It is hard to shake the feeling that Joe Bell was designed with an Oscar nomination for acting in mind, though along the way it ended up forgetting to make an engaging film to justify such an award. 

A film that proves to be fleetingly sweet, How It Ends is a pandemic creation where absurdity and sentimentality are given priority over substance.

An attractive forty-something, semi-successful actor from New York, Michael (Andy Karl), dies single. He’s told by a magical CEO (Christina Ricci) in a high rise in the sky that he has to find his soulmate to ascend and there’s a ticking clock to find them before he literally ceases to exist. So… eternity with a partner or you literally disappear never to be heard from again; useless and unloved.

With his feature film debut about one man’s love for his prized pig, writer-director Michael Sarnoski has harnessed Nicolas Cage’s latent intensity and made what might be my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year.

With Roadrunner, kind-hearted documentarian Morgan Neville virtually reunites many of Bourdain’s dearest friends and collaborators to contemplate his life and legacy while working through their still-raw grief on film. Whether the documentary’s subject would have approved of the project (probably not) is perhaps beside the point.

A film that only succeeds in dunking on itself over and over again, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a woefully misguided marketing ploy masquerading as a movie.