Sometimes a movie takes a few minutes to settle down and find its groove — which is what happens with “The Persian Version,” writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s warm-hearted and regularly hilarious look at a woman trying to reconcile conflicting cultures and a hard case of a mom.
“Obviously, I’ve had some issues with culture,” are the first words we hear from Leila (Layla Mohammadi) — after we see her entering a Halloween party in half a burqa with a neon-pink bikini…
Living in North Korea, the documentary “Beyond Utopia” tells us often, is horrible — and getting out, as the courageous family at the center of the film shows us, is almost as difficult.
Director Madeleine Gavin introduces to Pastor Seungeun Kim, who operates a network of volunteers from his church in Seoul, to get North Koreans wanting to defect out of the country safely. That’s no small task, since anyone trying to get out of North Korea is branded a traitor to the “great leader” Kim Jong-Un, and faces torture, beatings and possibly execution.
Read the full review of The Movie Cricket: moviecricket.net/sundance-2022/2023/1/29/sundance-review-beyond-utopia-is-a-compelling-documentary-paced-like-a-thriller-about-people-struggling-to-escape-north-korea
With the third installment of their collaboration putting Peter Parker onscreen, actor Tom Holland and director Jon Watts work a good amount of magic in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” — thanks to the borrowed cache of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and past iterations of the famous wall-crawler.
To get everyone up to speed without spoiling anything that isn’t in the marketing campaign or in the previous films, a recap: Peter Parker has been outed as Spider-Man, thanks to the vengeful…
There’s a scene early on in “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” that shows this won’t be another movie-length home video of a pampered pop star.
It happens on the day in 2018 when the Grammy nominations are announced. Swift is on a couch, on the phone to someone — presumably an agent or a publicist — who delivers the bad news that Swift’s album “Reputation” did not get nominated in the major categories. (Ultimately, it received just one nomination, for pop vocal album but lost to Ariana Grande’s “Sweetener.”)
Read the full review at sltrib.com: www.sltrib.com/artsliving/2020/01/24/sundance-review-miss/
