Female Film Critics 24/375
Inspired by a true story, Fisherman’s Friends begins with four London music biz executives on a weekend stag getaway in the bucolic village of Port Isaac in Cornwall. When they hear a hearty group of local fishermen sing a cappella sea shanties on the waterfront, one of them is immediately entranced.
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The funny and heartwarming comedy Never too Late from director Mark Lamprell tackles aging, friendship and living life to the fullest. Vietnam vets famous for escaping from a Vietnamese POW camp, wind up in a nursing home – and they want to escape. Things don’t go smoothly as even their backup plans fail spectacularly. Watching their every misstep is what makes “Never too Late” a funny and endearing romp.
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The actual Eurovision Song Contest has provoked many a joke, so why shouldn’t Will Ferrell pile on? This fluffy little film, streaming on Netflix, provides just the distraction needed in annus horribilis. It has music and romance, irony and silliness plus several energetic choruses of Ya Ya Ding Dong.
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Directed by Jack Henry Robbins, VHYes is gleefully, overtly, undeniably farcical – filled with parodies of pornographic, aerobics and home shopping, as well as over-the-top cameos by Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, the filmmaker’s parents.
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Stark and sobering, Retaliation stars Orlando Bloom as Malky (Malcolm), an angry ex-con who seems to adore his mother and habitually kicks back with his working class mates at the pub. Until the cracks in his veneer expose the root causes of his shockingly violent and volatile behaviors.
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One couldn’t pick a more appropriate film for this moment in history than John Lewis: Good Trouble. The 80 year-old civil rights leader and US Congressman’s life has spanned the Jim Crow south to the halls of power. Dawn Porter’s documentary doesn’t do anything fancy and it doesn’t need to; Lewis’s personal story and the historical footage speak volumes.
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Five years ago, theatergoers and critics were dazzled by this vivacious, culturally significant musical about the nation’s first Treasury secretary, political mastermind Alexander Hamilton. Now you can see the thrilling, live-capture, the 161-minute film version with the original principal Broadway cast.
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Filmmaker John Swab clearly has literary aspirations for the film, with references to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and S.E. Hinton’s Rumble Fish, and the writer-director has some interesting ideas about childhood innocence, trauma and struggles to understand the adult world.
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For the first time this summer, I’m not missing all the big loud comic-book movies we’re being bombarded with in an alt-timeline. I like those movies, but they do tend to dominate the pop-culture conversation. With them off the radar this year, there’s room to breathe for a fantastic little pulp comic-book movie like The Old Guard.
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Dawn Porter’s documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble is a stirring tribute to the 80-year-old civil rights hero and Georgia Democratic U.S. representative who eschewed violence while putting his own life on the line during protests in the early ‘60s. The documentary is also a clarion call to warn us that our election this fall, even before coronavirus came into our lives, is in danger of being compromised.
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