Roman (Koné Bakary), a young new arrival at a violent prison, anchors Philippe Lacôte’s“Night of the Kings.” We see the action through his eyes, as he faces an unruly bunch of prison mates.

Julie Delpy’s “My Zoe” is a risky endeavour for the 51-year-old actress-writer-director. It splashes through various different genres while simultaneously asking the viewer to follow along its main protagonist’s morally-controversial endeavours.

Four years in the making, here’s the most essential Notorious B.I.G documentary that exists right now and it hasn’t even been released yet. Netflix unveiled the trailer for “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” last night, it’ll be available to stream on March 1st, , but I managed to get a sneak peek.

I had seen an early version of Nicolas Jarecki‘s Crisis (Quiver, 2.26) back in early 2020. Its original title at the time went by “Dreamland.” Production on the film had wrapped up in early 2019, but I’m not too sure what happened in the ensuing two years after that. It seems to have been swept up in some kind of unconfirmed post-production hell.

I kept hearing from various people about how pleasantly surprised they were by Amazon original “Greenland.”

“Test Pattern,” Shatara Michelle Ford’s directorial feature debut, deals with sexual assault in slight but effective ways. It’s a nano-budgeted indie that, despite some amateur-esque production values, manages to do so much with so little.

Woody Allen may be guilty of child molestation. Or he may not be. However, making a movie as irresponsibly one-sided as Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick’s “Ronan v Farrow” doesn’t help anybody, except maybe Mia Farrow. In it, Farrow is portrayed as an angel, and Allen as a monster. “Allen vs. Farrow” is not a documentary. It’s a hit job.

Lee Daniels has given us a towering disappointment with “The United States vs Billie Holiday.” Tackling the drug-fueled days of the legendary jazz singer, Daniels’ treatise on the final years of the legend’s life can only be the bomb that it is by being so ambitiously and emotionally conceived — the writer-director of “Precious” and “The Paper Boy” gloriously swings for the fence and misses. The result is damn-near unwatchable.

It hasn’t been the best year for French cinema. With a canceled Cannes Film Festival, many of the supposed quality French films skipped 2020, hopeful that they will premiere on the Croisette this coming May.

Actress Robin Wright, who previously directed 10 episodes of “House of Cards,” premiered her feature-directing debut “Land” last month at the all-digital Sundance Film Festival. Wright, who also wrote the screenplay, stars as Edee, a grieving woman who moves to the mountains “to get away from people.” She’s still haunted by the tragic deaths of her husband and child and believes that leaving the city life behind will help her healing process.

A24 is now making their Best Picture Oscar contender “Minari” available via VOD platforms. This is a repost of my review from Sundance 2020 dated 02.02.20:

Director-essayist Rodney Ascher loves to be obsessed with his subject matter. His documentaries don’t veer towards the conspiratorial, they are conspiratorial. It can be an infectious experience, as you can easily join him down the rabbit hole while taking in his endless theories.

Here is a self-serious serial killer thriller that fees like it was made in the ‘90s. The fact that the first draft for writer-director John Lee Hancock’s “The Little Things” was written in 1993, only reinforces how the resulting film feels old, cliched and damn-near redundant.

It felt like watching paint dry as I screened director Gianfranco Rosi‘s “Notturno” during this past September’s digital edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. Featuring multiple points of view, Rosi’s film deals with the Middle East and the people that live there during the war.