Japan’s winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, is the story of an impoverished family of shoplifters in Tokyo that takes in a young girl after noticing signs of abuse and neglect by her family. The family shares a tiny, rundown home owned by Grandma (Kirin Kiri), an […]
Vice is a caustic, wildly unconventional biopic and dark comedy about the notoriously secretive, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. It uses flashbacks to show how this gruff, heart attack-prone bureaucrat with a grinch-like sneer came to wield an unprecedented amount of power in President George Bush’s White House, perhaps more so than any other […]
Following in the footsteps of this year’s inspirational documentary RBG, Felicity Jones stars in this biopic about the U.S. Supreme Court’s second female justice and much heralded liberal firebrand, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The film focuses on Ginsburg’s earlier years, documenting her roles as a mother, law student and professor – a path she took for a […]
This prequel to the Transformers franchise stars Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a car-obsessed teenager in a small town near San Francisco in 1987, who discovers that the beat-up, yellow Volkswagen Beetle she just drove home from the junkyard is actually a highly-advanced robot from another world. Bumblebee, as she names him, has fled a war […]
You look, you die. Such is the Medusa-esque premise behind this dystopian Netflix survival thriller, adapted by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Arrival) from the 2014 novel by Josh Malerman. Told through a series of flashbacks, Sandra Bullock is Malorie, a pregnant Michigan woman who survives “The Problem” – no, not her unplanned pregnancy, but rather, […]
A whopping 54 years after the original Mary Poppins made Julie Andrews a legend, Emily Blunt stars as the magical, airborne nanny spreading joy into the lives of the Banks family in London. In this sequel, Mary Poppins returns to remind the now adult Banks children and their young family members what it is like to […]
Jason Momoa stars in this Iliad-styled, DC Comics saga about the son of the former queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman) and a human, whom is recruited to take the throne and stop his half brother Orm (Patrick Wilson, sporting blond hair more akin to the Aquaman comics) from launching an attack on the filthy, ocean-polluting […]
Roma is Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón’s immersive snapshot of daily life in early 1970s Mexico City, as seen through the eyes of Cleo, one of two live-in housekeepers working for an upper middle class family in the Colonia Roma neighborhood. The film is based on Cuarón’s own childhood memories of his real life nanny, Libo, […]
Desperate and on the brink of financial ruin, 90-year-old Illinois horticulturist Earl Stone becomes an unlikely drug mule in this drama based on the true story of Leo Sharp, a WWII veteran who, in his 80s, became the oldest and most prolific drug runner for Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel for more than a decade. As Stone […]
Vox Lux is the tale of Celeste, a young girl who rises to international pop superstardom in 1999 in the wake of a horrific national tragedy. The story touches upon other international tragedies and a personal scandal along the way, culminating in Celeste’s big comeback tour in her hometown on New York’s Staten Island 18 […]