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      ‘Queen Marie’ Review: Border Talks

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      Alexis Sweet Cahill’s biopic about the Romanian queen is weighed down by stodgy exposition.Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but “Queen Marie” shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.Directed by the Italian filmmaker Alexis Sweet Cahill, the movie recounts how the country’s queen, Marie (Roxana Lupu), a British-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria, pressed for a greater Romania — incorporating Transylvania, among other regions — during the postwar peace talks in Paris in 1919.Exactly what harm President Woodrow Wilson (Patrick Drury), Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France (Ronald Chenery) and Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain (Richard Elfyn) saw in expanding Romania’s borders is never precisely clear from this screenplay. But geopolitical details are not high on the priority list of any movie in which King George V (Nicholas Boulton), in London, informs the Romanian queen, his cousin, of the limits of his power: “There’s very little I can do. We’re a constitutional monarchy, just like yours.”Surely Queen Marie — shown as a smart, savvy strategist — already knows that. But where the Romanian prime minister (Adrian Titieni) has failed, Marie will step in to make the case, and secure aid for her country, despite the fact that she is presumed to play a limited role in politics and faces skepticism because of her gender and diplomatic inexperience. In this telling, her success was mainly a matter of securing meetings with high-handed world leaders and disarming them. Negotiations are rarely so simplistic.Queen MarieNot rated. In English, Romanian, French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Paper Tigers’ Review: Reliving the Glory Days

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      A trio of aging martial artists reunite in this fresh, if uneven, debut by the director Tran Quoc Bao.Midway through “The Paper Tigers,” there’s a brawl in an empty pool: on the left, a trio of arrogant youngsters with serious moves; on the right, three middle-aged men who tout their seniority. The Tigers were once Seattle’s greatest kung fu fighters. Key word: “Once.”Danny (Alain Uy), a divorced dad, gets the wind knocked out him; Hing (Ron Yuan) hobbles around on a bad knee; Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) runs a boxing studio but doesn’t remember what to do with his hands. Somehow, the Tigers emerge victorious. But their methods are, uh, not flattering.Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, this charming debut from the writer and director Tran Quoc Bao reworks the kung fu comedy through the lens of his experience growing up as a Bruce Lee-loving Asian-American on the West Coast.In the opening, home video-style footage depicts our heroes as sprightly teenagers training under their beloved Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan). Twenty-five years later, the estranged grumps reunite to avenge their master’s death. Unfortunately, the distended, sometimes clichéd plot detracts from the snappiness of the comedy, which otherwise brims with snort-inducing one-liners. Particularly funny is a Chinese-speaking white guy (Matthew Page), who fancies himself more Asian than the actual Asians.Bao’s lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth. The film sticks to the action-comedy basics, which is just fine.The Paper TigersRated PG-13 for some strong language, offensive slurs and violence. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘In Our Mothers’ Gardens’ Review: Creating Space for Black Women

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      The Netflix documentary sets out to show how maternal lineages have shaped generations of Black women.In the meditative documentary “In Our Mothers’ Gardens” (streaming on Netflix), the stories could warm a room in any season. Opening with a quote from Alice Walker, whose book “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” inspired the film’s title, the documentary sets out to show how Black maternal lineages have shaped the idea of Black womanhood.The director Shantrelle P. Lewis, who also appears in the film as a subject, weaves together interviews with Black women from a variety of backgrounds, including the activist Tarana Burke, the entrepreneur Latham Thomas and Professor Brittney Cooper, the author of “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.” The interviewees offer anecdotes about their mothers and grandmothers, and reflect on how the relationships nourished them. In one scene, Burke recalls a childhood experience of being slapped by a stranger for playing in the supermarket. When Burke’s grandmother heard what happened, she smashed the store’s window with a pipe.Lewis pairs the stories with a lovely collage aesthetic, layering the interviews with home videos, photographs and music. Sometimes, she even frames her subjects within collages of flowers, antique curios and archival images.As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness. But as the women explore spirituality, trauma and resilience, an echo effect emerges. Sometimes that echo can sound like repetition. The film’s division into rough thematic chapters reinforces redundancies; some ideas within the “healing” segment could have fit within “radical self-care,” and vice versa. Yet such hiccups ultimately do not detract from the movie’s grace — nor from its showcase of Lewis’s natural gifts as a communicator and as an artist.In Our Mothers’ GardensNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Silo’ Review: When Life on a Farm Is Far From Wholesome

