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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 2022

★★★ Watched by IndieWire 03 May 2022 6

Review by David Ehrlich
Slowly, gradually, and then with great enthusiasm, what begins as a staid tale of people hurling CGI at larger pieces of CGI while yammering on about whatever new thing is threatening all existence evolves into something less familiar: A violent, wacky, drag-me-to-several-different-hells at once funhouse of a film that makes good on the reckoning Chiwetel Ejiofor promised at the end of "Doctor Strange" by cutting away the safety net that previous installments of the MCU have tried to pretend wasn’t there.
The Wobblies 1979

Watched by IndieWire 29 Apr 2022

Review by Susannah Gruder
Teeming with rousing folk songs from the picket line and spirited one-liners from union men and women, Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer’s 1979 documentary “The Wobblies” collages together personal impressions from former miners, lumberjacks, stevedores, wheat farmers, silk weavers, and migratory workers — all members of the IWW (International Workers of the World) at the turn of the century — to create a multilayered look at one of the nation’s most radical, and most often overlooked…
Firebird 2021

★★½ Watched by IndieWire 29 Apr 2022

Review by Jude Dry
Not that we needed a reminder, but Russia’s recent human rights violations — while flagrant — are sadly not a new phenomenon. David France’s “Welcome to Chechnya” documented the horrific genocide being waged against LGBTQ people in what is now a Russian Republic, a terrifying sign of what could lay in store for LGBTQ Ukrainians. Taking an altogether different tack, the stately period drama “Firebird” tells the true story of an ill-fated military romance between two men in Soviet-occupied Estonia during the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Anaïs in Love 2021

★★★★ Watched by IndieWire 29 Apr 2022

Review by David Ehrlich
Sometimes all you need to get a movie — and maybe even to love it — is an opening shot of a willowy young woman sprinting down the sidewalks of Paris with a crushed bouquet of flowers under her arm while a sun-shower of classical piano music sprinkles over the soundtrack at twice the pace of her footsteps. Much like its harried blithe spirit of a heroine (Anaïs Demoustier, as captivating here as Renate Reinsve was in Joachim Trier’s similarly headstrong “The Worst Person in the World,” and twice as restless), Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love” simply refuses to waste any time.
Emily the Criminal 2022

★★★★½ Added by IndieWire 1

Review by Kate Erbland
On the occasion of their second meeting, Youcef (Theo Rossi) asks Emily (Aubrey Plaza) the question on everyone’s mind: “You can’t make money another way?” Emily, a one-time art student trapped in a series of dead-end jobs because of her criminal past and growing debt, is bruised and bleeding, breathless from pulling off a daring (and maybe even dumb) crime for Youcef, and can only fire back, “You can’t make another way?” Well, no, neither of…
Spider-Man: No Way Home 2021

★★★ Added by IndieWire 2

Review by Kate Erbland
There’s little question that diving deep into the psyches of superheroes can render some dark finds (hell, Batman has turned that into a signature move over the course of numerous film franchises and television series, and that’s just one bat-eared dude), but the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s treatment of the state of young Spider-Man’s (Tom Holland) soul has continually added fresh dimension to an ever-expanding franchise. Spidey has always been an emotional dude — baseline biographical bits…
The Matrix Resurrections 2021

★★★★½ Added by IndieWire 2

Review by David Ehrlich
It’s fitting — maybe even fate — that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” should be the biggest and virtually only movie in the world on the week that “The Matrix Resurrections” is released. Both are mega-budget, meta sequels that feed on our collective familiarity with their respective franchises. One is a poison, the other its antidote.
One is a safe plastic monument to the solipsism of today’s studio cinema; an orgiastic celebration of how studio filmmaking has…
Licorice Pizza 2021

★★★★★ Added by IndieWire 2

Review by David Ehrlich
Gary Valentine is 15 going on 30, Alana Kane is “25” but in air quotes that basically allow her to be whatever it might say on her eventual dream ticket out of Encino, and they first cross paths on a pale 1973 morning in the San Fernando Valley at a strange moment in history when Old Hollywood and New Hollywood have started to overlap. Bing Crosby is still alive even though Jim Morrison is already dead,…
Finch 2021

★★★½ Added by IndieWire

Review by David Ehrlich
Even now, after surviving for more than 100 years and almost as many supposed deaths, the movies are still full of surprises. I submit to you the following as further proof of that phenomenon: At a time when feature-length sci-fi is dominated by franchise spectacle, someone made a tender, quiet, and terrifically affecting post-apocalyptic drama in which Tom Hanks plays a dying engineer named Finch Weinberg who builds a robot to care for his rescue dog…
A Man Named Scott 2021

★★ Added by IndieWire 14

Review by Jude Dry
Rarely do music documentaries transcend the conventional biopic form to appeal beyond its subject’s existing fan base, but one hopes a filmmaker would at least attempt to surpass mere hagiography. When the subject is also the executive producer, however, all bets at objectivity are off. The subject in this case is Kid Cudi (neé Scott Miscudi), the risk-taking alternative hiphop artist who upended the music industry with his self-released single “Day ‘N’ Night” in 2009, also…
Eternals 2021

★★½ Added by IndieWire 3

Review by David Ehrlich
Alexander the Great may have wept when he found himself with no more worlds to conquer, but super-producer Kevin Feige — having usurped every screen on Earth and reshaped the global entertainment landscape in his own image — merely straightened his baseball cap and announced that it was time to begin the next phase of his crusade. He knew there were more planets to rule, more parallel dimensions to explore, and more revenue streams for Disney…
The Harder They Fall 2021

★★★½ Added by IndieWire

Review by David Ehrlich
Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall” is a dynamite Black Western that doesn’t waste any time putting its cards on the table. “While the events of this story are fictional…” reads the opening scrawl, “These. People. Existed.” The point couldn’t be clearer: This tense, propulsive, and ultra-glossy Netflix oater might lay a thick new Jay-Z track over the opening credits (of a film that he also produced) and assemble an Avengers-worthy team of obscure Black icons…

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