Steve James
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This, Eberts best film of the 1990s, is major league compared to cloying 1986 crowd-pleaser Hoosiers aka Best Shot and to most other feel-good fictions of sports as metaphor for the redemptive in the American Way of Life.
Forest Whitaker ( Ghost Dog , Bird ) is the lumbering yet kindly and noble black man, Jared Leto ( Prefontaine ) is the wiry mastermind who hasn't quite thought of everything in advance, and Dwight Yoakam ( Sling Blade ) is the sociopathic wacko in a ski mask.
Watching the new teen comedy Booksmart, you would not know this is the feature film directorial debut for Olivia Wilde (Life Itself, House).
The picture is all the more of interest given that this is actress Olivia Wilde’s (“Life Itself”) freshman contribution to the celluloid pile, and since it’s written by four women—avoiding the usual problem of having script-by-committee emerge as something that none of the scripters want—it looks as though it comes from the pen of a single writer.
First-time director Olivia Wilde has made a movie far superior to some of the crap in which she has acted (e.g., “Life Itself,” “Love the Coopers” and “The Lazarus Effect” ).
But this directing debut by Olivia Wilde, who hasn’t always had the best acting gigs ( Life Itself , anyone?), is clever about playing the fool and wise to the ways of teen girls.
Wilde has impressed as a performer many times, even leaving an impression in lesser movies like Life Itself and Love the Coopers that didn’t give the astonishingly photogenic actress much to work with.
"Booksmart," the sharp and insightful directorial debut from actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde ("Life Itself"), takes us back to high school in a winning new comedy that upends notions of what movies like this can be.
Jared Leto ("Fight Club," "Prefontaine") has a brief stint as Susanna's wayward boyfriend of sorts.
For those who will be satisfied only with a documentary about gang violence in Chicago, allow me to recommend Steve James’s excellent The Interrupters.
But when I want a sports film that’s honest about the intersection of athletic ability and economic/racial disparity, I’ll stick with Hoop Dreams.
In a sneaky way, though, now and again I got the distinct feeling of watching a genre passion play based on the revelations of Steve James' amazing documentary Stevie : the idea that the best intentions of the privileged class are not only fraught with self-interest and venality, but doomed to abject failure besides.
"Friday Night Lights" gets you cheering for the Panthers, but it's a far cry from the usual rah-rah sports-movie formula--closer, in texture and ambition, to the documentary "Hoop Dreams" than to the pious "Remember the Titans."
For all of the endless blather about how comic books have the power to reveal all of our secret identities — one of Jackson’s pronouncements about the power of narrative tropes veers close to making “Glass” feel like the “Life Itself” of superhero movies — Shyamalan never meaningfully engages with the genre.
Many of those memories center around a mysterious woman (Annette Bening, “Life Itself”) that Vers can’t remember, but is so important to her subconscious that she is the avatar Vers sees when communing with the Kree’s sentient AI ruler the Supreme Intelligence.
While there, she’s drugged and abducted, sold into the servitude of a sex trafficking ring run by the Martinez brothers – fiery Victor (Oscar Jaenada, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”) and cooler-headed Hugo (Sergio Peris-Menchata, “Life Itself”).
This isn't to say that Venom 's the most ill-advised film of 2018 (in my mind, that title still belongs to Gotti , though it's worth pointing out that I've not seen Life Itself yet, and that one's supposed to be a real humdinger), just that it succeeds as a piece of entertainment despite the foundational lunacy upon which it was built.
First, it’s a better use of Tarantino’s signature plotting that whatever the heck last month’s Life Itself was, and secondly, at least someone has found a way to riff on newer films by that writer-director than the glut of films from the mid-90s and early 2000s that all wanted to be Pulp Fiction.