By: Trevor Chartrand Director Ethan Hawke’s country music biopic Blaze leaves a lot to be desired – with a lot of atmosphere and not much narrative, this film is meandering and weak. To some, the film could perhaps be considered an abstract poem, akin to the music stylings of the late Blaze Foley, which I suppose should be commendable. However, given the more obscure nature of this film’s subject, the storytelling gaps will leave audiences…
Björn Borg, a mannered enigma, and John McEnroe, a hot head with a brash reputation, developed a public rivalry with each other based on their differences in athletic gameplay and sportsmanship. However, if you’re looking for a explanatory grasp on their relationship, you won’t find it in Borg vs. McEnroe. The film itself is adequate by biopic and sport movie standards – merely on its surface – but its focus is more targeted on individual arcs.
I Can Only Imagine is, more or less, about the act of forgiveness. And just like that personal journey, this movie starts out tough before it starts feeling better for everyone.
By: Jessica Goddard Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a sappy, sweet, and rich examination of the relationship between Oscar winner Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening) and aspiring actor Peter Turner (Jamie Bell), some thirty years her junior. It’s a movie about a lot of things; their weird but earnest age gap romance, the eccentric persona of the former film starlet, the panic spiral associated with aging, the cutthroat nature of showbiz.
Stephanie Di Giusto’s The Dancer is one of the more interesting biopics in recent memory. It’s by the book in terms of the genre’s formula and narrative structure but Di Giusto finds another way to look at her film’s biographical material.
By: Jessica Goddard From the title to the opening scene to the whole conflict at its core, Goodbye Christopher Robin is a movie determined to make you rethink the context in which A.A. Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) wrote the beloved Winnie the Pooh stories (then Winnie-the-Pooh). There’s nothing wrong, in theory, with a biopic about A. A. Milne, but why this movie chooses to focus on A. A. Milne being a bad father who apparently ruined his…
