Month: March 2021

As a critic committed to maintaining a certain professional distance with those whose work I might review, I don’t often play the fan in the presence of filmmakers. But with French director Bertrand Tavernier — who passed away at the age of 79 on Thursday — I made an exception. Knowing that Tavernier would be

Bob Odenkirk, action star? It’s a premise so unexpected, so curious, that it just might have enticed audiences to watch “Nobody,” a revenge thriller that sees an otherwise unassuming Odenkirk (“Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”) kick ass and take names. “Nobody” debuted atop domestic box office charts, generating $6.7 million from 2,460 venues. It’s a

Simone Ledward Boseman has been the emotional center of the 2021 awards season, accepting several honors on behalf of her late husband, Chadwick Boseman. The actor posthumously earned two NAACP Image Awards this year, for outstanding supporting actor for his work in “Da 5 Bloods” and outstanding actor in a motion picture for “Ma Rainey’s

San Diego Comic-Con is returning in 2021 as a “special edition” gathering. Despite recent news that the massive, pop culture convention would be going virtual in July, plans for the fall gathering have moved forward. Comic-Con International has announced their plans to hold an in-person convention in 2021. The three-day event titled, “Comic-Con Special Edition”

Nine movies into his prolific career, the history of cinema has been embedded with the style and daring stories of Quentin Tarantino. The two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “Pulp Fiction” and “Django Unchained” celebrates his 58th birthday today, and with it, we are celebrating the 10 best performances that have come from his films. Including

“The Oxy Kingpins” is a documentary that feels like it could be a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” meets “The Insider” — the story of a scurrilous illegal business, and one of the hotshot thrill junkies who rode it to riches, and how that business connects up to a much larger

A bright, watery cornflower blue may lead the palette of “The Spine of Night,” an adult animated fantasy indebted in equal part to Ralph Bakshi and Gerald Potterton, but that doesn’t mean a lot of crimson blood isn’t spilled for contrast. Extreme, skeleton-snapping ultraviolence is a key selling point of this first collaboration between animator

As we recently passed the one-year anniversary of the first coronavirus-dictated lockdown, the internet’s insatiable hunger for short-term nostalgia kicked into overdrive. Memories from March 2020 trended again as fodder for renewed memes and Twitter threads, feeling at once from just yesterday and eons ago. An early entry in the inevitable subgenre of lockdown chamber

Ten years ago in January, the people of Egypt took to the streets to demand the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and his regime. It was the most spectacular of the revolutions during the so-called Arab Spring both in numbers and media coverage, as well as for the abject failure of its goals. Manal Khaled’s

At irregular intervals throughout Alba Sotorra’s stirring, sobering and vitally humane new documentary “The Return: Life after ISIS,” discreet titles appear to define the foreign terms that crop up. The small group of Western women in this Syrian detention camp are from all over — Canada, the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany — and

It’s awfully crowded in Violet’s head. First there’s the voice, which sounds like a demeaning male bully, constantly telling Violet she’s worthless. When it speaks, the screen turns red and a loud electronic humming noise causes Violet’s ears to ring. Then there’s a second running commentary, this one silent and less sure of itself, appearing