Browsing: review

Early in “Queen at Sea,” there’s a sex scene. It’s brief and shows little, but the fleeting moment will inform everything that happens in writer-director Lance Hammer’s crushing second feature. This movie about consent and dementia — and ultimately, far much more — hinges on a questionable act that provokes a hasty emotional reaction. In…

We’re past due for dystopian storytelling to train its lens on a creature in the here and now, one whose very survival speaks to consequential global change. Take the ice-dependent polar bear, rapidly losing its food-sustaining habitat and having to perilously adapt by nudging further and further into human spaces. And yet, as the moody,…

Documentary filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin specialize in capturing what no one else has done before, and when it comes to climbing docs, they’ve been at the summit since “Meru” and the Oscar-winning “Free Solo.” Now, with “Everest: The Other Side,” they’ve made their most visceral, vertigo-inducing experience yet — in Imax, no…

A football game in the middle of a war sounds as high concept as movies get. And yet Peter Berg’s Netflix epic “The Mosquito Bowl” is based on a scrimmage that really happened in the Pacific theater during World War II, when two Marine regiments squared off on Guadalcanal Beach on Christmas Eve of 1944.…

The pain of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is personalized in Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans’ straightforward documentary about a murder that remains unsolved 41 years later. “Who Killed Alex Odeh?” chronicles the death of a Palestinian American community leader in Santa Ana from a tripwire bomb, which prompted an FBI investigation that went nowhere. Unspooling…

It takes frighteningly little to destroy a happy family. So much love, so much joy, so much shared history can be erased by one terrible act or the discovery of something rotten that had been festering undetected. Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer explores the unimaginable in “Gentle Monster,” in which a celebrated concert pianist learns that…

“Christmas at the Kringles” is a Christmas-themed horror movie getting released on Halloween weekend but largely set on Valentine’s Day, if that gives you any indication of the identity crisis this confused project is going through. Scripted by Zack Imbrogno and directed by Kevin Lewis, it should just be content to be a comedy —…

Memorable movies are still being made on the streets of Los Angeles — although Max DeFalco’s rakish indie “Ten Will” isn’t going to get on any tourist’s map to the stars. Filmed without permits for approximately the cost of a used car, it’s a cringe comedy about a newly released convict, Tennessee Williams (Mikul Robins),…

“Clayface” is a talky DC comic-book thriller about a hotshot actor named Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) who loses his good looks, then regains them along with the ability to mutate into anyone he pleases. The movie is also a shape-shifter. Directed by James Watkins from a script by Mike Flanagan (creator of the new…

The brilliant Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong is a suffering protagonist’s best friend, exploring the buried pain in people like no other filmmaker. But he’s never been so delicately novelistic, and so accessibly human, as with his latest movie, “Possible Love,” even when Lee is spinning the enigmatic vibes he’s known for. A marriage story weighty…