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The treasures of an extended Oscar season just keep on giving, as Venice Film Festival winner and award season favorite “Nomadland” finds its way to theaters — and Hulu subscribers. It’s a special film, about a woman (played by two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand) who pulls up stakes and travels the country by van, hitting theaters at a time when many people have been reexamining their own lives. So if there’s a safe way to see it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better option out there.
The week’s a bit thinner on conventional crowd pleasers. Channeling “The Wolf of Wall Street”-style energy on an indie scale, both “Silk Road” and “Body Brokers” offer cutting-edge takes on 21st-century crimes: a black market for illegal drugs in the former and a scheme to profit on recovering addicts in the latter. Also in the Scorsese vein, the Montreal-made...
The week’s a bit thinner on conventional crowd pleasers. Channeling “The Wolf of Wall Street”-style energy on an indie scale, both “Silk Road” and “Body Brokers” offer cutting-edge takes on 21st-century crimes: a black market for illegal drugs in the former and a scheme to profit on recovering addicts in the latter. Also in the Scorsese vein, the Montreal-made...
- 2/19/2021
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
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In “17 Blocks,” Cheryl Sanford, matriarch of a low-income African American household in southeast Washington, D.C., talks wistfully of a “parallel universe” where she and her family enjoy cookouts, vacations and gift-filled Christmas mornings. This melancholy confession comes moments after a closeup of her casually snorting cocaine. It’s a heartbreaking scene in that have destroyed the future, and often claimed the lives, of too many African Americans in poor communities.
Though it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and was subsequently slated for distribution by MTV Documentary Films last fall, Davy Rothbart’s intimate and uncompromising documentary was then held back for 2020. The subsequent coronavirus outbreak put those plans in limbo once again, with theatrical and broadcast release still in flux. In the interim, “17 Blocks” has taken on fresh relevance amid the #BlackLivesMatter protests, speaking even more directly to this moment and an America convulsing in protest over racial inequality.
Though it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and was subsequently slated for distribution by MTV Documentary Films last fall, Davy Rothbart’s intimate and uncompromising documentary was then held back for 2020. The subsequent coronavirus outbreak put those plans in limbo once again, with theatrical and broadcast release still in flux. In the interim, “17 Blocks” has taken on fresh relevance amid the #BlackLivesMatter protests, speaking even more directly to this moment and an America convulsing in protest over racial inequality.
- 7/4/2020
- by Mark Keizer
- Variety Film + TV
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