Category Archives: 2023

A Thousand and One

A Thousand and One   4 stars 

A. V. Rockwell tells a story of a young Black mother raising a son against the backdrop of a gentrifying New York City that tends to deny opportunity from the poorer minorities.  Inez (Teyana Taylor) is living in shelters in the 1990’s and as an act of redemption decides to kidnap 6 year old Terry, from foster care where he has been placed.  But there is a secret kept hidden that can shatter their lives if discovered.  We follow this small family for the next twelve years as they struggle to build something together with her friend and eventual husband,  Lucky (William Catlett). Both Inez and Lucky have criminal backgrounds making things a challenge,  but are committed to keeping Terry in school on a path to success.  It is a moving,  well acted and well written story that keeps you rooting for this loving and unlikely family. The cast was present for Q&A including the little boy who played the young Terry and was really charming. The movie was very well received by the packed in audience. It was an excellent movie that I almost missed. 

Sometimes I Think About Dying

Sometimes I Think About Dying  4 stars

Despite the title this movie has a very positive message.  It is a close look at the life and private thoughts of its main character, Fran, a young woman working in a small seaside town in Oregon.  Daisy Ridley stars as the woman who seems to have a rather dull life working in a small office,  only interacting with her coworkers when needed.  The movie starts by showing her normal work and home routine using long stretches of silence,  but blended in are private scenes that convey her thoughts about death or ways to die. One day a new worker, a man in his forties joins the team and he and Fran make a connection and arrange to see each other from time to time.  They find that there are more things that they don’t have in common than things they do,  which leads to some awkward moments in their conversations. Both of the characters are driven to express honest thoughts that can be hurtful.  The film conveys a message of acceptance of others despite the differences we have.  I should also emphasize that Fran’s thoughts on death do not represent any suicidal tendencies.  They are a way of showing the private thoughts we have that are hidden from the outside world. For Ridley this is a real departure from her work on the Star Wars movies. It is one to check out if you find it. 

Radical

Radical  5 stars

There are so many good imaginative movies at Sundance which makes it hard to identify the very best.  But I believe we have one in Radical.  It is a true story about a Mexican teacher starting a new job at one of the poorest and badly performing elementary schools in Mexico. The school is in a border town that is full of violence and corruption where the students come from extreme poverty.   Mexican funny man Eugenio Derbez stars as Sergio Juarez who is taking over the sixth grade class for the new school year.  Derbez is known for the comedy How to Be a Latin Lover and for his role in CODA. His role here is much more of a dramatic one, but he is great in it.  Sergio has a very different approach to teaching where he really gets the students enthused about learning,  but has to deal with disapproval from the Director and from parents who don’t like their children getting their hopes up too high.  The idea of a hero teacher bringing out the potential of underprivileged children has been done a few times but Radical really does an outstanding job at it. Derbez and two of the child actors were present for the Q&A. Many of the scenes shown in the movie happened in real life including the corruption that deprives the school of computers.  At the Q&A it was revealed that after ten years the school still does not have computers and it would be pointless to get them because they would only be stolen for the parts.  The two girls answered that they hope to continue with acting careers. I did not have this one on my initial list but looked for it once I heard some of the word of mouth,  (plus it has Eugenio Derbez, one of the funniest actors I have seen.)

Polite Society

Polite Society. 4 stars 

Polite Society appears in the Sundance Midnight section which usually means there will be horror and pain.  This is where you will find some of the bloodiest movies you can imagine at Sundance.   Not so with this one as it is a comedy with martial arts action and British humor featuring young girls.  It took some imagination to create this story set in a London girls school with a mostly Pakistani cast.  Schoolgirl Ria has been studying martial arts and her dream is to become a stuntwoman.  Her sister Lena has dropped out of art school and Ria is horrified to learn that she is being set up for marriage to a wealthy young Pakistani doctor and then moved to Singapore for a nefarious reason.  So Ria makes it her mission to stop this marriage enlisting the help of some of her classmates.  This fast moving comedy uses many of the same techniques seen in modern Asian action movies only with high school age girls.  It’s an interesting blend of genres that we seldom see.  It is directed by Nida Manzoor and stars Priya Kansara of Bridgerton as Ria. The cast and crew were present for the Q&A following the world premiere. 

