City Of Gold is a documentary love letter to Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold. Instead of covering the fancy-schmancy restos that movie stars love, the L.A. Times contributor finds little holes-in-the-wall specializing in wildly diverse cuisines, introducing his readers to neighbourhoods they didn’t even know existed. (See full review here).
Opens April 1. See Listing.
Rating: NNN(Susan G. Cole)
Darling combines elements of Repulsion and The Shining in a minimalist mood piece about a young woman (Lauren Ashley Carter) whose life becomes a waking nightmare when she’s hired as the caretaker of a creepy Manhattan brownstone. Shot in black-and-white with the story so spare that we never even learn the protagonist’s name, it’s a dreamlike horror movie that plays like a meditation on its inspirations rather than a simple homage. (See full review here).
Opens April 1. See Listing.
Rating: NNN (Norman Wilner)
Everybody Wants Some!! is a return to the hangout vibe of Dazed And Confused, a shaggy comedy about college kids in Austin set over the weekend before the start of classes in September 1980. If Dazed was a sprawling epic of intertwining subplots, Everybody Wants Some!! (named for the Van Halen song, of course) is more focused in its storytelling, just following Jake (Glee’s Blake Jenner), a baseball player newly arrived from California. (See full review here).
Opens April 1. See Listing.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Absolutely Anything is a fantasy comedy starring Simon Pegg as a London schoolteacher endowed by aliens with the power to make his wishes reality. (Director/co-writer Jones supposedly came up with this a while before Bruce Almighty but never got around to making it he would’ve been better off letting it lie.) A movie about limitless potential, it has no creative spark of its own. (See full review here).
Opens April 1. See Listing.
Rating: N (NW)
Kill Your Friends star Nicholas Hoult as a charming late-90s A&R exec who’s literally willing to stab competitors in the back. But the actor with the boyish pout and disturbing grin is not enough to put across this attempt at a savage critique of the music industry before Napster hacked record labels to bits. Hoult’s Steven Stelfox is our guide to recording sessions, music festivals and coke binges. (See full review here).
Opens April 1. See Listing.
Rating: NN (Radheyan Simonpillai)
Midnight Special is a master class in the screenwriting maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Writer/director Nichols and his Take Shelter star Michael Shannon reunite for a tense thriller about a father desperate to keep his unnaturally gifted son (Jaeden Leiberher) out of the hands of various parties intent on exploiting him. It’s a terrific variation on the sci-fi chase movie sub-genre, with Nichols’s ultra-tight focus on character boiling a complex narrative down to a series of desperate conversations between people who don’t have a lot of time to explain themselves. (See full review here).
Opens April 1. See Listing.
Rating: NNNNN (NW)
Available now on Netflix
Drone starts from the presumption that remotely piloted airborne vehicles are a bad idea – they turn actual combat into video games that remove any risk to the pilots and thus distance them from the consequences of their lethal actions. By the end of the picture, you’ll find it hard to disagree with that argument. (See full review here).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch here.
