“Despite entertaining directorial flourishes often accompanied by striking stock footage cutaways — from Carl Sagan to a history lesson on Black hair care products — Russo-Young can’t set her hooks into much beyond the postcard images of the Big Apple.”
“While Springsteen takes the American dream and helps everyone navigate through its dismantling, Chadha packs it all up with ‘Blinded by the Light” and makes it speak to an entirely different country and a whole new generation.”
“Attieh and Garcia have ironically made a movie that metatextually gives Sergio the respect he doesn’t deserve. If he were real, he’d be absolutely thrilled to be the star of a movie that’s so unique, and so genuinely cool.”
“‘Wild Rose’ has the makings of a movie deathly afraid of validating a ‘bad mother,’ even if it comes at the expense of the protagonist’s internal consistency.”
Pablo Staricco Cadenazzi Interviews ‘Heavy Trip’ Directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren
“Perry has written an anti-heroine who is wholly clued into her own mythology metaphor, referring to herself and the band’s circumstances using the self-aggrandizing language of conquests, lore and legacy.”
“‘Director A.J. Eaton’s rock star biography ‘David Crosby: Remember My Name’ checks all the boxes of the lion-in-winter music documentary.”
“Another stunning work of perfectly placed ellipses and calculated restraint, Pawel Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’ is a film filled with images as iconic and austere as its blunt title.”
“Gaga’s mere presence in ‘A Star Is Born’ allows Cooper a wide berth to go big with scenes and moments that play with and embrace camp.”
“‘Bodied’ is a blisteringly urgent and inescapably topical meditation on race, class and identity; the kind of movie that could only be told with the panache and in-your-face directness of Kahn.”
“‘Black Orpheus’ embraces sex as multiplicitous. This somehow makes the love more noble, because it is not confused with lust, and sex becomes a celebration rather than a symbol of it.”
“A Hendrix biopic can be tackled in a variety of ways, but a director should either commit to gonzo audio/visual techniques or simply let the performances take over.”
“The more outlandish the dialogue becomes, the more Kishi highlights his tight screenwriting with co-scribe Sofía Gómez-Córdova.”