Life Itself (2014)
Directed by Steve James
The surprising and entertaining life of renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert (1942-2013): his early days as a freewheeling bachelor and Pulitzer Prize winner, his famously contentious partnership with Gene Siskel, his life-altering marriage, and his brave and transcendent battle with cancer.
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What critics compared Life Itself to
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.
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”).
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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.