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      A mainstay of American agriculture, corn can become a suffocating trap when a human comes up against tons of it in a vertical storage bin.The terror of certain life-threatening situations is tough to translate to the screen. One of these is what a dispatcher in “Silo” calls a grain engulfment. Here, it happens when a teenage farmworker, Cody (Jack DiFalco), is sent into a multistory silo to break up clumps of corn. Someone negligently activates the machinery, and Cody becomes marooned in a quicksand-like rush of corn. Any movement might cause him to sink below the surface. And any effort to extract him must account for the forces exerted by 1.5 million pounds of corn.The scenario is a real one; statistics at the end cite how frequent and deadly these entrapments are. Building a movie around Cody’s peril requires an approach that makes every creak of metal or shift in grain suspenseful to viewers. For Cody, being unable to budge, reach his inhaler or see the rescue efforts is petrifying. But the director, Marshall Burnette, doesn’t stick to Cody’s perspective. Every time he cuts beyond the silo, the tension is lost.Burnette’s feature debut, “Silo” is based on a story he devised from news coverage. Jason Williamson wrote the screenplay.If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse. Cody’s mother (Jill Paice) curses fate for entrusting her son’s life to Frank (Jeremy Holm), the volunteer fire chief, the person she holds responsible for Cody’s father’s death in a car accident. The cast also struggles to capture the urgency. Few actors could convincingly engage in an angry dispute about the best way to rescue a kid “surrounded by unstable corn.”SiloNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Citizen Penn’ Review: A Portrait of Sean Penn as an Advocate

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      The documentary follows the actor’s work helping Haiti, starting in 2011.Sean Penn’s work in Haiti after its devastating 2011 earthquake continues to this day. And this new documentary “Citizen Penn” is a revealing, engaging chronicle of the actor’s activism.One of the opening scenes of the movie, directed by Dan Hardy, is a mini-montage of its subject behaving like the tabloid fodder he was during the 1980s and 1990s. It culminates with a clip from Penn’s acceptance speech at the 2009 Academy Awards ceremony, where he took the best actor prize for his work in “Milk.” He tells the audience, “I know how hard I make it to appreciate me.”Hardy’s subsequent exercise in Penn-appreciation, focusing on Penn’s extraordinary and still-continuing philanthropic activism in Haiti, accepts that challenge, and overcomes it.Speaking with Hardy for this film, Penn reveals, among other things, his acute awareness of the interview as a mode of performance. Dressed in jeans and a denim shirt, an American Spirit cigarette almost ever-present in his hand, the often combative actor adopts a friendly mien and seems frank, engaging and unguarded. He speaks of wasting some time on nightlife in the aftermath of a divorce, and being galvanized by television coverage of the 2011 earthquake.After asking a physician friend down there what was needed, and being told “350,000 vials of morphine,” Penn got them. From the divisive president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, as it happens. After assembling a volunteer force, Penn went to Haiti and was increasingly astonished at how devastated it was.The actor and filmmaker is the “star” here, yes, but Hardy also profiles Haitians and some expatriates in the medical field who were moved to go back to the country. Their commitment and insight fills out the chronicle. These days, the island country is increasingly hurricane battered. And Penn remains a fierce, and appreciated, advocate for its cause.Citizen PennNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘The Boy From Medellín’ Review: A Dizzying Week in J Balvin’s World

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      A documentary about the reggaeton star from Colombia is a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity.The year is 2019 and protests in Colombia — the largest the country has seen in decades — have erupted against the government of President Iván Duque. The killing of 18-year-old Dilan Cruz by a police projectile makes its way into the reggaeton star J Balvin’s Instagram feed, which exacerbates his individual crisis.It seems Balvin wasn’t sleeping well. In the days leading up to a sold-out concert on Nov. 30, 2019, in his hometown, Medellín, he begins to consider his responsibilities as a public figure. Social media users criticize his political disengagement, while uprisings in the city threaten to cancel his big night.In “The Boy from Medellín” on Amazon Prime Video, the director Matthew Heineman captures a week in the life of Balvin, the Prince of Reggaeton, a charismatic performer who appears to be privately diffident.Known for his gritty documentaries about international conflicts (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”), Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.At the very least, attending a J Balvin show looks like it would be great fun.Heineman weaves together clips from Balvin’s youth — his scrappy origins in the local music scene — with snapshots into his chaotic present. As the concert approaches, Balvin seems to be either on the verge of a panic attack or meditating with the help of his spiritual adviser. Destigmatizing mental illness is an important cause for Balvin, for reasons made intimately apparent.Similar recent mythmaking projects like Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” and Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana” have generated their own publicity by giving access to curated versions of the personal lives of musicians, which makes them seem real and relatable. In “The Boy from Medellín,” this curation is obvious.Before Balvin hits the stage, his manager urges him to speak out and cites the activist roots of the American rap group N.W.A. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison, since the artists responsible for explicit protest anthems probably didn’t need any encouragement to express their opinions. In “getting political,” Balvin risks alienating some fans, but he stands to win some as well — the viewers of this documentary, for instance.The Boy from MedellínRated R for language. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Pink Skies Ahead’ Review: Partying Through Anxiety