Against the Tide

Against the Tide  4 1/2 stars!

The second movie was a documentary from India called Against the Tide. This was some superior filmmaking by an Indian woman director.  Her subjects were two close friends from Bombay,  India who belong to the Koli community.  They both struggle to make a living by fishing according to their traditions,  but face the challenges of a dwindling stock of fish in the ocean and increased competition.  The director wanted to convey just how hard it is for them to make a profit and feed their families and she definitely succeeds.  The two have very different approaches to running their businesses.  One tries to use modern fishing practices with a large boat and crew, fishing in deep water fast from shore,  while the other uses a small boat with only a few hands and stays in shallow water. The conclusion is that either way the fishermen barely can stay afloat while trying to support a wife and their small children.  I found it amazing that the subjects put so much trust in the filmmaker when it exposes the internal disagreements in their families.  It is informative to see the conditions of poverty that these businessmen are fighting against.  We also get exposure to the illegal practice of fishing with lights at night in order to increase the size of the catch. I had seen stories about this before. So far Against the Tide gets my vote for the best documentary. 

Sorcery

Sorcery  4 stars

From Chile comes a story of witchcraft set in the historical setting of the 1880’s on the Chilean island of Chiloe. The actual events feature a crackdown on the indigenous Huilliche natives by the ruling Chilean authorities and the German settlers.  The fictional story features a young Huilliche girl, Rosa, whose father is murdered by one of the German settlers. She is sheltered by a lone indigenous man,  Mateo and learns about the ways of witchcraft practiced by her people going back centuries and vows to seek justice for her dead father.  It is a very dark and sad story that is aided by a threatening score.  It is yet another example of the unresolvable clash in cultures between native people and the white settlers who came to seek a new life. The story includes acts of the supernatural and the use of trained animals. I found it an effective and haunting way to tell the story. 

Missing

Missing                 2 stars

For my first 2023 release I saw Missing. Just five years ago the groundbreaking film “Searching” brought us a mystery told in the unique way of viewing images on computer screens and surveillance cameras as a father goes searching for his missing daughter. Now filmmakers Will Merrick and Nicholas Johnson have made Missing, using a similar approach to story telling about a mother (Nia Long) who goes missing while on a vacation to Columbia with her new boyfriend, leaving 18 year old daughter June (Storm Reid) to try to find what happened to her with only a little help from the FBI. June, however, is quite accomplished at using social media and various online apps, making use of them to find clues as to what happened to her mother. She has clever ways to break into the boyfriend’s online accounts and find previously hidden details about him. And she is aided by a Columbian freelance investigator by way of Taskrabbit who is very helpful, leading to even more discoveries. About every 20 minutes or so a new startling revelation is discovered that completely changes June’s perception of some person or other including her mother. The movie feels like the ultimate in Things Are Not as They Seem genre as we follow things further and further down the rabbit hole. Unfortunately, this movie goes beyond the breaking point, with events that are just too much to be believed. I wanted to like the movie but by the end I felt that it had gone too far with the various twists with too much for me to accept. I am betting others will be disappointed by the ending. For a better treatment of this type of online mystery, go back and see 2018’s “Searching”.

Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear      3 ½ stars

The title of the hit horror “Cocaine Bear” tells just about everything you can imagine about this movie. “Inspired by true events”, in 1985 the body of a drug dealer with a failed parachute Is discovered in Tennessee, accompanied by a duffle bag of cocaine. Somewhere in a forest in Georgia the rest of the plane load of cocaine was dumped leading to a trio of the dead man’s drug dealer colleagues going in search of the missing drugs. Unfortunately, for them and the rest of the characters in this comical and bloody situation, a 500 pound bear has discovered the drugs first, getting stoned out of its mind after eating at least one brick of cocaine. What follows for the next hour and a half are some of the most hilarious encounters between said bear and the humans unlucky enough to cross paths with the ravenous animal. Besides the drug dealers (including the late Ray Liotta) there are the two teenage kids, Dee Dee and Henry, Dee Dee’s mom (Keri Russell), the local park ranger (Margo Martindale) who has gotten a raw deal on recent mishaps in the park, her activist friend, Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a trio of teenage boys who get their kicks out of attacking park visitors and a local cop (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) who aims to get to the bottom of the bizarre happenings in his jurisdiction. All find their way to the woods where the insane bear is hunting its prey. Although it is a comedy, Cocaine Bear deserves its R rating since there is no shortage of blood and gore as one person after another meets their fate at the claws and teeth of the angry bear that includes some missing limbs and at least one disembowelment. There also may be some valuable lessons to be learned when confronted by a bear in the woods, though I wouldn’t be real sure about that. The movie is directed by longtime actor and occasional director Elizabeth Banks known mainly as Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games movie series and is much in the tradition of recent horror comedy movies Werewolves Within and Shadow in the Clouds.

