Posts Tagged ‘sci-fi’
 

 

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Wild Robot” & “Disclaimer”

THE WILD ROBOT (DreamWorks Animation/Universal – Sept. 27):  Chris Sanders’s movie is a fairly captivating if unsurprising family entertainment.  In the future, when a plane with a cargo of robots crashes off the ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Assessment” & “Road Diary”

  THE ASSESSMENT (no distrib);  It seems initially as though Fleur Fortune’s feature directing debut The Assessment will be easy to peg.  The script, by John Donnelly and the duo credited as “Mrs and Mr Thoma...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” “Bad Behaviour,” & “Divinity”

  SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING:  The Office, for depressives.  Fran (Daisy Ridley) is the most anonymous member of a nondescript shipping department in a small Oregon town, wrapped in so many layers of emotional insulat...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Magazine Dreams,” “Polite Society” & “Drift”

  MAGAZINE DREAMS:  The hype was accurate:  Jonathan Majors gives a titanic performance in Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams.  Playing Killian, a roided-up amateur bodybuilder obsessed with achieving glory in that pr...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Past Lives,” “Fairyland” & “Infinity Pool”

  PAST LIVES (A24):  The playwright Celine Song makes an impressive feature writing/directing debut with the lovely, eloquent Past Lives.  The film is sort of the opposite of Sliding Doors and all of the multiversal ente...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Flora & Son,” “A Little Prayer” & “The Pod Generation”

  FLORA AND SON (Apple):  John Carney’s Irish dramedy was (with Fair Play) the commercial bonanza of Sundance, reportedly with a $20M pricetag.  It isn’t hard to see why the studio and streamer checkbooks cam...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

ShowbuzzDaily Sundance 2022 Reviews: “892” & “After Yang”

  892 (no distrib):  John Boyega’s turbo-charged performance fuels this true story.  In 2017, when Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) entered a Wells Fargo branch in a suburb of Atlanta and informed the teller that his ba...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “The Survivor,” “Charlotte” & “I’m Your Man”

  THE SURVIVOR (no distrib):  So many films and television productions have tackled the subject of the Holocaust over the decades that it takes real effort to break through with a story that feels fresh.  Barry Levinson&...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Virtual Sundance Reviews: “In the Earth” & “Knocking”

  IN THE EARTH (Neon):  After his foray into more commercial cinema with the Netflix remake of Rebecca that didn’t go very well, Ben Wheatley has returned to the stranger and more experimental style of his earlier f...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Virtual Sundance Reviews: “Human Factors,” “Cryptozoo” & “How It Ends”

  HUMAN FACTORS:  Is Ronny Trocker’s Human Factors intended as a political allegory?  The married couple at its center are the German Jan (Mark Waschke) and the French Nina (Sabine Timoteo), and there’s a plo...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “Westworld”

  Do Westworld‘s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have free will?  This third season of HBO’s was supposed to be fundamentally different from the first two, and certainly things changed in some key ways. ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “Westworld”

  WESTWORLD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO   With most other forms of new entertainment content sidelined for at least the next several weeks, television is likely to be even more at the center of our culture than it already is...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Sundance Film Festival Reviews: “Late Night” & “Paradise Hills”

  LATE NIGHT (Amazon):  It’s legitimate to note that the thoroughly mainstream and commercial Late Night belonged at Sundance just about as much as The Devil Wears Prada would have, since to a large extent it transp...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “Manifest”

  MANIFEST:  Mondays 10PM on NBC Of all the Lost rip-offs we’ve seen over the years, NBC’s MANIFEST seems from its pilot to be the laziest, and perhaps the worst.  Creator Jeff Rake (he has the eminently forg...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “The 100”

  CW’s THE 100 has set its bar fairly high fover the years, and on those terms, Season 5 wasn’t quite up to par.  The central crisis–our protagonists had to face off against a pack of vicious thawed-out ...
by Mitch Salem