"The Truffle Hunters," as the title suggests, features men - mostly over the age of 80 - who have made a living throughout the countryside of Italy hunting truffles...delicious and incredibly rare fungi that grow below the surface of the Earth and that have incredible value to high-end food connoisseurs.
What the title doesn't tell you, is that it is a movie for dog-lovers, and beneath its surface - just like truffles themselves - there is rich complexity. Also like truffles, this small documentary film is worth the search for what you'll gain in the act of the discovery.
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Director Alexandra Aja has made a career out of horror. Films like "Crawl," "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Piranha 3D" clearly show his skill as a growing master of the genre. With his latest film, "Oxygen" ("Oxygéne" as it's known by it's original French title), he leans more heavily into science-fiction while still flexing his usual muscles.
The result is the most effective movie to date that deals with the isolation, desperation and claustrophobia associated with the recent pandemic, even though "Oxygen" has nothing to do directly with it. Review: Riveting two-part documentary series, 'The Crime of the Century' a tough pill to swallow5/10/2021 Documentarian Alex Gibney has got his finger on the pulse of current issues facing Americans...and he also is clearly one of the fastest-moving filmmakers on the planet. It took him no time last year to kick out the pandemic-related "Totally Under Control" and his previous HBO documentary mini-series, "Agents of Chaos," took a deep-dive into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
His latest two-part effort - with Part One airing tonight on HBO with Part Two following on Tuesday, 5/11 - is called "The Crime of the Century" and is a stunning exploration of the Opioid Epidemic...and how it isn't just some accidental phenomenon, but yet another man-made disaster. A totally bonkers Andrew Garfield and a solid performance from Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) is not enough to save "Mainstream" from itself.
EXCLUSIVE CONTENT: Interview with "Mainstream" director Gia Coppola A scholarly documentary, "The Human Factor" walks us through the Middle East Peace Process, as told from the perspective of United States mediators under George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and beyond.
"Wrath of Man" is a tough-guy action-film featuring characters with names like Bullet, Hollow Bob and Boy Sweat Dave, who all talk in witty sound-bites and phrases typically found in movies but not in real life. In other words, of course it's directed by Guy Ritchie, the director of other like movies such as "Snatch," "RocknRolla," "Revolver" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."
But instead of simply existing as a stylized heist movie and finding comfort in that, the convoluted plot of "Wrath of Man" turns this into an over-long, shoot-em-up that devolves into mindlessness the further it goes along. Granted, there are not too many films about grain entrapment to compare "Silo" to. But this tense, focused drama/thriller has enough uniqueness and intrigue to suck you in, if not overwhelm you, with sharply-drawn yet simplistic characters and a strange situation that benefits from the audience not knowing its dangers.
If you're like me, you consider yourself a big fan of Billy Crystal. I seriously root for him, and whenever he appears in a movie he is always a sight for sore eyes...he's the "comfort food" of comedy, where you can just sink back and relax into his quick-witted sense of humor and uniquely-nasally voice, knowing that at any minute, he has the capability of making you smile even when he - on occasion - isn't making you laugh.
The clunky, overly-sappy "Here Today" is, sadly, one of those occasions. It's co-written and directed by Crystal himself, his first directorial effort since the HBO baseball movie, "61*," twenty years ago. Crystal is coming off of his best performance since his iconic role in the 1989 classic, "When Harry Met Sally," in last year's mostly unseen and unnoticed "Standing Up, Falling Down." In that film, Crystal was warm, touching and funny, but he also showed off his dramatic chops as an alcoholic dermatologist, fully embracing the fact that, at age 73, there's more road behind him then in front of him. "Here Today" takes a deeper dive into themes like this: Mortality, aging, family relationships, friendship and legacies left behind. Crystal is no question one of the greats of his generation, but this misfire will definitely not rank as a film worth remembering. New on Netflix this weekend is the legal drama, "Monster," which boasts an impressive cast, and a screenplay by Radha Blank ("The Fourty-Year-Old-Version"). The film, which premiered all the way back at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival has taken a while to get to the screen and now we know why.
Despite all of the talent involved, "Monster" is a timely story that somehow feels antiquated...a film with "urgent" themes but paced so slowly that the fiery embers it stokes never ignite. |
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