Scraps on Cinema

In the city of Puebla, Mexico around the turn of this century, an aspiring chef named Iván (Armando Espitia) finds his culinary degree counts for little after a year in the scrub room of a small diner. Passed over for a position in the kitchen in favor of the boss's nephew, he is told that he lacks patience, and should feel grateful that he even has a job. Going nowhere fast, he struggles to keep in touch with his mother, who takes care of his terminally ill father, and to stay in the good graces of his estranged girlfriend, who maintains sole custody over their son. What's more, Iván is a homosexual, and the increasing implausibility of his protecting this secret in a society of entrenched patriarchal, cultural conservatism only compounds upon his precarious social and interpersonal position. One night, Iván and his best friend Sandra (comedian Michelle Rodríguez, not to be confused with the American actor) decide to get wrecked at a new gay bar. It's there that he meets G...

On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a bartender named Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) tells four local children a fairy tale of New York: Once upon a time, in the historically Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan at the height of summer, a younger Usnavi is on the verge of leaving his bodega  behind to return to the D.R., intent on reclaiming and reviving his late father's business (apparently destroyed in Hurricane Maria). With three days to settle his affairs, he finds that his little cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), being too young to have "island memories," has no interest in leaving his own island behind. For what it's worth, the undocumented teenager, having come of age in the Obama era, is a blooming activist, more interested in joining the youthful phalanx against socio-economic injustice than in retreating into nostalgia for the Old World. The shy Usnavi also has his eyes set on the lovely Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), whose own near-term dreams ...

The American commercial film industry as it exists today is a slouching behemoth that seems to exist solely to throw up the most vivid, self-satirizing farces at its own expense, distilling not just in economic practice, but also in narrative and spectacle, the psychotic and parasitic obesity of late-stage capitalism. Without rival, the most entertaining of these farces in the last ten years has  to have been Universal Picture's "Dark Universe" project, a proposed franchise of tentpole blockbusters that would have rebooted the studio's roster of classic monster I.P.s as interconnected serials in the vein of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The misguided commitment of taking decades-old "B" movie staples based on century-old romanticist literature, and trying to revive them as slightly more gothic variations on standard action-adventure fare, obviously goes back slightly further, particularly to the success of Stephen Sommers' The Mummy  and The Mum...

A work of historical fiction set amid the 1984 U.S. presidential election, The Last Thing He Wanted is adapted by director Dee Rees and co-writer Marco Villalobos from the 1996 Joan Didion novel of the same name. It sees a sidelined, muckraking journalist (Anne Hathaway) abdicating the campaign trail in order to help her gun-running father (Willem Dafoe) out of a jam. In the process, she's marooned in Costa Rica, and runs afoul with the various clandestine parties in the American empire's subversive, reactionary missions in the southern hemisphere. The juxtaposition of high melodrama and historical intrigue pushes the film's already convoluted plot to ludicrous extremes. But that manner of its dramatization is also the only interesting thing about the latest from Rees, her previous films being  Pariah  (2011), Bessie  (2015), and Mudbound  (2017, also distributed through Netflix). All of these films are far more narratively straightforward, so Rees' expe...

For every prestige picture or blockbuster that swallows up the discourse on diversity and representation in the commercial film industry, there's an un-bespoken retinue of also-rans made by those who are just humbly hecking out their filmmaking careers. Stella Meghie, a Canadian-born writer-director, has three pictures already under her belt, her best yet known being the young-adult romantic drama Everything, Everything  (2017). Her latest is  The Photograph , another romance, this one starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield as a formulaic pair of professional urban middle-class lovers whose brief fire risks being snuffed out by the calls of career opportunity and their  own personally guarded natures. Both of them photographers, the archivist Mae and the journalist Michael's bittersweet love affair is juxtaposed with the story of Mae's late mother, a photographer in her own right, whose own ambition and drive tragically pull her away from closeness, both as...

Let's just take a moment to acknowledge the obvious: As far as these major studio superhero movies go, the production and cinematography on display in Birds of Prey  continues the comparably impressive streak in Warner Bros.' catalogue. It's not as oddly evocative as your Joker , or as operatic as your Batman v Superman  - but it is far and away a perfect synthesis of cynical brand tie-in wallpaper and prestige film theatricality. It's a reminder that these cape-man serials, originally on Hollywood's B-list, are now the equivalent of its great musicals events, or its prestige historical and Biblical epics. It's frankly disappointing, then, when the filmmakers paper over the musical potential they broach. A femdom reproduction of the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number from Gentlemen Wear Blondes  will get short-circuited as just another one of crazy clown lady Harley Quinn's traumatic inserts. A similarly marquee-lit, "POSTMO...

Released in 2003 to modest success, Bad Boys II  seemingly only attained a kind of special infamy in pop culture and pop culture discourse after British comedy darling Edgar Wright payed homage to it with his 2007 film  Hot Fuzz . Before that, it was the first box office misfire in director Michael Bay's career. His previous frenetically maximalist action films --  The Rock  (1996), Armageddon  (1998), Pearl Harbor  (2001) -- had all done gangbusters. Bad Boys II  was the first financial disappointment from the old new bad boy of the Hollywood 90's and his frequent producing partner, Jerry Bruckheimer. When Bay's follow-up, the Ewan McGregor-Scarlett Johansson sci-fi romance The Island  (2005), also bit the monetary dust, to many of the commercial film industry's trade journalists and reviewers and financiers, it must have seemed like the light of the blockbuster wunderkind  had faded with the rather brief but peak period where his cinem...