Glen Wilson/Warner Brothers
MOVIE REVIEW
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)
“Judas and the Black Messiah” – which retells F.B.I. informant Bill O’Neal’s (LaKeith Stanfield) ascension within the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 leading up to the bureau’s assassination of chapter chairman, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the following year – often feels like a companion piece to Spike Lee’s 2018 “BlacKkKlansman.”
Daniel Power/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
Land (2021)
In her directorial debut/Oscar showcase, “Land,” Robin Wright plays Edee, a woman grieving the losses of her husband and son. She leaves everything and civilization behind to rough it out in the Wyoming Rockies in a ramshackle wood cabin without electricity or plumbing. While Edee is in the outhouse, an ursine visitor stops by and ransacks the cabin and months’ worth of canned goods therein. She is in bad shape when Miguel (Demián Bichir) and Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge) find her after becoming alarmed by smoke no longer rising from her chimney in the dead of winter. Edee refuses to go to a hospital, so Miguel volunteers to care for her and eventually imparts some essential survival skills along with an ’80s hit song.
Matt Glass/Magnet Releasing
MOVIE REVIEW
12 Hour Shift (2020)
In “12 Hour Shift,” Angela Bettis plays Mandy, a surly small-town Arkansas hospital nurse with a drug habit who moonlights as a supplier in the organ black market. The plot of course centers on her worst day ever, when everything that could possibly go wrong indeed does. Stuck with a double shift, Mandy tasks her stereotypically dumb blonde cousin Regina (Chloe Farnworth) with transporting a kidney to a garage where unlicensed transplants are performed. Regina of courses loses the kidney, and must replace it or surrender one of her own to the menacing criminals.
Sean Price Williams and Takeshi Fukunaga/Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Ainu Mosir (2020)
“Ainu Mosir” tells the coming-of-age tale of an indigenous Japanese teenager shouldering the weight of preserving a way of life. Kanto (Kanto Shimokura) lives with his widowed mother (Emi Shimokura) in a tourist-trappy northern Japan tribal reserve, where residents run souvenir shops and delight visitors with ritual ceremonies performed with clockwork precision. No spoilers, but Kanto has a very personal stake in a controversial village tradition. His coming-of-age isn’t the typical rite of passage for indigenous youngsters. Instead of his survival skills being put to the test, Kanto is confronted with an adult decision pitting his personal values against communal responsibilities.
Daniella Nowitz/Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Asia (2020)
The Israeli entry to the Academy Awards, “Asia” often feels like a Lifetime movie gone wrong. It’s got all the trappings: dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, irresponsible mother, rebellious daughter, disability and terminal illness. Russian nurse Asia (Alena Yiv) is too busy to attend to her sick teenage daughter, Vika (Shira Haas), but she manages to find time to lure her married doctor colleague to come out to the car for a quickie. Meanwhile, Asia deploys fellow nurse Gabi (Tamir Mula), a Palestinian who can’t get enough shifts at the hospital, to care for Vika.
Patti Perret/Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Hunt (2020)
After President Donald Trump personally “canceled” it in a tweet, “The Hunt” was abruptly bumped from its Sept. 27, 2019, release date indefinitely — until now. Its premise involves a group of “woke” “libtards” declaring open season on “deplorables” and kidnapping a dozen of them. That’s basically its plot: The "elites” pick off the conspiritards one by one in gory detail over a bogus conspiracy dubbed “Manorgate” until a few escape and strike back in similarly gory detail. The end.
Michael Gibson/STXfilms
MOVIE REVIEW
My Spy (2020)
In “My Spy,” former wrestler-mixed martial artist Dave Bautista plays J. J., a nails-for-breakfast war veteran-turned-C.I.A. operative on assignment staking out newly widowed Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley) and her 9-year-old daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), who have recently fled Paris and are struggling to adjust to their new life in Chicago. The clever Sophie is quickly on to J. J. and threatens to blow his cover if he doesn’t take her ice skating, participate in her special person’s day at school and train her to become a spy, all so that her new classmates will no longer ostracize her.
Bernard Walsh/Paramount Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Rhythm Section (2020)
The Broccolis, whose Eon Productions holds film rights to Ian Fleming’s lucrative James Bond franchise, are probably keen on turning Mark Burnell’s Stephanie Patrick novels into their next cash cow, but “The Rhythm Section” plays out more like “La Femme Nikita” than “Dr. No.” Blake Lively channels Anne Parillaud as Stephanie Patrick, a junkie prostitute trained into a deadly assassin under the Tchéky Karyo-esque hard-bitten Jude Law. She then trots the globe to hunt in exotic locales replete with sand roads and teal walls and colorful parrots chirping for the terrorists responsible for murdering her entire family.
Patrick Redmond/Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Turning (2020)
It’s difficult to imagine “The Turning,” Universal Pictures’s newest throwaway in the January trash heap following the dismally reviewed “Cats” and “Dolittle,” being worse than those two debacles. Indeed, music video auteur Floria Sigismondi’s first film since indie gem “The Runaways” a decade ago could pass as respectable if not for its utterly impenetrable final minutes.
Twentieth Century Fox
MOVIE REVIEW
Underwater (2020)
A remarkably late addition to Fox’s 1980s sci-fi canon, “Underwater” finally surfaces some three years since the completion of principal photography. To be sure, the studio has never gotten out of the B-picture business entirely, but for the past few decades its niche pipeline has been mostly outsourced to Eurotrashy outfits like Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, resulting in more bargain actioners like “Taken” while the low-budget sci-fi well ran dry in favor of . . . James Cameron’s other preoccupations.
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