Critic's Notebook

When the Saints Go Marching In

The Kennedy/Marshall Company/Sony Pictures Classics

MOVIE REVIEW
Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

In a way, “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” feels like “Summer of Soul ( . . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” with melanin vastly depleted. Directors Ryan Suffern and Frank Marshall seem oblivious at best, ignorant at worst, glossing over glaring questions so as to not hold anyone accountable for apparent inequities on display, making the proceedings as pleasant and inoffensive as possible to make nice with white upper-middle-class boomers who presumably make up their target audience.

Game Boy

Paramount Pictures and Sega of America

MOVIE REVIEW
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

It’s easy to get cynical about “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” sequel to a live-action movie based on a Sega video game character (voiced by Ben Schwartz) that travels at supersonic speeds. You may recall the original’s disastrous, universally loathed first trailer, which prompted the studio to postpone the release many months to overhaul the CGI, finally delivering it just before the global pandemic hit in 2020. Yet it’s already getting the sequel treatment, and ahead of 2019’s “Detective Pikachu,” the live-action movie based on a more contemporary Nintendo video game character.

Final Frontier

Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
The Territory (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

The Uru-eu-wau-wau people, indigenous to Brazil’s rainforest, have seen their land and their population decimated since the 1980s when miners made first contact in the region. Now farmers brazenly show up with chainsaws and tractors to engage in a free-for-all land grab with no governmental oversight or interference, and they are not above resorting to violence and even murder. Worse, far-right politicians such as President Jair Bolsonaro run on platforms promising a legal path to the encroachment. This fight between the Uru-eu-wau-wau and intruding farmers is the subject of “The Territory,” 2022 Sundance winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary and Special Jury Award for Documentary Craft.

Space Oddity

SXSW

MOVIE REVIEW
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it. Looking back, especially at your own family, often you remember only the best parts, and certainly you focus on what you want to see. In the summer of 1969, while the future Kenneth Branagh was in Belfast going to the cinema to admire Raquel Welch with his family, the future Richard Linklater was in a suburb of Houston also going to the cinema to admire Raquel Welch with his brothers, but more often to watch movies about space. Practically everyone in the Houston area was involved in the space race, including young Stan (voiced by Milo Coy). Believe it or not, his kickball skills brought him to NASA’s attention, since – due to a minor math mishap – one of the space modules had been built at half size. So while his family thought he had a summer camp scholarship, Stan endured months of training to become the first boy to walk on the moon.

Breaking Awaits

Beth Garrabrant/Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
When You Finish Saving the World (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

With “When You Finish Saving the World,” it feels as though actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg has created what seems like an entire universe populated with Mark Zuckerbergs – at least his own take on the tech titan memorialized for posterity in “The Social Network.”

What Ever Happened to Baby Ben?

Wyatt Garfield/Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Resurrection (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

At first glance, “Resurrection” looks to be a thriller about a woman confronting the reappearance of her former abuser. The film calls her sanity into question in a misogynistic manner, then boasts a conceited genre-shifting climax that is more noxious than clever. Following “Here Before,” “Encounter,” “False Positive” et al., this gaslighting-as-narrative-device trope is now a very troublesome trend.

Doing the Right Thing

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Emergency (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

“Emergency” is one of those one-crazy-night movies (“Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” “Superbad,” “Dazed and Confused” et al.), about two college kids attempting to make history as the first Black students ever to complete a tour of every Greek party on campus in one evening – but the plan derails with their discovery of an unknown white girl passed out in their living room. They try to do the right thing and get her help, mindful that they are risking their lives because of the optics – strangers presume their guilt in this scenario based on skin color. Indeed, this well-trodden trope takes on a sense of somberness and urgency in the age of Black Lives Matter.

I'm Like a Bird

IFC Midnight

MOVIE REVIEW
Hatching (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

“Hatching” functions like the hybrid of a dark fairy tale and an adolescent horror. It’s utterly implausible, yet it isn’t explicitly sci-fi or supernatural. It falls into the body horror subgenre somewhat, but it’s more gross than it is scary.

Scenes From a Marriage

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Lucy and Desi (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

Those vexed by the revisionist history in Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos” may be looking forward to Amy Poehler’s documentary “Lucy and Desi” – both films focusing on the off-screen relationship between Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, stars of the storied 1950s CBS sitcom “I Love Lucy,” and released three months apart by Amazon Studios/Prime Video. The good: “Lucy and Desi” is built around Ball and Arnaz’s own words culled from cassette tapes in the private collection of their daughter, Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill. The bad: Her involvement does kind of place the documentary’s objectivity in doubt. One can’t shake the feeling that she’s pushing her own narrative about her parents.

Study Hell

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
Master (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

The opening scene in “Master” crosscuts between an older Black woman and a younger Black woman both moving into a residence hall. The reason for the juxtaposition is not readily apparent. Is the older one experiencing déjà vu as she moves in? Are there parallels to be gleaned from this montage?

It’s not revealed until a bit later that the younger woman isn’t in a flashback and that their moves are in fact contemporaneous. Professor Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) is the first Black woman to assume the position of master at the Belleville House on the Ancaster College campus, where Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) is the lone Black incoming freshman. What ensues is akin to a supercut compilation of Microaggression’s Greatest Hits.