Film Review: “King Richard”

Game, set, and match: Smith serves up winning performance in Williams biopic

Richard Williams (Will Smith) coaches his daughters Serena (Demi Singleton, l.) and Venus (Saniyya Sidney).

The last based-on-real-life tennis move I reviewed was Battle of the Sexes back in 2017, a jaunty yet powerful look at the infamous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Just as that movie was about so much more than solely tennis, so too is King Richard, a film that takes place nearly 20 years later, and, while ostensibly about the early lives of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams, is actually about race, class, parenting, and marriage. But the picture features plenty of nail-biting tennis matches, too, for the true tennis aficionado.

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Film Review: Fury

Aptly titled with a gutsy delivery.

The Furious Five
The Furious Five

It’s hard to imagine much originality stemming from any new or forthcoming World War II movies.  This was my thought back in 2009 before Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was released, offering audiences a completely new vision of the second world war and delivering never-before-seen perspectives with style.  This isn’t to say that that film revitalized the genre, but it kinda did.  The newest World War II tale, Fury, starring Basterds alum Brad Pitt, offers a focus we haven’t seen much of (tank vs. tank battles), but otherwise a lot of the same gruesomeness and gritty warfare and dehumanized soldiers we’ve seen before.  If it weren’t for a lack of strong character development, Fury could have been a war classic.  Fury is a strong entry into the World War II genre, focusing on a much-passed over yet crucial deadly type of war machine (again, tanks), yet still overtly showcasing the horrors and disturbing nature of war.

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