‘Malcolm & Marie’ Review: A Promising Premise With Disappointing Results
Sam Levinson's latest film can't keep up with the excellence of its performances.

Sam Levinson's latest film can't keep up with the excellence of its performances.
Stand and Deliver is an inspirational classic from 1988 starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante, and his class of rag tag students in East Los Angeles. It’s the story of how a new teacher shows a motley group of students in the inner city with backgrounds as gang members, dishwashers, and mechanics — the power of self-determination. He teaches the teenagers to believe in themselves through algebra and calculus.
I think these messages and the way they are presented in this small-town in Texas are increasingly more important as the internet/ social media becomes more and more critical and judgemental every day. Love yourself today and every day because as Ru Paul always says: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?”
“To be universal, you have to get specific”: while the film does not attempt to provoke discussions about queerness or race, those watching closely may find something resonant in Sorrentino’s love letter to the Naples of his youth.
A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.
Telling a story about the French and Indian Wars from the perspective of the British prioritizes the perspective of the colonizers.