Scraps on Cinema

Over-indulgently heralded in its opening titles as "A Cinematic Adaptation of the Chivalric Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  by Anonymous," writer-director David Lowery's latest film sees Sir Gawain of Arthurian legend portrayed by Dev Patel as a brash and intemperate youth to whom we are introduced in a brothel, cavorting with an unnamed prostitute played by Alicia Vikander. This, in stark contrast to the guileless exemplar of courtly virtue presented in the 14-century poem on which the movie is based. Our story begins on Christmas Day. Attending a celebratory feast at the Round Table, Gawain is summoned to the side of his aunt and uncle, Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie) and King Arthur (Sean Harris), who kindly chastise him for having no tales to tell of his own adventures, what with medieval courts being quite obsessed with tales of adventure, tests of mettle and virtue, quests for honor and all that. Opportunistically, Gawain's mother (Sarita Choudhury) - who...

Living in the unincorporated wilderness of Oregon, Rob (Nicolas Cage) makes money foraging for truffles, a valued commodity among the cosmopolitan restauranteurs of Portland. When Rob's sole companion, a reliable truffle pig, is stolen in the dead of night, he enlists his millennial buyer Amir (Alex Wolff) to help him find it. When it was first announced in the fall of 2019 that Nicolas Cage had been cast in a dramatic saga concerning one man's search for his favored animal, the snickering that what would emerge would be more or less " John Wick , but with a pig" was almost unavoidable. Through a combination of poor financial decision-making as well as his own creative eccentricities, Cage has certainly found himself headlining many a low-budget, gonzo genre flick, further cultivating his reputation as the United States' premiere cult actor. Even the trailers for Pig , a first feature for writer-director Michael Sarnoski, are calibrated to play up an understated, ...

A single, magical day in Los Angeles: Tyris (Tyris Winter), a homeless gay teenager, trolls the streets looking for a restaurant that still serves cheeseburgers; Marquesha (Marquesha Babers) struggles to put her New Age therapist's advice into practice; a rap duo (Bryce Banks and Austin Antoine) catch a lucky break when a local music producer happens to hear them performing outside a medical marijuana dispensary; Sophia (Maia Mayor) stalks her ex-boyfriend and who she believes to be his new lover. We become acquainted with these and other young voices in et cetera -fashion. Some of them only appear in what amounts to a sketch or vignette. Others, like the above-listed, chart a course across the larger narrative, hyperlinked to the rest by chance encounters. All of them are writers and stars of Summertime , directed by Carlos López Estrada. Estrada's debut feature was Blindspotting , an urban drama written by and starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, released in the summer of ...

It's just another spring day serving fast food for one "Zola" (Taylour Paige), a 19-year-old black girl who lives with her boyfriend in the Chicago 'burbs and, on occasion, makes much better money moonlighting as a stripper. But this is also one of those days where the Fates conspire; one of those days that happen all the time and never at all; one of those days that, as Philip Roth wrote, stupefies, sickens, infuriates, and embarrasses the imagination of any novelist. Today is the day that Zola meets Stefani. There's no point in proceeding with this synopsis without acknowledging the unorthodox and novel source of Zola  (stylized as " @Zola" ), director Janicza Bravo's sophomore feature film, co-written with playwright Jeremy O. Harris. Adapting a 148-part series of tweets by the real life Aziah "Zola" King - who is credited as an executive producer and consulted on the film's production - the filmmakers make no bones about amplifying ...