Creed III

Creed III               4 stars

Creed III finds Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan, returning as the star but also directing) retired from his world championship and now the owner of his own boxing gym ad quite well off with his music producer wife Bianca (Tess Thompson) and young daughter. It is the third in the series and the first that his mentor, Rocky Balboa does not appear in. The story starts with the young teenage Adonis at a group home with his buddy Damian who is making it in the boxing world when things take a bad direction and the two of them get caught up in an act of violence. Skip ahead about eighteen years and Creed is preparing world champion Felix for his next title match when a figure from the past, Damian (Jonathan Majors) appears at his door. Having just gotten out of prison, it soon becomes clear that Damian is interested in more than getting reacquainted with his boyhood friend. He has dreams of reaching his goal of becoming a champion and will stop at nothing to get it including exploiting Creed’s feelings of obligation toward him a well as cheating in the ring. Creed is warned that trouble awaits if he follows this path, but that matters little to him. Tragic events follow in a movie that is also about race in addition to being a boxing film. It is about two connected lives that took very different paths because of a single event involving young black men and the justice system. Inevitably, the film goes to the final confrontation between the two fighters in a showdown of a fight that is filmed like it is disconnected from the real world around them. The fight scenes are not as good as in the first Creed movie, but how could they be? That was a legendary film. The events surrounding these two characters may seem implausible in the real world making it quite a stretch, but it is entertaining to see these two talents and very well-conditioned actors performing together.

Scream VI

Scream VI            3 stars

The sixth installment of the popular Scream series that debuted back in 1996 descends on us in what is referred to as the sequel to the requel. I haven’t seen all of them but I think I know all the rules that have to be followed. There is a series of murders committed by a costumed figure called Ghostface using a large knife that are based on the movie franchise “Stab”. Characters return from previous movies that are apt to become victims of stabbings to come. The potential victims are also potential suspects. Each entry in the series must be more spectacular than the previous one. And there must be numerous nods to other horror classics like Halloween and Friday the 13th. (Also, the murdering tasks are typically shared by more than one Ghostface.) Many of these rules are explained to us thanks to a monologue from Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) where she outlines the whole series to us. The surviving characters from the previous outing in California have all migrated to New York City (minus Sidney Prescott, sorry Neve Campbell) where Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega of Wednesday) is now attending Blackmore University. Older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera of In The Heights), who previously dispatched the Ghostface from last year, followed her here to protect here and shares an apartment with several other young adults. Sam and Tara just happen to be the daughters of Billy Loomis who was the original Ghostface back in the nineties. It doesn’t take long before the bodies start falling with the appearance of Ghostface along with his menacing phone calls. Also appearing is the infamous Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox making her sixth appearance) who is now a news reporter trying to get a story. And Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere of Bring It On: All or Nothing and Amanda Knox) shows up again only this time she is an FBI agent sent here from Atlanta to investigate the murders. Local police detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney of My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Family Stone) becomes involved in the case after his own daughter becomes one of the victims. Before the killer or killers are revealed there are plenty of tension filled moments featuring confrontations with the masked killer and harrowing escapes, plus plenty of blood from all the stab wounds. Amazingly, some of the victims manage to survive deep knife wounds to the abdomen that should be fatal, leaving them with possible openings to return. But after six entries in this franchise things have probably gotten a little repetitive so it may be time to put Ghostface to rest.