Golden Village Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
My Love (2021)
A near carbon-copy Chinese remake of “On Your Wedding Day,” Lee Seok-geun’s 2018 Korean film, Han Tian’s “My Love” manages to bottle the lightning a second time: It earned the equivalent of $21 million U.S. on its opening day and won the highly competitive Chinese Labor Day holiday box office over Zhang Yimou’s “Cliff Walkers.” Sweet, sentimental and occasionally funny, it’s the kind of romance that Hollywood has seemingly forgotten how to make.
Continue reading “Wedding Crashers” »
Alexander Bloom/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Hive (2021)
Based on a true story, “Hive” reveals how women are shunned by Kosovan society when they attempt to do virtually anything – work, drive, start a business etc. Some women’s lives are on hold as they endlessly await word on the fates of their men – husbands, fathers and sons – missing due to the war with Serbia and presumed lying dead in some undisclosed mass grave. Per end titles, about 1,600 people from Kosovo remain unaccounted for two decades postwar. Still, traditional values dictate that these women survive on the paltry 30 euros monthly handouts from the government, lest they bring shame on their families by trying to make ends meet when the soldiers are not officially dead.
Continue reading “Working Girls” »
Corey Hughes/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
All Light, Everywhere (2021)
“All Light, Everywhere” is an exposé on the police state that spotlights Axon, a company that offers a range of "public safety” products such as Tasers, police body cameras and drones. The documentary is so clinical in its depiction of the blind spots of surveillance that it sometimes recalls those unconscious-bias training videos some of your white colleagues love to complain about. But its revelations are nevertheless interesting, even if its approach is anything but.
Continue reading “Caught on Camera” »
Warner Brothers Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
In the Heights (2021)
Somewhere buried deep within the “In the Heights” movie adaptation is the story of a people who feel neither at home in America nor privy to the American dream. But you must look hard past the glossy, neon-lit music video treatment of the Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes.
Continue reading “Far Upper West Side Story” »
Christopher Raphael/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Wrath of Man (2021)
After a seemingly endless series of retreads (“Sherlock Holmes” times two, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” and . . . “Aladdin”?!), Guy Ritchie returned to mining his own oeuvre with 2019’s “The Gentlemen.” His latest, “Wrath of Man,” directly recalls one of his lesser known offerings, 2005’s “Revolver,” with Jason Statham navigating through some twisty shenanigans. But since it’s a remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 film, “Cash Truck,” it too qualifies as a retread.
Continue reading “The Transporter” »
Mass Distraction Media/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Summer of Soul (. . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) (2021)
A documentary on the Harlem Cultural Festival in the summer of 1969 – when Woodstock took place upstate – “Summer of Soul” features previously unseen footage from this star-studded but mostly forgotten event, with performances from Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips and many more.
Continue reading “A Great Season in Harlem” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
CODA (2021)
If “Sound of Metal” is about the hearing impaired learning to normalize the disability, then “CODA” is set in the utopia where that normalization is complete. “CODA” does indeed center on a hearing protagonist; its title is an acronym for child of deaf adults. Here, deafness is more of an inconvenience for the hearing, and our protagonist is torn between interpreting for her family’s thriving fishery business and pursuing her own musical talents.
Continue reading “Hearing Aide” »
BFI Flare
MOVIE REVIEW
Jump, Darling (2021)
Oscar Wilde once said that no man becomes like his mother, which is his tragedy. But what writer-director Phil Connell’s film presupposes, what if he becomes like his grandmother?
Russell (Thomas Duplessie) is a resting actor who refuses to work more than one shift a week in a Toronto drag bar called Peckers (devastatingly, this is not a real place). On his 31st birthday he receives a card from his grandmother Margaret (Cloris Leachman, in one of her final roles) offering him her car if he comes to Prince Edward Island to collect it. So when his partner Justin (Andrew Bushell) calls him an embarrassment and dumps him, Russell takes his last money and shows up on Margaret’s doorstep. Russell loses little time in writing himself a large check from his grandmother’s checkbook, but a mishap with the car shortly followed by a mishap of Margaret’s means he decides to stay with her a while.
Continue reading “Cross to Bear” »
BFI Flare
MOVIE REVIEW
Dramarama (2021)
What are five 18-year-old virgins to do their last night together before they depart for college? A night when they are entirely alone in a house that also has a swimming pool?
Well, whatever you’re thinking, they don’t do any of that. A lot of moms will be happy for this movie to be shown at a lot of theater-kid sleepovers, but it’s unclear if “Dramarama” wanted to be anything beyond a note-perfect nostalgia trip. On Twitter this critic routinely sees 20ish gay influencers, with complete sincerity, call anyone gay over 40 an “elder” and casually discuss how we’re still trapped in the closet since all our friends are dead from AIDS. Will anyone with that mindset actually care about how much things have changed since 1994, when “Dramarama” is set? Can someone who can’t believe gayness existed 27 years ago be able to sympathize with the struggles of someone in a world that can’t even see him in the first place, much less carefully sub-categorize him?
Continue reading “And Then There Were None” »
BFI Flare
MOVIE REVIEW
Sweetheart (2021)
The British seaside movie is normally a house of horrors. There are vampires (“Byzantium”), human trafficking (“London to Brighton”), exploitation (“Brighton Rock” in all its guises), drug deals gone awry (“Away”), kidnapping and torture (“The Scouting Book for Boys”), and violence in all its forms (“Quadrophenia” being the granddaddy of them all). “Sweetheart” triumphantly breaks the mold by being about exactly none of these things. It is such a relief to see a movie set on the English coast where the worst thing that happens is a fancy-dress night in the pub.
Continue reading “Offline Connection” »