Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe is a true-life tale transformed into an inspirational fable. That’s not novel for the movies, but in this director’s hands, the results are mostly enchanting. The film follows Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), an impoverished Ugandan girl who became a chess champion at the age of…
Set aside all human decency and imagine, for a moment, that you’re Kim Jong-il. Imagine it’s 1978, and you’re pushing 40, still Great Leader’s son rather than the future Dear Leader. You have yearned for years to create a truly great North Korean cinema, one whose films would be celebrated…
Pasolini’s Salò meets red Solo cups in Goat, Andrew Neel’s deep, dank dive into the depravities of frat pledging that operates as its own kind of hazing ritual. Points are made and lessons imparted with all the subtlety and finesse of a Greek paddle to the head. Based on Brad…
We’ve come a long way since American Psycho. And also not. When co-writer/director Mary Harron premiered her Bret Easton Ellis adaptation in 2000, the kneejerk assumption for audiences who’d only seen the trailer was that surely a man had made the ultra-bloody black comedy. The film was dismissed before it…
Judy Davis doesn’t like the expression “scene-stealing,” even though it precisely describes her performance in The Dressmaker. “I always sort of cringe when I hear that,” she says, “because what it implies is that’s what the actor is after.” So let’s just put it this way: As Kate Winslet’s acerbic,…
In this age of billion-dollar, candy-colored, fully digital child-distraction movie-making, the new chatty-animal adventure comedy Storks wouldn’t have to be good in any way to be wildly profitable. It often is good, though, hilariously so, its too-familiar misfits-become-a-family storyline enlivened by flights of lavish comic invention. Its set pieces, especially…
“These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.” That’s how Kirsten Johnson prefaces Cameraperson, made up of footage she has collected over 25 years of working as a camera operator, cinematographer, and director on dozens of different documentaries — films like Laura Poitras’ The Oath…
Over the last 10 days, the Toronto International Film Festival has screened hundreds of movies from all across the world. L.A. Weekly’s April Wolfe and Michael Nordine trekked to Canada in search of the best of the fest, from the Cannes holdovers and awards hopefuls to the world premieres and…
Command and Control is frightening for a whole pants-shitting list of reasons, but perhaps the scariest is that the near-detonation of a nuclear warhead in 1980 was sparked by the tiniest imaginable accident. A technician working on a Titan missile in a Damascus, Arkansas, silo dropped a wrench socket from…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class, episode-by-episode. #WhateverItTakes. Just when we thought it would be smooth sailing waters for the troublesome twosome, Tristan and Miles, the boat was rocked yet again. During a game of truth or dare, Zoë pins Miles down with the “how many have…
Think you’ve got a good understanding of the world and how it works? Better have a seat, pal, since we’ve got some bad news: Everything you think you know is probably wrong, or, at the very least, a half-truth. No, really. Think fingerprints are an infallible methodology of forensic science?…
Potential filmmakers and groups of friends, professional actors and drunk patrons all got creative for the camera during Dinerwood: Level 4, a 48-hour film challenge that culminated with a screening at Welcome Diner on Wednesday, September 14. Ten teams entered their three-minute films for a chance to be declared “the…
“Mr. Street, do you think God loves football?” asks a young boy in a Dillion High School jersey. “I think everybody loves football,” replies Jason Street, a quarterback-turned-coach on the show, Friday Night Lights. This clip kicked off a reunion special about the beloved drama, available to watch now on…
Prodigies flame out; it happens all the time. But the tale of Sergei Polunin, a young Ukrainian ballet dancer whose family hitched its wagon to his star, is a particularly sad one. Steven Cantor’s doc Dancer illuminates Polunin’s celebrity before it reveals his artistry; much of the film is a…
The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth airs Sundays on Showtime In filmmaking, an assembly cut is when recent dailies are strung together in rough narrative order to create the first, very raw draft of the movie. Though it by no means lacks polish or editorial intent, Showtime’s…
Lily Rabe’s discomfiting performance anchors the fascinatingly uneasy comedy-drama Miss Stevens. Julia Hart’s film — about a young, slightly hapless English teacher who must chaperone three students to a state drama competition — has a premise that could easily invite cliché. You half expect it to become either an inspirational…
Matt Johnson’s prankish Operation Avalanche boasts a strong half hour of footage that’s fully engaged with this question: Could a couple of bright, Kubrick-obsessed A.V. geeks have faked the moon landing in 1969? Like the best speculative fiction, these scenes concern the practicalities. We see the gang’s hidden-camera peek at…
Still and silent, Jerry Lewis slumps there like old furniture in the lifeless house in which the first half of Daniel Noah’s coming-of-old-age drama Max Rose molders. The film is a fiction, a tidy and improbable one, but these scenes have documentary power. Lewis’ Max Rose, recently bereaved, sits and…
What’s constant in Katherine Dieckmann’s films – Motherhood (2009), Diggers (2006) and A Good Baby (2000) – is an attention to characters and place. Many of us in the world of film reside in the big coastal cities, but a good number come from somewhere else, smaller towns with subtle…
According to Forbes, Fan Bingbing made $17 million last year — more than any actress on the planet not named Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston. The Chinese megastar is likely most familiar to American audiences for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities — New York, L.A., Chicago — it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovsky may be a twentysomething male, but in his sophomore feature, he exhibits a direct pipeline into the psyche of a lonely, middle-aged woman. In Zoology, a lowly zoo worker suddenly sprouts…