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      Kelly Oxford’s ’90s-set coming-of-age story follows a college dropout as she navigates a new romance and a new medical diagnosis.A blue-haired ball of manic energy, the 20-year-old Winona (Jessica Barden) has dropped out of school and moved back home with her parents. In a crucial time for finding autonomy, Winona is stunted. She cannot, for the life of her, pass her driving test. Even though she has outgrown her longtime pediatrician (Henry Winkler), Winona still sees him and he tells her she has an anxiety disorder — a label she immediately rejects. She carries on with her life: partying, getting high, gorging on candy and dating. She meets a strait-laced Ph.D. student and things seem to go on track. But as can be expected, her life hurtles toward a crash.“Pink Skies Ahead” is set in 1998, when the writer/director Kelly Oxford would have been about Winona’s age. Oxford’s debut film is semi-autobiographical, adapted from an essay of hers, titled “No Real Danger,” and it mirrors the anxiety she struggled with as a young adult.But for being such a personal film, “Pink Skies Ahead” lacks a distinctive center; it feels more like an amalgamation of different coming-of-age movies over the years, from “Ghost World” to “Lady Bird.” It is not without tender or enjoyable moments — that’s the beauty of a formula — but there’s a tonal imbalance of comedy and drama. The two constantly deflate each other.The film takes a few distracting turns but rightfully comes back to Winona’s vulnerability. Though Barden is older than her under-drinking-age character, she effectively captures her immaturity and complexity. You may be left wishing she had more depth to work with.Pink Skies AheadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on MTV beginning May 8. More

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      New 'The Batman' Leaked Video See Catwoman in Action

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      Warner Bros. Pictures

      Reportedly part of an upcoming Catwoman documentary, the footage also features Zoe Kravitz describing her iteration of the anti-hero in the Matt Reeves-directed movie.

      May 6, 2021

      AceShowbiz –
      Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Films have not released another official sneak-peek of “The Batman”, but a new look at the movie has landed online. A featurette centering on Selina Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman has made its way around the Internet, giving a look at Zoe Kravitz’s iteration of the anti-hero.

      In the scenes from the upcoming movie, Catwoman is seen in action. She suits up in her black leather suit complete with her mask on while seemingly trying to break into a vault. In another moment, she’s crouching on the floor while looking alert, while another scene briefly shows her in a duel with Batman.

      The video also features commentaries from the star and the crew about the character. “The villains are often some of the most, if not the most exciting part of the movies,” director Matt Reeves says of what to expect when watching the character in the movie.

      He goes on explaining, “I mean, the rogues gallery is incredible, and what I wanted to do was I wanted to see a Batman that wasn’t an origin tale, but was sort of in his early days, but that meant that a lot of the characters that are the rogues gallery of characters, are in their origins in a way. So we have a Selina Kyle who’s not yet Catwoman.”

        See also…

      Kravitz explains the nature of her character, “Selina can take care of herself. She really wants to fight for those that don’t have someone else to fight for them. I think that is where Batman and she really connect.”

      Producer Dylan Clark echoes the actress’ claims as he weighs in, “What’s really interesting about Selina Kyle is that she represents the savior for the ill-treated, the forgotten, the people that haven’t had anybody looking out for them. She’s also very complicated, you don’t quite know exactly where her loyalty or allegiance lies.”

      The leaked footage is reportedly taken from a documentary on iTunes called “Catwoman: The Feline Femme Fatale” that’s bundled with any of the four original Batman films.

      “The Batman” stars Robert Pattinson in the lead role, with Paul Dano as Riddler, Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon, John Turturro as Carmine Falcone, Peter Sarsgaard as Gil Colson, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth and Colin Farrell as Penguin. Filming wrapped in March and the movie is slated to arrive on March 4, 2022.

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