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Tribeca 2024: ‘Group Therapy’ Review: Six Comedians Get Honest and Vulnerable About Mental Health | Movies We Texted About
Comedy is one of the great cultural forces. It is, in many ways, the great equalizer. In the hands of a talented performer, comedy speaks truth to power, whether that means mocking our leaders or finding commonality in the human experience. It’s the latter of these that filmmaker Neil Berkeley’s latest documentary, Group Therapy, in which six comedians known for their frank discussion of mental health issues –Mike Birbiglia, Nicole Byer, Gary Gulman, London Hughes, Tig Notaro, and Atsuko Okatsuka– are brought together to speak about the subject in a makeshift group session moderated by Neil Patrick Harris. Link: https://movieswetextedabout.com/group-therapy-review-six-comedians-get-honest-and-vulnerable-about-mental-health/
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Tribeca 2024: Presumed Innocent Updates the 90s Classic With Mixed Results | That Shelf
Where the series falters is in its updates to the story. For fans of the original, some characters are removed or re-positioned. Case in point: there’s no Sandy Sterns in this version (though maybe it’s a good idea not to try to top Raúl Juliá). There are also several red herrings that go nowhere, and while none of these are exactly bad on their own, altogether they make the story feel flabby. This doesn’t even include some of the later changes, one of which is actually a little mind-boggling. If you’ve seen or even heard of the novel or the…
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Tribeca 2024: The Weekend Is a Thrilling Film About the Horrors of Family Dinner | That Shelf
You don’t choose your family. Some of us are blessed with loving homes, and others come from complicated situations. The Weekend, a fun new thriller from Nigeria, features one hell of a complicated situation. Nikya (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) is an orphan, but she’s begun the journey of starting a new family with her fiance, Luc (Bucci Franklin). She is desperate for a family and, after finding out that she is pregnant, pushes Luc to go away for the weekend to visit his family. The problem is that Luc is estranged from said family and hasn’t had any contact with them for many years. It’s clear…
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Star Wars: The Acolyte & Under Paris | Awesome Friday Podcast
Greetings programs! This week on the Awwesome Friday Podcast Matthew and Simon are taking a look at two new streaming things. First we have the new entry in the Star Wars universe, The Acolyte, and following that the new French shark movie Under Paris. It’s a fun episode and we hope you enjoy it! This week our patreon supporters get to hear Simon ask about comic book characters that are better on the page than on the screen, and then in celebration of Under Paris Matthew asks for our top three Shark movies (that aren’t Jaws). All patrons get access…
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The Classics Shelf: Anjelica Huston | That Shelf
The Classics Shelf is an ongoing retrospective of classic cinema produced monthly by writer Bil Antoniou in collaboration with other writers in the That Shelf stable. The theme for June 2024 was the films of Anjelica Huston, which I contributed to with a brief review of her performance in the film The Man from Elysian Fields. There’s only so much that can be done in two scenes in a film, but Huston nails everything about this moment. With only the slightest changes in her face, she ran the gamut from terrified to incredulous before bursting into laughter. Not a cruel…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘Beacon’ Review: A Novel Setting, but A Disappointing Misfire | Movies We Texted About
[…] The first half of the film does a good job of setting up the two lone characters in opposition.Emily is suspicious of Ismael, the lone and lonely man living in this remote place, and Ismael is wary of Emily because of a steadfast belief in the supernatural, going so far as to warn her not to brush her hair for fear of summoning a siren. This back-and-forth of mutual distrust works really well, and in this half of the film, we go back and forth a number of times, presenting how Ismael could be trustworthy or really not. Both actors put in their best work in this half of the movie as…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘Brats’: Andrew McCarthy Looks for Closure | Movies We Texted About
In the mid-1980s, Andrew McCarthy starred in a number of highly successful teen films. You’ve probably heard of at least two of them: St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink. He and several other young actors were positioned at exactly the right time and place to create a cultural moment. Teen stories were smart, popular, honest, and fun in ways they hadn’t been before, and this whole group of actors were starring in most of them. This young cadre of performers, including McCarthy, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy, seemed poised to take over Hollywood. In 1985, journalist David Blum penned an article for New York Magazine titled “Hollywood’s Brat Pack They’re Rob, Emilio,…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘All That We Love’ Offers a Familiar Portrait of Grief and Awkward Family Dynamics | That Shelf
There are few things in life as devastating as the loss of a pet. Pets are members of our family, our companions, and unlike people, pets (dogs especially) always offer their love unconditionally. A loss like this can leave a person reeling, and no matter what our societal norms around them are, they are difficult to get over. All That We Love begins with such a loss. Emma (Margaret Cho) holds and comforts her dog Tanner as he passes. It’s a solemn note to begin on, but it sets up Emma for the chaotic path she will take over the next few…
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‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ Finds a New Galaxy Within the ‘Star Wars’ Universe | Exclaim!
