Films – Page 15 – Spinning Platters

Film Review: “14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible”

New doc is a terrific peak at extraordinary accomplishment

Mountaineer extraordinaire Nims Purja, atop one of his many ascents.

If you feel like you need some motivation to get back in shape after your long Thanksgiving weekend of feasting and resting, I recommend you watch the new Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible stat. The film tells the story of Nepali mountaineer Nirmal “Nims” Purja, who became the first person to summit all 14 of the world’s highest peaks in under seven months. The feat–and the movie about it–are both exceptional and inspiring.

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Film Review: “The Humans”

Strong performances anchor awkward stage-to-screen adaptation

The Blake family gathers for Thanksgiving.

“Boy, the holidays are rough. Every year I just try to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s,” the late great screenwriter Nora Ephron has Harry (Billy Crystal) comment to Sally (Meg Ryan) in the 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally. “A lot of suicides,” Sally dryly replies. Some 30 years later, Pennsylvania-born playwright and first-time filmmaker Stephen Karam has given us The Humans, a Thanksgiving-set film that illustrates Harry’s point. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, though, thankfully, the picture lacks Sally’s cynicism.

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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: “Belfast”

You can’t go home again, but you can make a mediocre movie about it

Buddy (Jude Hill) plays in the streets of his beloved Belfast.

Writer/director Kenneth Branagh, best known for his Shakespeare adaptations, turns his attention from the Elizabethan era to late 1960s Northern Ireland in his new film Belfast. The time and place offer as much drama and conflict as anything by the Bard, but Branagh’s nostalgic film, a black and white period piece based on his own boyhood, feels lightweight and forgettable despite its dramatic context.

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Film Review: “Spencer”

No fairy tale: Larraín’s take on Diana falls flat

Kristen Stewart is Princess Diana in SPENCER.

Given the excess of coverage and plethora of media portrayals of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, that Chilean director Pablo Larraín would choose her as the subject of his new film feels somewhat odd. Do we really need another look at Diana and the royal family and all their dysfunction? If you’re a fan of The Crown, you may already have had your fill, but if you’re still curious for even more on the inner workings of the Windsors and Diana’s psyche, then Larraín’s Spencer may be for you.

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Film Review: “Last Night in Soho”

Wright’s foray into horror yields twisty, bloody results

Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) hopes Jack (Matt Smith) can help jump-start her career in show business.

You’d be forgiven if, when you saw the poster or trailer for Last Night in Soho, you assumed it would be some sort of edgy, stylized, dark humor-filled picture. After all, the film’s director is Edgar Wright, of Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead, and The World’s End fame. The film’s marketers seem to be seizing on fans’ perception of Wright to sell the film, but make no mistake – this movie is markedly different from the rest. Above all else, this picture is a horror movie, and an exceptionally bloody one at that, making its Halloween weekend release appropriate.

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Film Review: “We’re All In This Together”

Boland’s skills are on full display, thrice

Effectively playing a character on screen is hard. Effectively playing two characters on screen is harder. Directing yourself playing two characters on screen is lunacy! Well, lets officially jot down Katie Boland as an artistic risk-taker because she writes, directs, and stars in dual roles in We’re All In This Together. Did I mention it’s also her feature film directorial debut? The list of accomplishments we can attribute to this project are endless, and should be celebrated, even if the end result isn’t fully emotionally gratifying or cinematically coherent. We’re All In This Together (or WAITT, henceforth) is a lean family drama that juggles too many themes and side plots to successfully fit within a short 85 minute running time, but Boland’s devotion to the filmmaking craft and her on screen performance nevertheless emerge strong.

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Film Review: “The French Dispatch”

Anderson’s French Dispatch is precious and pretty, with an emotional punch

Fox Searchlight has finally released Wes Anderson’s very long-awaited new film The French Dispatch, and this sentence pretty much sums it up: “Leutenant Nescaffier is emphatically celebrated among cooks, cops and capitaines, not to mention swindlers, stoolies and snitches, as the great exemplar of police cooking.”

If that sentence – with its very sneaky verb, its obviously overbalanced serial commas, its all too visible use of French terms, and finally, its curious “police cooking”- makes you smile, laugh, giggle, catch your breath, or even tingle, then this is your film. If not, then there’s nothing I, or this review, can do for you.

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Film Review: “The Rescue”

Mission Possible: Terrific new doc recounts harrowing Thai soccer team rescue

Husband and wife filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have made two of my all-time favorite films in the past six years: 2015’s Meru and 2018’s Best Documentary Oscar winner Free Solo. They return today with The Rescue, which chronicles the recovery of a Thai boys’ soccer team from a flooded cave back in 2018, an event that transfixed the world. Chin and Vasarhelyi’s new documentary is just as engrossing as the original story, and with this picture the duo continues their streak of producing absolutely must-watch, enthralling films.

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Film Review: “No Time To Die”

All the Bond we love and don’t love, shaken, not stirred

Looking back, Bond considers his life choices.

Nearly fifteen years ago, the world was introduced to Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale, the sixth actor to portray the iconic British secret agent (I’m not counting David Niven). Casino Royale portrayed Bond as a gritty, brutish, and most importantly, emotional character. It was a product of the time, a post 9/11 world where terrorism was no quipping manner and audiences desired “realism” over campiness, hence the popularity of the Bourne movies leading up to Royale. And now, the Daniel Craig era comes to a close with No Time To Die, his fifth film as Bond. No Time To Die is the perfectly fitting end in just about every manner, tying in all the familiar role-players from the previous films while finally bridging Craig’s emotional brutality with the campy, spy game action of previous Bond films. The opposing sensibilities don’t always gel. So the question is — will all audiences enjoy the precarious balancing act that director Cary Joji Fukunaga squeezes within a bloated 2 hours 45 minutes? No, definitely not. Like me, many will leave the theater entertained but also confusingly disappointed. However, No Time To Die’s value will appreciate over time. Even a week after viewing it, my acceptance and understanding of the film has grown.

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