I hate to say it, but I think I’m starting to feel “indie film about growing up as a foreigner in America” fatigue. Don’t get me wrong, Lee Isaac Chung’s MINARI is a solid little film that follows a unique American family finding their way throughout the country in the 1980’s but there’s a lot here that, while admirably performed and visualized, feels like something we’ve seen before. In a way, that’s the beauty of films like this one: even as they follow a different type of family and culture, even I, a Mexican who grew up in Texas, can…

In the affluent and snowy suburbs of Chicago, a mourning is taking place. Amid those vast homes, with their equally vast spaces, a chilly quiet takes hold of the members of the Jarrett family. Calvin (Donald Sutherland) and Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), the parents, try to move past the tragic loss of their oldest son, Buck; their other child, the younger Conrad (Timothy Hutton), only feels blame and is seemingly resigned to a life of self-inflicted punishment. At one time a successful high school student and athlete, Conrad’s devastating guilt now controls his life, plastering his face with unmitigated sorrow…

MHM MHM MHM! Nothing like a straight-faced period romance film. Is this what growing up is like? Where you start to open up your heart to films about two beautiful people falling in love while immaculately dressed? I couldn’t really say, but damn did this movie make me feel lovestruck; not just by its characters, but by the art of film itself. Sometimes it’s the simple things…

SYLVIE’S LOVE, from writer/director Eugene Ashe, is a delight, plain and simple. It operates like a throwback but is shaped by a modern sensibility and voice that gives interesting weight to a typical…

Honestly, it sounds like a set up for a bad joke: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay aka Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and successful singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) all get together and hang out one night in a Miami motel room. Funnily enough, these legends actually do end up walking into a bar to further build on a jokey situation but despite its incredulous setup, Regina King, making her directorial debut, explores the intriguing relationships between these icons in ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI….

After a quick run around introduction that gives the basic gist…

The best bands find a sort of harmony in the journey of music making. While one member may shed on the guitar and the other works the drums and another blows away on the trumpet, the differences between the members all centralize on their mission to craft music that speaks to and from them. Like any collaboration, the diversity of the members’ talents and lives truly operate on a tightrope where the collision of different ideas and backgrounds result in either memorable success or toxic failure. In George C. …

The beauty of art, in this case film, is that the artist can create new and wondrous worlds from scratch. On the flip side of that, artists are also free to explore this strange and sometimes vicious reality of our own, warts and all; and if director/writer Emerald Fennell has any say with her glossy and fiery PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, there are some damn big warts to address.

With such visible targets — namely, the perpetual tyranny of unchecked and privileged men — Ms. Fennell could possibly take her film in a variety of directions: to a ferocious horror revenge…

Finding itself among the pile of lackluster movies with inexplicably cool titles, HUNTER HUNTER from director/writer Shawn Linden is a patient work that observes the violent pitfalls of slumming it out in the woods. While it tries its best to craft a slow burn depiction of backwoods paranoia and violence, the unrelenting brutality of the film’s final act hopes and prays that the viewer will think all of the wheel spinning in the previous 80 minutes will be worth it.

And boy, do those wheels spin. In the remote wilderness, Linden positions his story around a family living astray from…

Going off the only other Oz Perkins film I’ve seen, THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER, it’s safe to say the filmmaker loves him some dark and moody pieces, especially slow ones. Moving from an isolated and wintry campus and into the depths of a muted fantastical forest, Mr. Perkins brings his personal blend of stark visuals and slow burn storytelling to a two-hundred year old fairy tale in GRETEL & HANSEL, a reimagining of sorts that somehow turns out to be less frightening than the source material.

In this version of a tale that propagates the terror of kindly old women in…