November 30, 2023 3:15 am
When D. Smith’s “Kokomo City” premiered at Sundance this year, Nick Allen wrote, “The women interviewed here—Liyah Mitchell, Dominque Silver, Koko Da Doll, and Daniella Carter—are scholars of their experience. Smith empowers them throughout, giving them space in the edit and with each extreme close-up of a weaponized body part, sometimes in slow motion. The editing by D. …
Is Tyler Perry running for office? Despite a few moments that allow critical or at least skeptical views of the actor-writer-director-studio mogul, “Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story” plays like a nearly two-hour ad for Perry, the sort of thing you’d play at a political convention to hype the crowd. There’s no denying at this point that …
Can you call a film formulaic if it’s based on things that really happened? Maybe. As with any movie, it’s all about the tone and style: the choices made by the storytellers. “Next Goal Wins” is case study, unfortunately. It’s an inspirational football comedy, co-written and directed by Taika Waititi (two Thor films, “JoJo Rabbit,” et al) with Iain Morris …
If Gelila Bekele and Armani Ortiz’s “Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story,” the origin documentary about the rise of the divisive mogul, could deliver on one promise, it arises as an undeniable crowd pleaser. Despite its intrusive, cacophonous score and its blatant heavy-handedness—deployed to burnish another laurel to Perry’s noted career—the broad film still felt …
Like many another music-crazed kid who witnessed The Beatles’ epochal arrival in early 1964, I was fascinated by the influx of bands—dubbed the British Invasion—that followed in their wake. Though the Rolling Stones proved to be the most durable of these, their eventual dominance wasn’t apparent then. At first glance, they were mainly notable for …
The Corsican-born filmmaker Paul Vecchiali is probably best known, if at all, in the States as the producer of “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” the Chantal Akerman picture that raised international consciousness when it topped the once-every-ten-years Best Film Ever poll in Sight and Sound magazine. Vecchiali was also a writer and …
“May December” starts with a flurry of confusing activity in two different locations. A glamorous woman (Natalie Portman) checks into a boutique hotel, murmuring into her Bluetooth. Another woman (Julianne Moore) is in the final stages of planning a get-together at her waterfront home. She opens the fridge and stares into it. The camera then …
Please Don’t Destroy isn’t just a sketch comedy troupe, they’re one of the biggest of the meme generation, breaking through during the pandemic with short videos on TikTok and Twitter enough to get the attention of a comedy kingmaker. Since being hired by “Saturday Night Live” in 2021 as writers, they have filled the Lonely …
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Years before I learned her story, Shere Hite’s name loomed large in my sociology classes. Her self-titled report about female sexuality was just as talked about as Kinsey’s and Masters and Johnson’s findings. However, in recent pop culture memory, Kinsey got a movie, and Masters and Johnson got a TV show. Hite had been relegated …
The third in DreamWorks’ animated “Trolls” series is as adorable as the first two, and irresistible in the truest sense of the word. Even parents who fear they were dragged into the theater and just hope it will be short (well under 90 minutes) and painless will find themselves beguiled. That is partly because the …
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