218 Best Releases Rated PG-13 (Page 11)

Benh Zeitlin's follow up to "Beasts of the Southern Wild" loses its way in a muddle of fairy dust and magical realism. A person can grow up a tremendous amount in eight years. In the case of filmmaker, Benh Zeitlin, that’s how much time it took to make Wendy, a movie about not growing up, and the unfortunate fact that there’s no stopping it. It also happens to be Zeitlin’s follow up to Beasts of the Southern Wild, one of the most celebrated debut films of all-time, but sadly not talked about much these days.  Maybe it was Zeitlin’s lack of a quick second effort that made us forget about it, like a nice dream that slowly disappears as we go about our day, but now we finally have Wendy, Zeitlin’s folksy reimagining of Peter Pan, told from the perspective of Wendy Darling (Devin France). Similar to Beasts, it’s a magical realism film centered around a young girl growing up and finding her place in a big, scary world, but much like growing up, it’s a mixed bag. Instead of the London setting from the original play, this version takes place somewhere in the nameless, impoverished backwoods of America. Like Beasts, the characters are below the poverty line and off the grid. While the residents of the Bathtub in Beasts were mostly fine with  their place in the world and had fulfilling lives, for the characters in Wendy, there is a sense that  joy and imagination have already passed out of their lives, and there’s no getting it back.  Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie is a miscalculation on every level. As a meat-and-potatoes thriller, it fails utterly. As an exercise in style, it’s disjointed and unimpressive. A remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcockian comic mystery, Charade, could’ve brought out Demme’s humor, something largely absent from his films post-1990. Instead, the movie is a joyless, dull affair, resulting in something completely unnecessary. The film follows the broad plot of the original movie: a woman on holiday in Europe meets a mysterious man. When she finds out her husband has been murdered, she gets caught up in a game of international intrigue, fortune-seeking, and mistaken identity. While the original starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, The Truth About Charlie stars Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg. Already the film has an issue—namely, that Newton and Wahlberg are no Hepburn and Grant. A simple comparison to the original movie is warranted only because The Truth About Charlie is so hollow and unmotivated that the comparison has to be made. Otherwise, it's incomprehensible as a work of art. Continue Reading →

As a printer churns out women’s headshots, none of them look particularly similar. Their hair colors vary. Some of them are angled a little differently. One of them stands out because she’s holding her hand to her chin, but their demeanors are the kind of neutral that most viewers would try projecting a sharper emotion onto. Part of the issue, however, is that the emotions in question aren’t sharp. They’re throbbing, constant, quiet. They’re easy to feel but hard to unpack. Continue Reading →

Ring the alarm next time a movie tacks “Blumhouse’s” to the front of its title. Is it a marketing tactic? Is it a sign of desperation? How about a warning to heed instead? Hell, is it all three? It might be a little early to tell, but it’s starting to feel like the latter. Continue Reading →

Netflix's sequel to To All the Boys I've Loved Before keeps the charm but loses some of its edge. Netflix's algorithmic approach to satisfying the needs of its many and sundry subscribers (and its willingness to pour untold millions of dollars into producing and distributing original content) often feels like they're fishing with a shotgun -- just spray and pray. But amid the field of mediocre teen rom-coms they've put out over the last few years (Tall Girl, anyone?), the streaming service struck gold in 2018 with To All the Boys I've Loved Before, a sweet, inclusive, effortlessly charming treacle that feels like if John Hughes had a 21st-century understanding of racial and gender dynamics, and the results were shockingly warm, inviting, and downright fun. Now, Netflix is putting out a sequel just in time for Valentine's Day, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, and while the surprise is gone, Lara Jean's story holds onto just enough of its residual charm to entertain. Making a sequel to a rom-com is never easy; what happens after 'happily ever after'? Luckily, Jenny Han's bestselling YA book has two sequels (of which Netflix plans to make a trilogy), so there's a treacly blueprint to work from. As P.S. I Still Love You begins, perpetual wallflower Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and sensitive jock Peter (Noah Centineo) are beginning the furtive first steps of their relationship: going out on dates, showing each other off to their friends, and navigating the thorny question of when/how/if to have sex. The courtship period is done, now it's time to really find out of Lara Jean and Peter are meant to be together. This question is complicated by the arrival of John Ambrose McClaren (Jordan Fisher), Lara Jean's middle-school crush and one of the subjects of the clandestinely-mailed love letters that kickstarted this whole affair in the first place. He's smart, sweet, nerdy, and thanks to their mutual volunteer work at the local retirement home (populated by a spirited Holland Taylor as Lara Jean's carefree confidante), get plenty of time to meet-cute all over each other. Continue Reading →

Dominic Cooke's well-crafted spy thriller doesn't try anything new, but boasts winning performances & a zippy plot. In 2019, the buddy-car film Ford v Ferrari became the clear cut favorite of dads across American and Britain. Using well-matched leads in Christian Bale and Matt Damon, James Mangold’s film became a critical and commercial hit, showing that fathers still have the power to put a movie into the green. It looks like there’s a new dad film of 2020 though, with Dominic Cooke’s Ironbark taking its rightful spot upon the beer-bellied throne.  Ironbark tells the story of Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British businessman recruited by the government to become a spy-like courier in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Wynne agrees to keep this entire operation a secret from everyone, including his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), growing more invested and involved and spy-ish.  Flanked by one British operative Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and one American operative Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), Wynne begins meeting with a Russian source named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Together, they smuggle nuclear information back into Britain and the U.S. in hopes of avoiding nuclear war, and eventually dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Continue Reading →

Jeff Orlowski's documentary about the effects and ethics of social media lacks enough emotional depth or practical solutions to work. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Did you know that the Internet is scary? Don’t worry, you're about to hear it again. Did you know that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google store your information in order to sell it to advertisers? Of course, but maybe it'll really sink in if you hear it one more time. And—just bear with me—were you aware that these companies are so fine-tuned that they can track how long you stay on one given page, post, or picture? Of course you did, but The Social Dilemma doesn't care about that. There are a handful of working parts to Jeff Orlowski’s latest documentary, but rather than make use of its potential to say something new, it simply sticks to the most basic information and fleshes it out with some good old fashioned fear-mongering. It's part regular doc, part dramatic reconstruction, and mostly an insipid polemic, which, when paired with its potential to comment on the ethics of privacy and social manipulation, comes off as a regurgitation of what's been said before. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →