
Adaptation of cowboy comic-book El Payo, #2 in a series.
The Summer I Turned Pretty series adapts the beloved trilogy into a bingeworthy TV show and introduces a new generation to Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
Movies also have the ability to make the audience think deeper about an issue that plagues society. "Blindspotting" does that without shying away from the intense reality of police brutality and racial discrimination.
Another uneven "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" redux that says nothing novel about its subject matter.
With The Father, writer-director Florian Zeller- who wrote and developed the play upon which the film is based- pulls no punches as he confidently makes every effort to put the audience in the mind of someone whose grip on reality has all but vanished. It’s a dazzling testament to Zeller’s abilities as a director as he makes his first transition from stage to film appear as if he’s been working behind a camera his entire career. The dialogue he fashions with co-writer Christopher Hampton, along with the work of production designers Peter Francis and Cathy Featherstone, collectively makes the downward spiral of dementia startlingly tangible, doing so in a way that can be comprehended by everyone except the person it directly affects.