Female Film Critics 24/375
The cast of Amsterdam reads like an Irwin Allen disaster picture lineup…Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Robert DeNiro, Anya Taylor-Joy, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Ed Begley, Jr, Timothy Olyfant and Taylor Swift…and like the Poseidon Adventure, this film is a sinking ship that barely manages to stay afloat.
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Monster is a remarkable film about a filmmaker, Steve Harmon. He is 17 and Black. He is bright, inquisitive, a good son to good parents. He is a model big brother. But the prosecutor at his trial labels Steve Harmon a monster. The voice of this so-called monster denies the label.
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After winning an Emmy as a stressed-out teenage addict on HBO’s Euphoria, Zendaya was ready to go to work on the second season – but then COVID-19 sent everyone home. So she decided to make a movie. Actually, she was approached by Sam Levinson, creator of Euphoria. He was working on a script about a rising director named Malcolm and his much-younger girl-friend Marie, who get into a long argument late at night after the Los Angeles premiere of his new movie.
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The titular pugilists have retired to their glass house after the premiere of Malcolm’s movie. Wifelike Marie prepares mac ‘n’ cheese for her hungry man while he teases apart the evening.. Malcolm and Marie is Friday Night Fights without ring, gloves, or bloody blows. Love and hate pound a tattoo throughout and as terraced dynamics in Liberation over the credits.
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Even the best filmmakers make colossal blunders, and this comes from Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento, The Dark Knight trilogy). A $200+ million mistake on top of a miscalculation. In the midst of the pandemic, Nolan insisted that his sprawling, unfathomable sci-fi action-adventure be released in multiplexes despite the fact that people are more susceptible to the coronavirus when congregating indoors.
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Fans of writer/director Christopher Nolan are not strangers to bent time, trippy constructs in physics, or highbrow filmmaking. Unfortunately, all that wizardry can’t make up for the lack of character development and mental gymnastics required to buy into and stick with the story of Tenet.
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In Blackkklansman, a movie with a title that makes it sound like it’s a Mel Brooks high concept farce from the 1970’s, Spike Lee Has dipped back into historical events that began in 1978 to hold the mirror up to the dangerous racial chaos of America in 2018. And it’s no farce. At the same time, both Lee’s film and the book of the same name on which it is based, a memoir by a black undercover police detective, Ron Stallworth, working in Colorado Springs, do create cognitive dissonance. A black man in the Klan? How?
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Based on an outrageous true story, Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” veers wildly between hilarious and harrowing, thrilling and appalling, smart and stylish. Most importantly, the two-time Oscar nominee’s latest “joint,” as Lee calls his films, is undeniably relevant, even though most of the events it chronicles happened 40 years ago.
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Opening with a Civil War scene from Gone With the Wind (1939) and closing with footage from the Charlottesville riots (2017), Spike Lee’s “crazy, outrageous, incredible true story” about Ron Stallworth is both historical and relevant. In the early 1970s when Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) became the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department, he wanted to go undercover. His chance comes when he’s assigned to surreptitiously record a speech by former Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins), a.k.a. African nationalist Kwame Ture.
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Director Spike Lee is not subtle in his approach to targeted topics, nor should he be when he’s tackling blatant
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