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Samaritan, Me Time, Three Thousand Years of Longing and more
Breaking ***
Maybe the Sundance-movie equivalent of “comfort food” is a drama where the narrative bones are sturdy, the central performances are engrossing and the sociopolitical subtext is all just right there in the text. Director Abi Damaris Corbin—who co-wrote the script with Kwame Kwei-Armah—tells the fact-based story of Brian Brown Easley (John Boyega), a Marine Iraq veteran with mental-health issues who holds up a bank in Marietta, Ga., entirely to get attention for the fact that his VA disability check was garnished.
Beast **
Look, I’m all for giving emotional subtext to a stalked-by-a-giant-lion movie, but at a certain point, you need to deliver more on being a stalked-by-a-giant-lion movie. Idris Elba plays Nate Samuels, an American doctor who takes his two teenage daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries) to visit an old friend (Sharlto Copley) on a South African nature preserve, shortly after the passing of the girls’ mother.
Fall, Mack & Rita, Emily the Criminal, Secret Headquarters and more.
13: The Musical **
It will always be baffling when a film adaptation of a source material—book, play, etc.—chooses to abandon the very concept that made it original, and worth adapting in the first place. This version of the 2008 Broadway show tells the story of Evan Goldman (Eli Golden), a Jewish adolescent who’s forced to move with his mom from New York to Indiana, just as he’s preparing for his bar mitzvah.
Bullet Train, Luck, Thirteen Lives, Prey, I Love My Dad and more
Bullet Train **
It has been nearly 30 years since cinemas were bursting with Tarantino copycats, convinced that motor-mouthed underworld types + plenty of violence = $$$ and an unlimited cachet of cool. It wasn’t true then, and it still isn’t. Director David Leitch (Deadpool 2) and screenwriter Zak Olkewicz adapt Kōtarō Isaka’s novel set on a Tokyo-to-Kyoto high-speed train where several characters—a conscientious snatch-and-grab man (Brad Pitt); a pair of hired killers (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry); a mysterious young woman (Joey King)—are among those wreaking havoc over a briefcase full of cash, and its connection to a scary crime boss.
Co-writer/star Jeremy Rishe and the long road toward the local premiere
For any creative work, it can be a long road to getting that work from your head out into the world. For Jeremy Rishe and the team behind the feature film Jewtah, it feels particularly long.
