It is, to put it charitably, a formula. There’s this Small-Town Kid from a working-class background who, despite a lack of know-how or means has Very Big Dreams, and while no one Believes In Her, just maybe, with the help of a Unlikely Mentor,…
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“I have all these feelings wrapped up inside of me. I just don’t have anyone I can trust my feelings with.” The mysteries of female adolescence are explored with concentrated poignancy in the short How Does It Start, as a curious twelve-year-old girl comes…
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A vacationing family is terrorized by doppelgangers in Jordan Peele’s sophomore outing Us, a tense thriller featuring a high-bar performance from star Lupita Nyong’o and Peele’s signature blend of comedy, terror and social allegory that, for a while at least, proves an enjoyable ride. Peele,…
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She’s not exactly looking for love, but she’s open to it. And while she’s not quite lonely, no one in her life seems to have much use for her. She spends most of her time alone, but as she sees it, that’s not necessarily…
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Love, in Michael Glover Smith’s buoyant roundelay Rendezvous in Chicago, doesn’t come easy for a handful of the city’s paramours, but when it does—it’s a treat for them, and us. In a sixty-nine-minute ensemble romantic comedy charting three couples meeting, committing and splitting, Smith…
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It would be difficult to overestimate the impact that Richard Dreyfuss has had on American culture, his sort of whip-smart, articulate neuroses and acute attention to, as he puts it, inner heroics, a staple of his now canonized portraits in a series of seminal…
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Julia Roberts pulls out all the stops in a career high performance—one that reminds us how much empathy we can have for an actor we hold dear—in Ben is Back, a searing look at the bond between a mother and son over 24-hours of…
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