“Supernova” opens in total darkness. Slowly, stars emerge. One shines brightly, then disappears.
Tusker, Stanley Tucci’s character (“Spotlight”), later explains that everything is made from dying stars, which turn into supernovas that spew “star stuff,” the building blocks for life, through space. With a gigantic flash, these interstellar explosions create the universe as we know it.
There is a vitality to destruction. A beauty, even.
** Editor’s Note: The title of this article has been changed after learning of the death of Cassandra Louise Baker, the production designer for “The Wanting Mare.” We offer our condolences to her friends and family.
“The Wanting Mare” could have been a classic. The feature film debut of Nicholas Ashe Bateman, who worked on the visual effects for “Save Yourselves!”, “Topside” and A24’s upcoming “The Green Knight,” has some incredible imagery and a unique approach to the fantasy genre.
In the first scene of “Prisoners of the Ghostland,” Nicholas Cage (“Color Out of Space”) bursts into a bank lobby, screaming “Bonsai!” and wielding a shotgun.
The film gets crazier from there.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.”
In “Land,” Robin Wright’s (“House of Cards”) feature-film directorial debut, Edee (played by Wright) goes to Wyoming to find solace after a traumatic event. It’s too bad the film loses its way.
In a U.S. base on Okinawa, just after World War II, a little girl dreams of the atom bomb. A creature called the Baku comes to eat her nightmares.
This girl, named Lauren and played by Lake Bell (“In a World”), grows up to become a Cryptid rescuer, saving beings like the Baku from those who seek to imprison or exploit them. She takes the creatures to the Cryptozoo, just outside San Francisco.
What now?
I’ve been asking myself that a lot recently.
What would Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown say to one another?
While this sounds like the prompt for a history essay, the movie “One Night in Miami” imagines these icons meeting on the 1964 February evening that Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, became a world boxing champion.
“The Midnight Sky” is empty.
Directed by and starring George Clooney (“Hail, Caesar!”), the film is based on the novel “Good Morning Midnight” by Lily Brooks-Dalton. Both interweave the stories of an astronomer waiting out an unnamed apocalypse in an Arctic base and a crew of astronauts returning from a space exploration mission to a desolate Earth.
“Ammonite,” starring Kate Winslet (“Titanic”) and Saoirse Ronan (“Little Women”), is resoundingly beautiful. It’s also boring. It’s silly and it’s heart-wrenching. It’s meticulously realistic and absolutely mad.
We’re all sick of being online.
It’s a cliché at this point— the phrase “Zoom fatigue” makes me want to hurl my computer out the nearest window. Online class. Online work. Online shopping. Online therapy. Online Happy Hour. Online Thanksgiving.
After eight months of living online, is it any wonder that we’re tired of our computer screens?
Yet think back, for just a moment, to the before-times.