Female Film Critics 24/375
Packed with visual references and sprightly animation, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie will have young audiences ready to “let’s a-go,” even if adults find it a busy ride. A sequel to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which earned $1.4 billion worldwide, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie bursts with more characters and colorful locations but has a less-cohesive plot.
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Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasures, Cord Jefferson’s cagey American Fiction has garnered five Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score. The story introduces Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a serious West Coast university professor/fledgling writer who bristles at the media’s exploitation of Black stereotypes for profit.
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One of the year’s very best films, writer/director Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a sly, sophisticated and thoroughly engaging put down of America’s propensity for racial stereotyping — in particular in the realm of literature, publishing and academia, but crossing into other turf, as well. It is the subtly told tale of a highly esteemed and brilliant Black author and college professor. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, whose current manuscript isn’t selling because it isn’t deemed to be ‘Black’ enough. So, as an anger-based joke, Monk — as he’s known to family, friends and fans — composes a supposedly semi-autobiographical novel that he credits to a completely fictitious author who is reportedly hiding his real identity because he’s ostensibly a criminal on the run. The manuscript is pure in-your-face jive, but — against his will — his agent submits it to a publishing house where they applaud it’s authenticity and buy it for big bucks.
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Hearing Black artists’ work described as “raw” and “real” grates on Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. It’s not that Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a professor and author, doesn’t find some writing transportive. He just considers a lot of what catapults onto best-seller lists and movie screens featuring Black characters pandering: stories of drugs, deadbeat dads, pregnant teens, and police shootings. Those circumstances might be some people’s realities, but writer/director Cord Jefferson’s debut feature film argues there are other stories we’re not seeing. A blistering indictment of giving the public what it thinks it wants, it criticizes the publishing industry—and some films—for “elevating” Black voices yet perpetuating stereotypes.
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Although the mixed-media Pop Art animatronics are dazzling and the superhero saga compelling, watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse becomes an exhausting endurance ordeal. At 2 hours, 20 minutes (140 minutes), it’s the longest American animated film. Back in 2018, the Oscar-winning, comic-book adaptation Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse explored the idea of alternate universes, as Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a troubled Black-Latino Brooklyn teenager, discovered countless other web-slingers, variations on a theme. This sequel takes the ground-breaking concept even further.
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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is an energetic, multifaceted adventure, and not just because its heroes hopscotch through other dimensions. As visually inventive as its 2018 predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse again delivers eye-catching action along with characters of depth and nuance both behind and outside of the mask. It’s a thrilling achievement, even as it leaves viewers dangling by a thread for the final installment.
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Anyone who has followed Paul Rudnick’s career and appreciates it knows to keep following, nuisance-close lest missing a word. The Coastal Elites outshines his every other brilliance. It expands upon what it means to manage these agonizing days with heart and soul, laughter and vinegar.
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Baltimore itself is the stage where rappers and poets perform on street corners, dancers hotfoot their way across bridges and through buildings, clubs host sweaty dance-off competitions, where crowds gather to watch those with the best moves crowned King or Queen. And in one poignant sequence, a tulle-clad dancer performs a beautiful mixture of ballet and club moves in the graveyard where Tamika Ray (aka FatGirl), a pioneer of Baltimore dance, lays buried.
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From its first moments, The Photograph, with its underlying romantic jazz score and winning co-leads, is calling the viewers into an intimate slow dance, maybe with Luther Vandross playing, that feels safe, sexy, and so satisfying you won’t want it to end. It’s the sort of movie that’s rarely made anymore, yet here it is.
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Scripted by Tracy Oliver and director Tina Gordon Chism, it’s an allegory about the long term effects of adolescent bullying. As Executive Producer, 14 year-old Marsai Martin came up with the idea, and her confident performance evokes her appeal as Diane Johnson on ABC’s Black-ish.
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