On the story level, "Swapped" is quite basic, but there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s like a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, yet on that score it’s visually ravishing and quite touching.
The media has done a good job of talking about what’s not in “Michael.” I refer, of course, to the accusations of child sexual abuse that dogged Michael Jackson from 1993 until the day he died (and, of course, they didn’t stop then). The media has done a far less good job of talking about […]
"Deep Water," which is very much a neo-'70s disaster film. should have been called "Airplane Crash into a Sea of Jaws." As it stands, the word in the film’s generic title that echoes that earlier Harlin movie is more than a little ironic, since "deep" is the exact word to describe what Renny Harlin’s movies are not. They are shallow. They are dramatically flat. They do not have interesting characters even on a schlock B-movie level. As a director, he has a sixth sense for how to reduce actors to walking slabs of pulp.
if you zero in on what’s routine about "Michael" or what the movie leaves out, you may miss the compelling urgency of what it gets in: Michael Jackson’s journey to become himself by freeing himself from the past. I think audiences are going to embrace that journey, and "Michael" itself, in a major way.
In "Everyone Is Lying to You for Money," McKenzie cuts through reams of misinformation and conducts unshowy but confrontational interviews with finance players who are famous and powerful. (He also talks to a lot of people who are not.) He chases the story of cryptocurrency and gets to the bottom of it with such muckraking zeal that by the end of the film I was convinced he should become a politician.