbed "pacification," were part of a widely reported broader sweep to hide the city's poor from international visitors.

Vampire grrrls rule the L.A. club scene in this polished but skin-deep indie genre spin.

As many amateur cooks are now discovering, spices are best used in moderation. The same can definitely be said of quirkiness, the overuse of which is a problem afflicting many first-time filmmakers.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] Whether the Storage Wars crew would have recognized the value of a box of letters discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2014 is open to debate. But it's a good thing that directors Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera did.

Angus MacFadyen returns to the embattled King of Scotland role he played in 'Braveheart,' only this time the movie is all heart and no spine: a medieval historical drama that mostly just sits there.

To say that Robert the Bruce suffers from poor timing would be an understatement. Not only does this film about the medieval Scottish king arrive a very long 25 years after Braveheart— of which it is a sort of unofficial spinoff — but it has the misfortune of following the recent, superior Netflix film Outlaw King, starring Chris Pine as the same character.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] An uncompelling spinoff of the director's 2017 film about women sentenced to death row, Sabrina Van Tassel's The State of Texas vs. Melissa interviews the family and supporters of Melissa Lucio, a woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Joshua Leonard's 2011 feature debut, The Lie, explored a sort of identity crisis that resulted when a new parent (Leonard) used his baby as an excuse to ditch work. The crisis starts earlier in Fully Realized Humans, which again sees Leonard and Jess Weixler playing a couple who perhaps shouldn't be trusted with a baby.

Imagine a Roald Dahl-type story of clever children circumventing monstrous adults, wrapped in a gothic tone of morbid absurdism not unlike Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Now add a visual sensibility that lands somewhere between Edward Gorey and Wes Anderson, air-drop the result into the "Sugar Rush" videogame from Wreck-It Ralph and press play.

A teenage murder case recently relitigated on social media is sympathetically traced in Daniel H. Birnam's urgently felt Netflix doc.

"How long do you think we humans have?" asks filmmaker Jeff Gibbs to a series of random people at the beginning of his environmental-themed documentary, Planet of the Humans. That the question has since taken on a particularly sinister edge in the wake of COVID-19 is but one of the many ironies of the film made available for free on YouTube for 30 days, courtesy of executive producer Michael Moore.

A native of the place strangers call Easter Island amplifies a call for self-rescue in Eating Up Easter, Sergio M. Rapu's eco-themed documentary.

The 'Avengers: Endgame' producers tapped their stunt supervisor to direct a stock action script, relying on his ingenuity — and Chris Hemsworth’s commitment — to make it feel fresh.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] For Dee's Tots Daycare in New Rochelle, New York, that last word in the mom-and-pop enterprise's name is a misnomer, or at least an understatement. The business of teaching, entertaining, feeding and straight-up loving a houseful of children who range from infants to tweens isn't limited to the daytime; it's a 24-hour operation.

Cluttered and downbeat but illuminating, this Michael Moore-produced environmental documentary looks at the "green power" movement and sees red.

Writer-directors Brett and Drew Pierce (billed as The Pierce Brothers) know exactly what they're doing in the creepy prologue to The Wretched, which unfolds 35 years ago as the camera crawls around a lawn on which old-school kids' toys — a knitted bunny, crayons, model cars, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rubik's Cube — lie abandoned in the rain. Inside the house, a babysitter arrives to find the flowers wilted and the mother of a young family busy committing a gruesome act in the basement.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] An alumna of the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence program who has earned attention with her short films, Israeli writer-director Ruthy Pribar makes an assured feature debut, balancing sobriety with emotional intensity in Asia.

Spike Jonze directs a film version of the Beastie Boys' 2019 stage-show memoir, in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond prove themselves infectious raconteurs of their white-kid-turned-king-of-rock hip-hop saga.

Netflix releases a delightful, sugar-rush animated feature for families about an extremely dysfunctional family, one in which the kids conspired to orphan themselves.