Excerpt: Light has too many characters and too many subplots to sustain its throughline momentum, making for an intermittently entertaining but ultimately tedious experience.
Excerpt: Blinded by the Light has a lot on its mind — for better and worse. Thanks to some inventive musical staging of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest hits like “Dancing in the Dark” and “Born to Run,” director Gurinder Chadha delivers a crowd-pleasing and uplifting musical romp.
Excerpt: What easily could have been a simple feel-good story takes a touching and timely approach in exploring the experience of immigrants, identity, and culture clash.
Excerpt: Seriously adorkable teen is saved, in 1987, by the rock poetry of Bruce Springsteen. The Boss is still relevant today, as is, alas, the harsh political and economic setting of Thatcher’s Britain.
Excerpt: Springsteen’s words are universal. Director Gurinder Chadha, known for feel-good stories where minority teenagers chase dreams reserved for other ethnicities and social classes, creates a coming-of-age story anybody can identify with and celebrates the power of music to motivate and push one to reach for things long thought unattainable.
Excerpt: Hell no, you don’t have to be a superfan of Springsteen to enjoy Blinded by the Light, but it sure helps. Even if The Boss is not your ideal vibe, the sprightly emotions on-screen cannot help but target and trigger your own matching passionate feelings for whatever you revere.
Excerpt: the book’s comedic, misanthropic vitriol has been toned down in favor of the sweet mother-daughter story and lack-of-artistic-outlet character study at its heart.
Excerpt: Cate Blanchett can make anything watchable, and this is no exception. However, it is easily a disappointment coming from a filmmaker as talented as Richard Linklater.
Excerpt: Cowriter/director Gene Stupnitsky resists easy gross-out gags, instead guiding his three young stars into distinct performances, the comedy derived from their age and innocence.
Excerpt: One of the best comedies you’ll see this year. A raunchy yet sweet film that avoids some of the pitfalls that would come to lesser esamples of the genre.
Excerpt: Much more sweet than raunchy, and surprisingly innocent. Genuinely kind to its young protagonists as they try to navigate a culture that doesn’t much care to protect them from growing up too soon.
Excerpt: They have just enough information to be dangerous – these “tween” misunderstandings set up awkward episodes, punchy one-liners, and propel an adventure that will test their friendship through threats of grounding, bodily harm, and public humiliation.
Excerpt: Rather than offering a brutal plan to corrupt and shatter the democratic process, The Parallax View offers what we see as another facet of government’s perpetual background drama, real power’s theatrical apparatus, planting seeds or trimming branches where needed.
Excerpt: a horrifying look at state sanctioned kidnapping and murder and human rights violations against women whose effects are still being felt by families today even as they defend the practice.
Excerpt: While Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is plenty good just as a horror film for youngsters, it’s the emotional and political undertones that will linger with you long after seeing the film.
Excerpt: Jumping, gasping, and freaking out are fun when presented in the right spirit, with a playful sense of mischievousness. This movie has the right spirit.
Excerpt: Aldis Hodge’s fine performance has been done a disservice with pedestrian filmmaking…Brian Banks deserved better, not only from the American justice system, but from this paint-by-the-numbers film.
Excerpt: There’s plenty injustice here to enrage the thinking, feeling citizen, but despite a passionate performance by charismatic Aldis Hodge, this docudrama is nowhere near incensed enough on his behalf.
Excerpt: In a perverse way, this movie is pretty timely with its white males shaken when strong women, including one of color, prove themselves, usurping their power.
Excerpt: What has all the ingredients for a juicy, female-empowered crime drama, complete with an accomplished cast and superior production design, emerges as a God-awful mess of mish-mashed scenes, choppy pacing, and downright laughable attempts to shock and surprise.
Excerpt: Lane builds an entertaining and thought provoking case for The Satanic Temple. I know I was won over, enthusiastically so, but…be aware that these folks, while definitely edgy individualists, should not be confused with the Church of Satan
Excerpt: Hilarious, provocative look at the wonderfully profane rebels of the culture wars who, with tongue in cheek but seriously, too, are trolling fundie-Christian America with their delicious blasphemies.
Excerpt: [Lane’s] film is a platform to cut through the laughter and protests by Christian celebrities that galvanize their ranks when it should expose the hate and entitlement at their back.
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