Using his previous film, the embellished period thriller Operation Avalanche, as a stepping stone towards his latest feature, Canadian renegade Matt Johnson takes another crack at the biopic genre with BlackBerry. Director Johnson (co-writing with frequent collaborator/producer Matthew Miller) chronicles the rise and fall of the titular game-changing portable device that allowed users online access and exclusive text-based communication.
Following in the same footsteps as Clint Eastwood’s maligned biopic The 15:17 to Paris, Tom Waller’s Cave Rescue is a dramatic thriller about the 2018 real-life mission to save a team of young Thai soccer players. Like Eastwood’s movie, it stars some of the actual people who were key players in the recovery. There isn’t much build up to the incident in Cave Rescue, which separates it from The 15:17 to Paris. Waller’s movie is…
The White Crow, written by Oscar nominee David Hare (The Reader) and directed by Harry Potter actor Ralph Fiennes, goes against the usual conventions of a biopic.
I’ve always wanted to know more about the late Dr. John Sarno and his psychological practice ever since Howard Stern praised him for getting rid of his severe back pain. Other celebrities who endorse Sarno include Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David, former 20/20 reporter John Stossel, and Bored to Death creator Jonathan Ames.
The works of people like Norman McLaren (Pas de Deux, Ballet Adagio, Narcissus) and Wim Wenders (Pina) have shown that ballet can be useful subject matter for beautiful cinema. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, this pleasurable quality somehow cannot find its way into documentaries. The most recent example of this failure to showcase ballet in the genre is A Ballerina’s Tale, Nelson George’s portrait of noted ballerina Misty Copeland – the first African-American woman to be…
