One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty.
While “Oh. What. Fun” has an excellent director, Michael Showalter, who also co-scripted, some nice music, and top performers, including Danielle Brooks as a delivery driver Claire meets on the road, and the exquisitely lovely Havana Rose Liu, very appealing as Jeanne’s daughter, it keeps undermining our sympathy with off-kilter stakes and inert efforts at humor.
In Your Dreams is an exciting, imaginative, and sometimes funny adventure story about a sister and brother who try to use their dreams to change their reality. But it is also a wise and touching story about the challenges of family and of change.
It is like watching a flower bloom, delicately and compassionately portrayed by writer/director Tommy Dorfman and a beautiful performance by Fogelmanis.
The voice talent and character design are second-tier, and there are too many characters. But the action scenes are exciting, and the pacing, along with its reassuring humor and some nice character arcs, makes it a mildly appealing watch.
The Librarians is a documentary about the hysterical, unfounded, personal, and sometimes violent attacks on librarians. It is also about their unwavering commitment to making facts, literature, and inspiration available to anyone.
We experience the sharp pain of a sad loss, a young father and a beloved neighbor and friend. But the larger story, the one about the failure of the Israeli military to respond quickly, about the normalization of having to have a safe room in every home, about the culture of a country where every citizen serves in the military, and about the return to Murrow’s perceptive warning 70 years ago is what we will carry with us.
The Summer Book is a haiku of a movie, conveying profound thoughts about time, memory, loss, and nature through a simplified, meditative, cinematic language of exquisite images and gentle music.
Lurie is especially good at the narrative and character elements of the practice and game scenes, using them to move the story forward and build to the kind of resolution we look for in underdog sports stories with compelling emotional stakes.
