In TV terms, the biographical film “Mike Wallace Is Here” is effectively a feature-length recap. Using only archival footage, the director Avi Belkin distills more than five decades of the longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent’s career on camera to an hour and a half. Presenting Wallace with relatively little mediation is a natural way to tell this story, even as it creates a limitation. Documentary as autobiography, the movie shows a man who is always cultivating his appearance for an audience...
It takes confidence and a healthy amount of narcissism to direct yourself in a farce about two women who engage in competitive psychological gamesmanship for the pleasure of your company. That is true even if you are not the script’s sole author (and the other is veteran screenwriter and longtime Luis Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière).
“Pokémon Detective Pikachu” is the first feature to pivot on a pairing of animated characters from the Japanese merchandising juggernaut and real live actors. But why even bother? The human stars barely look like they have pulses. The plotting proceeds with the one-mission-then-the-next logic of a video game, and even the notion of film noir feels bogus. When we see a clip from a gangster picture on screen, it’s the fake movie from “Home Alone.”
It’s fitting that “Missing Link,” which concerns a lovable creature a step behind on the evolutionary ladder, has been made with stop-motion animation, the painstaking process by which models and puppets are photographed to create the illusion of movement. In form and content, it’s a movie about fighting obsolescence. The perfection of the computer animation would simply be wrong.
Apart from Frederick Wiseman’s “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library,” few movies have celebrated book-lending institutions as havens of fair-mindedness and pluralism, so it’s tempting to give a pass to “The Public” as a rousing, lovingly made civics lesson, even if its screenplay does not seem fated for shelves.
By NASA’s estimate, 530 million people watched Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon in July 1969, making it one of the most widely seen television events in history. Now a new film allows moviegoers to experience the Apollo 11 mission from unexpected angles through mesmerizing footage and recordings that were never intended for a large viewership — or even necessarily for the public.
For roughly the first 50 minutes of “Parkland: Inside Building 12,” students and teachers recall last year’s attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in harrowing detail: who heard what and when, who hid where, which doors were locked, who was bleeding or killed. Much of the second hour is then devoted to remembering the 17 dead, one by one. At the close, when Emma González is shown reciting their names at the March for Our Lives rally, we have a mental image of each person.
“Isn’t It Romantic” is the second comedy in less than a week, after “What Men Want,” in which a woman gains the power to improve her life following a concussion.
“What Men Want” presumes a lot of things about its viewers. One is that they won’t tolerate a satire of workplace sexism if it doesn’t sometimes put the woman in her place. Another is a taste for Fiji water, an object of product placement so frequent that you worry for a drought in the South Pacific.
Having sold out at event screenings since December, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which opens for a full run this week, is poised to become the only blockbuster this year that was filmed from 1914 to 1918, on location on the Western Front. Commissioned to make a movie for the centennial of the armistice, using original footage, Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.
Opening on the 71st anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the conspiracy thriller “The Gandhi Murder” begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.
As animation has trended toward the precision that comes from working with computers, it has become refreshing to encounter throwbacks to less “perfect” styles.
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s original telling, Sherlock Holmes indulged in morphine and cocaine because the drugs offered him a break from “the dull routine of existence.” His mind, Dr. Watson recalls him saying in “The Sign of Four” (1890), rebelled at “stagnation.” Problems, work and cryptograms: Their inspiration would permit him to dispense with “artificial stimulants.”
In “Phil,” Greg Kinnear acts and directs, which has left him without at least one important person to say “no.” Still, even the most exacting auteur might have labored to help him make sense of this title character. The film opens with Phil, a suicidal dentist, preparing to throw himself off a bridge, then backing off, despite the encouragement of onlookers and the thematically appropriate musical accompaniment of “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden” on his car radio.
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