'Willy's Wonderland': Film Review

Not long into I'm Your Man, Dan Stevens' character, a genial android named Tom, arranges a perfectly contrived combination of romantic clichés for his would-be partner, Alma. The rose petals are "artfully" strewn, the candles flicker, and flutes of bubbly are ready for sipping beside the bubble-filled tub.

There’s a brief shot early on in Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s wondrous romance and Berlinale competition entry What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?) that might seem to illustrate something quite mundane. The male protagonist’s soccer practice session has ended.

Like a blind date who starts off the evening by making a self-deprecating joke, the sequel to Eddie Murphy's smash hit 1988 comedy Coming to America takes pains to deflect the most obvious criticism that might come its way. "American cinema is the best," a character declares at one point in the unimaginatively titled Coming 2 America.

Also Read: Neon Acquires Celine Sciamma's Berlinale Contender 'Petite Maman'Overcome by grief, Marion returns to the city, leaving Nelly and Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne, “Godard Mon Amour”) to finish with the house. Nelly goes to play in the woods, where she encounters a young girl (Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine’s real-life sister), who is building a tree fort out of branches.

There's sardonic self-deprecation in the part Daniel Brühl has chosen for himself in his first feature as director, that of a European movie star sweating over an audition for a Hollywood superhero film that stands to push his fame — and his bank account — to the next level. But celebrity entitlement is only one part of the package.

This review of “La Llorona” was first published following its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. For his third and most tonally adventurous feature to date, socially perceptive writer-director Jayro Bustamante repurposes one of Latin America’s most ubiquitous supernatural legends to fiercely examine genocide against indigenous people in his native Guatemala.

Toward the end of Tina, the revealing documentary tribute by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin for HBO, Tina Turner is seen in an extended concert clip performing the Beatles' "Help" as a decelerated ballad — intimate, melancholy and full of feeling.

Opening with a very real-looking hardcore sex tape, and climaxing with a deranged orgy featuring super-sized dildos, Romanian writer-director Radu Jude's latest taboo-busting polemical comedy is refreshingly untroubled by tasteful restraint. Shot during COVID lockdown last summer, with cast and crew all wearing anti-viral masks, the snappily titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a scattershot attack on sexual hysteria and political hypocrisy in an era of online slut-shaming.

Most cop movies — and most movies in general — spend the first reel setting up a story that usually kicks off after an “inciting incident,” to quote various screenwriting manuals, which takes place within the first ten or 15 minutes. For the rest of the film, we then watch how that incident unravels and affects the lives of all those involved.

Hungary’s most recent contribution to the implacable flow of war films pouring out of Eastern Europe is a far cry from the Russian tank operas and spectacular disaster films like Battle of Leningrad. Denes Nagy’s sensitive first featureNatural Light (Termeszetes feny), bowing in Berlin competition, is the opposite of these: a slow starter high on atmosphere but low on action, whose horrific main event takes place discreetly off-screen.

ever do nothing nice and easy,” she said in a sultry snarl. “We always do it nice and rough.”“Tina,” the documentary about Turner that premiered at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, has moments where it tries to be nice and easy, sliding over difficult portions in Turner’s life in an attempt to find a celebratory tone.

The premise of Netflix's new teen drama Moxie— of a present-day 11th-grader taking inspiration from her mom’s Riot Grrrl memorabilia to make her school more hospitable for girls through an anonymous feminist zine — is at once wholly plausible and a transparent Gen X fantasy of its cultural relevance to Gen Z.

The underseen but arresting 2016 documentary feature Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait of a flinty Vermont loner and his volatile relationship to the land that has consumed him for more than three decades. Its director, Tony Stone, now blurs the line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking to depict another solitary man inseparable from his natural environment in Ted K, a piercing psychological probe into the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

Three bright, talented young people in their 20s struggle to find their place in a rotten society, scarred by Germany’s defeat in World War I and menaced by the rising tide of Nazism, in Fabian — Going to the Dogs (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde.) This second screen adaptation of Erich Kastner’s now classic 1931 novel (the first was directed by Wolf Gremm in 1980) marks a stylistically daring attempt to capture the zeitgeist by director Dominik Graf, who returns to Berlin competition where

If you're not a marine biologist and you haven't yet seen My Octopus Teacher, chances are good that you have no strong feelings about eight-armed cephalopods. You might associate their tentacles with horror movies or appetizer plates — but likely not such stirring matters as interspecies communication or physical renewal after dire injury, to name two of the indelible turning points in this winningly unorthodox nature film.

Add Disney’s new animated feature Raya and the Last Dragon to the list of 2020 and 2021 movies you’ll desperately wish you could see on the big screen.

Okay: It's getting a little ridiculous with the time-loop movies, right? Unless you subscribe to the movies-mirror-reality idea, in which stories of waking up every day to an uncontrollable but numbingly familiar set of horrors feel about right.

You have to wonder about the shelf life of all the compact film productions being stitched together around COVID pandemic restraints, particularly those in which the visual field is limited to computer desktops.

A real-life architectural gem is the centerpiece of The Affair — and, in many ways, its most compelling character. The building is a modernist masterpiece, completed in 1930, when the term "modernist" embodied the thrill of risk-taking in a new age.

Watch Video: 'Raya and the Last Dragon' Trailer: Meet the Dragon and a Butt-Kicking BabyFollowing the end of the plague, Kumandra splintered into five provinces. When one of the five tries to steal the gemstone for itself, it shatters into pieces, weakening its powers and bringing back the Druun.