Star Wars has had problems for a while now. The various Disney+ series have been a mixed bag, but one thing they all have in common is that, critically maligned or acclaimed, they all tend to start strong. The problem is that starting strong isn’t enough, and more than a few of the series have fumbled their endings. The other problem is that nearly all the Star Wars series have focused on the same period, set about a decade after The Return of the Jedi, and telling a story about a resurgent empire rebuilding itself under the nose of a naïve, complacent New Republic. They’re nearly all interconnected; they’re…
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Boy Kills World & Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga | Awesome Friday Podcast
Greetings programs! Join us as we dive into Boy Kills World, the new live action cartoon action film starring Bill Skarsgård, and then return with us to the wasteland as we look at George Miller’s latest, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. We have a lot to say about both of these movies and we hope you enjoy the show! Listening Links: This week on your bonus show, we talk about formative but perhaps underseen films from the late 90s, including titles like Last Night and Dark City. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/june-2nd-bonus-105580962
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The Fall Guy & Challengers | Awesome Friday Podcast
Greetings programs! This week on the show, we’re taking a close look at the new Ryan Gosling & Emily Blunt starring, David Leitch-directed ode to stunt work, The Fall Guy. Following that, we’re looking at Luca Guadagnino’s latest Challengers, starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor. Join us! Listening Links: On this week’s Awesome Friday Bonus Round we discuss our favourite directors, concert films, and, briefly, Canadian politics. It’s a blast, I assure you. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/may-26th-bonus-105120607
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‘Atlas’ Movie Review: Another Soulless Netflix Action Movie | Movies We Texted About
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s likely by design. Almost every idea in this film is lifted from a better movie. The mech suits are from Avatar; the AI characters are a mix of the robots from I, Robot, replicants from Blade Runner, and Samantha from Her. The hardened main character is paired up with a character she initially detests but learns to trust, who is straight out of too many movies beginning with counting. All of this might be tolerable if there were some unique hook or excellent performance to keep the viewer interested, but there isn’t in either case. Link: https://movieswetextedabout.com/atlas-movie-review-another-soulless-netflix-action-movie/
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Late Night with the Devil | The LAMBCast
Even if you don’t believe the Box Office report from opening weekend, that the movie made $666,666, you have to admit that’s a clever bit of business. The whole movie is loaded with those kinds of self referential moments, and the guests this week are anxious to join in dissecting them. Sitting down in the guest chairs for this week’s episode are Lisa Leaheey, Nick Rehak and Jason Soto, all from the “Rabbit Hole Podcast Network”, as well as Matthew Simpson of the “Awesome Friday Podcast”. We don’t want to give too much away but everyone was enthusiastic to talk…
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Sweetland Review: A Bittersweet Story About the Difficulty of Change | That Shelf
The town is dying. That’s the start of Christian Sparkes’ new drama Sweetland. It’s not entirely clear why, but the town is metaphorically crumbling. The residents have a chance at government-assisted relocation and job retraining, but the offer is only good if every resident takes it, and Moses Sweetland (Mark Lewis Jones) doesn’t want to. Moses, you see, is a gruff old man. He’s nearly the last of a line so embedded in the town that it’s not clear if the town got its name from his family or vice versa. He has little reason to leave: his whole life has…
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A24 Retrospective – Dark Places (#277) | Contra Zoom
We continue our series going through the entire catalog of A24’s films. On this episode we are looking at 2015’s Dark Places directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner. The film stars Charlize Theron as Libby Day a woman who witnessed her older brother murder her entire family in a satanic ritual as a child, only to now be forced to questioned if that’s what really happened. Joining the show is Matthew Simpson, one half of the Awesome Friday Podcast. Link: https://contrazoompod.com/277-a24-retrospective-dark-places/
I am a Rotten Tomatoes-approved, freelance film & television critic and podcast host from Vancouver, Canada! I am a co-founder of the Cascadia Film & Television Critics Association and a voting member of the International Film Society Critics, Pandora International Critics, and the Online Film & Television Association.
I maintain bylines at Exclaim!, Awesome Friday!, That Shelf, ForReel, Movies We Texted About, KeithLovesMovies, and I can be heard regularly on the Contra Zoom Podcast and The LAMBCast.
