Festivals Reviews

SXSW 2021: Alien on Stage

When a group of Dorset bus drivers made the very unconventional decision to abandon their holiday season pantomime in favor of a homegrown theatrical adaptation of Alien, Ridley Scott’s revered science fiction horror film, the response from local audiences was predictably muted. Luckily, the show found a life beyond their town and has been committed to film in this delightful documentary.

Festivals Reviews

SXSW 2021: Not Going Quietly

When he received a surprise ALS diagnosis in in his early thirties, advocacy lawyer Ady Barkan pledged to spend the limited time he had left to live with his young family in Santa Barbara. A weekend in DC lobbying to save the Affordable Care Act, a chance meeting with a young activist in the airport, and a viral conversation with Arizona senator Jeff Flake aboard a cross-country flight changed all of that.

Reviews

Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry presents a star in focus

When R. J. Cutler’s experiential new documentary opens, his subject, Billie Eilish is sixteen years old, crafting songs from illustrated diary entries and engineered beats in her brother Finneas’s bedroom in their family’s modest Los Angeles bungalow. It closes, a little over two years later, when having just celebrated her nineteenth birthday, she cleaned up at the Grammy Awards as the youngest person to win the Big Four (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year), leaving the ceremony with multiple armloads of shiny gramophones (those, plus Pop Solo Performance, Pop Vocal Album and Producer of the Year for Finneas) and — more importantly — a congratulatory FaceTime call from her tweenage crush, Justin Bieber.

Reviews

I Care A Lot is a showcase for Rosamund Pike and a Peak Netflix Movie

I Care A Lot (2021 | USA | 118 minutes | J Blakeson)

Netflix has its share of great (or aspiring to be great) cinema — e.g., Roma, The Irishman, maybe even Mank — but as nice as it is that they indulge the occasional auteur with commercially questionable projects, their great gift to the world may be the Good Enough Netflix Movie. Light yet engaging, well-paced, an amount of star power, maybe a bit of an edge, and a grab bag of genres that shift every half hour to comfortably disappear two hours of quality time on your couch. J. Blakeson’s I Care A Lot falls into the latter category: it opens as a dark comedy about swindling old people, morphs a few times into a mystery, a heist, and a violent revenge thriller, before coming full circle. But throughout the ever-shifting tone, it remains a constant showcase for Rosamund Pike.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2021: Flee, Hive

Flee (2021 | Denmark/France/Sweden/Norway | 90 minutes | Jonas Poher Rasmussen) Flee, an incredible film about the harrowing journey of Amin, a …