Movies

Beautiful mysteries abound in “Suburban Birds,” a sharp and beguiling debut feature from the Chinese director Qiu Sheng. It begins as the story of a group of engineers working on the outskirts of a rapidly growing city, taking measurements and assessing the terrain. Before long the movie takes a left turn and sets their narrative in delicate collision with another: a lovely portrait of young children at play, their games and adventures initially seeming to unfold in an earlier time frame. … [Read more...] about Critic’s Choice: ‘Suburban Birds,’ Qiu Sheng’s lovely debut, has its L.A. premiere

The fragility and fallibility of history is on display in the illuminating documentary “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché,” directed by Pamela B. Green. Early in the film, Green asks a host of Hollywood elites — directors, producers, writers — if they’ve ever heard of Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female film director. Almost uniformly, they respond in the negative, and Green’s film, produced and narrated by Jodie Foster, dives deep into the frustrating mystery of why Guy-Blaché has been nearly erased from film history, while also seeking to correct the record. … [Read more...] about Review: ‘Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’ sheds light on the first female film director

By Rick Bentley Tribune News Service Thu., April 18, 2019 LOS ANGELES—It’s taken Linda Cardellini almost a quarter of a century, but she’s finally returned to the genre that helped launch her professional acting career. The initial starring role on television for the star of The Curse of La Llorona was in the series Bone Chillers. There’s no way the projects could be any different, as the TV show dealt with high school students battling a wide array of monsters, while her new feature film is based on a well-known Latin American legend. The reason for jumping back into horror has to do with a trend that emerged in her recent acting roles. In the films Green Book, Daddy’s Home 2, The Founder and even the action-packed Avengers: Age of Ultron, Cardellini was cast to play a wife. She quickly stresses they were all lovely roles, but she wanted a change. “What was great about being cast in La Llorona was to get a role where I could stand on … [Read more...] about Linda Cardellini pleased to stop being someone’s wife in The Curse of La Llorona

The other reason is of all the social media platforms, I feel that Twitter has done the worst job of trying to rein in bullying, misogyny, neo-Nazism. I feel it’s a part of their business model. The nastiness of Twitter is what people like about it. I didn’t like the fact that I was in anyway contributing to that. … [Read more...] about Satirist Andy Borowitz: ‘Truth is ridiculous’ in the age of Trump, but also essential