Tuesday, December 29, 2020
THE MIDNIGHT SKY
Monday, December 28, 2020
AK VS AK
Sunday, December 27, 2020
SOUL
SOUL is rated PG and has a running time of 100 minutes. It is streaming on Disney+.
Saturday, December 26, 2020
MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM
The resulting film is good if you take it as it is - a filmed play. As such the language (Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapting August Wilson) is stylised and the action largely confined to either the rehearsal room or the recording room. We have moments of high drama in the form of powerful monologues by Ma Rainey and Levee, and a final act release of tension. If you take it as it is, this really is a powerful and moving drama. Viola Davis' Ma Rainey is an instant icon of queer and black cinema - a powerful and uncompromising figure who speaks honestly to the racism of her time. Kudos to the costume and make-up designers that gave her heft and sweat and revolting make-up - underlining the fact that she was not going to survive a more superficial mass marketing age. But it's Chadwick Boseman in his final role that steals the show, with his two powerful monologues. The latter is a violent indictment of an absent God, and given what we now know about Boseman's fatal illness, and can see in his thinner frame, it has an extra pathos. I suspect that he will be posthumously nominated for Awards and deservedly so.
MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM is rated R and has a running time of 94 minutes. It is streaming on Netflix.
Thursday, December 10, 2020
THE DIG
THE DIG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 112 minutes. It will be released on January 29th 2021.