The SunBreak

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.

I had really high hopes for this quirky British comedy about a woman, Frankie (Maeve Dermody), who is sick and tired of being dumped. We meet her as she’s left by her “perfect man” via his little brother Wilbur (yes, he broke up with her by proxy) and through some awkward interactions with this little messenger (Rory Stroud) , she finds out there maybe a gene that consistently makes you the dumpee at the end of a relationship rather than the dumper. For the rest of the film she tries to fix this defect.

Scores of film buffs in the west know and love Tunisia, whether they realize it or not. The North African country’s enjoyed a rep as a popular location for outside movie productions for decades. Its arid but picturesque deserts provided suitably exotic backdrops for scores of international hits, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars series, The English Patient, and many more.

Despite having appeared in six Marvel Cinematic Universe features and having ascended to the leader of the Avengers by its Endgame audiences never really got to know Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Whereas other core team members like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and even multiple Hulks were the subject of multiple standalone stories to flesh out their backstories, the history and motivations of reformed Russian spy Natasha Romanoff was always left to a series of offhand allusions to a vaguely dark, cryptically complicated past. Alas, it took a tragic sacrifice (and then a pandemic delay) to give her the spotlight she deserved, albeit in flashback form to fill in the long-missing pieces.