"Nickel Boys" is wholly unique. A new kind of film that casts the viewer as the main characters and relies on archival footage. Occasionally I found myself watching the movie like it was anything else, thinking of what the camera was looking at as important rather than the character doing the looking. The archival footage, worked great for me though. The integration of the footage into the rest of the movie helps to establish the setting, but more importantly it…

Fernanda Torres gives a captivating, devastating performance, but it only works because Walter Salles directs the hell out of the first 30 minutes. "I'm Still Here" begins as a slice-of-life story about the family before the inciting incident. That first part runs a little longer than it would in some other movies, but the extended time with the whole family really helps us get an idea of who these characters are and how they interact. It's so well paced, staged,…

I knew that "Blue Lock: Episode Nagi" was going to basically recap the first season of the show. I expected only a few things from it: a deeper look at Nagi's character, a look at some of the soccer matches that we didn't see in the show, and maybe interesting insight from a different perspective in the matches we've already seen. It did not meet those expectations.
  The first expectation is the one that performed the best. We resee…

KiKi Layne is the reason to go see "Dandelion". Her performance is really good, she sings very well, and the songs that she helped write stand on their own without the film as context. Without her, I would not have enjoyed the movie nearly as much as I did.
  Nicole Riegel's work is where I find fault. The screenplay has the characters flip-flopping from scene to scene. For example, early in the film Dandelion walks out of a gig,…