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Call Me Dancer is a genuinely heartfelt, captivating and inspirational documentary about Manish Chauhan, a dancer from Mumbai who pursues his dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer. It will make you stand up and cheer. Co-directors Pip Gilmour and Leslie Shampaine follow Manish for five years starting from his days of street dancing in Mumbai. Manish took a chance by entering a dance school where he first met Yehuda Maor, a ballet dance teacher and former dancer. Call Me Dancer is as much about Manish's struggles to become a professional dancer as it is about the compassionate bond between him and Yehuda who becomes his mentor. The co-directors do a wonderful job of taking the audience on an emotional journey that captures Manish's impeccable talent and passion for dancing, but also his pure joy, hope, determination, anxiety and frustrations that come with his long journey that takes him to New York and Israel. Above all, the documentary also shows his resilience despite some obstacles and setbacks. Call Me Dancer is very well-edited in a way that makes it feel cinematic without a dull moment or a segment that lasts too long. A truly great documentary finds just the right balance between entertaining the audience, provoking them emotionally as well as intellectually. It also makes you forget that you're watching a documentary because you're so immersed in the subject's life and in his or her story. Call Me Dancer accomplishes those two major feats with flying colors. It opens at Quad Cinema via Abramorama, and would be a great double feature with Billy Elliot and Mao's Last Dancer. 
Godard Cinema is an illuminating, well-edited and warts-and-all documentary biopic about the iconic French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard. Director Cyril Leuthy combines contemporary interviews with Marina Vlady and Nathalie Baye along with archival footage of interviews with Godard himself and other actors he worked with like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, his first wife. Godard Cinema reveals a lot about Godard both as filmmaker and as a human being. You'll briefly learn about his traumatic childhood, his love life and political views. There's also plenty of well-chosen clips from his iconic films, i.e. Contempt. Fortunately, Godard Cinema doesn't bombard the audience with film clips. The film's style and structure is pretty conventional, but doesn't become dry or dull. It's also well-researched and filled with new insights from every talking head, so it also doesn't become repetitive either. Most importantly, though, director Cyril Leuthy avoids veering into hagiography which many documentary biopics tend to do. At a running time of 1 hour and 40 minutes, Godard Cinema opens at Film Forum via Kino Lorber. 
Time Bomb Y2K is a mildly engaging and well-edited, but ultimately underwhelming and shallow glimpse of the years leading up to 2000 during the Y2K scare. It succeeds as a basic introduction to Y2K and the ensuing fear and paranoia for those who weren't there or were too young to remember it. Peter de Jager was the first person to warn about the dangers of Y2K and how everything that relied on computers would fail when 1999 changed to 2000. Co-directors Brian Becker and Marley Mcdonald combine archival footage to provide the audience with a reader's digest version of the Y2K scare, but without digging deeper to allow for profound insights or revelations. What about contemporary interviews with Peter de Jager or others who could look back in retrospect years later and talk about what lessons they've learned? What about a little more backstory about Peter de Jager? He deserves his own separate documentary biopic. If you were among those who experienced Y2K and remember it, you'll learn nothing new or surprising. At a brief running time of 1 hour and 24 minutes, Time Bomb Y2K opens at DCTV's Firehouse Cinema before debuting on Max on December 29th, 2023. American Fiction  Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a professor whose career as an author has failed to launch. He moves back home to take care of his mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who has dementia, while reuniting with his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), and brother, Clifford (Sterling K. Brown). He decides to write a new controversial book called Ma Pafology under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh which catches the attention of publishers and his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz). Coraline (Erika Alexander), his neighbor and a potential love interest, doesn't know that he's secretly the author of Ma Pafology. Based on the novel by Percival Everett, the screenplay by Cord Jefferson, is a witty, occasionally provocative and only sporadically funny. Its systemic issue is that it bites off more than it could chew while suffering from tonal unneveness. Monk struggles to be successful in the book industry while writing about the black experience, and he's jealous of the success of another author, Sinatra (Issa Rae). When he arrives at the home of his mother, that's when the film gets a little darker and more complex as he deals with trauma and some family dysfunction. He also has to cope with the death of his sister. That subplot isn't as unflinching as it could've been. Concurrently, it makes Monk's character arc and his journey through grief feel contrived and shallow. The film's main plot, though, is how he hides behind the pseudonym of an author who he claims is a tough, ruthless gangster who has had a hard knock life. There are some funny moments as Monk pushes the envelope under the secret pseudonym. The third act doesn't quite earn its uplift. For the most part, American Fiction doesn't quite hit hard enough as a comedy, as a satire or nor a character study. Fortunately, American Fiction boasts a lively and heartfelt performance by Jeffrey Wright. It's the best performance of his career. Sterling K. Brown is also superb in a supporting role as is Issa Rae. There's nothing exceptional, though, about the production design, cinematography or musical score. The editing is decent without any choppiness or clunkiness, and the film doesn't feel weighed-down by its running time like too many films do this year. At 1 hour and 57 minutes, American Fiction is mildly engaging, tonally uneven and undercooked despite a fine ensemble cast.
 Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire  Kora (Sofia Boutella) lives among farmers on a moon called Veldt where grain is the main currency. Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) and Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), who lead the tyrannical Motherworld, aren't happy that the farmers sold their grain to the Bloodaxes, an insurgent group, so they hunt the Bloodaxes down. Meanwhile, Kora joins forces with Bloodaxe warriors, General Titus (Djimon Hounsou),Nemesis (Doona Bae), Tarak (Staz Nair) and Milius (E. Duffy), to defend Veldt from the nefarious Motherworld. The screenplay by writer/director Zack Snyder and his co-writers, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, is an uninspired, convoluted and unimaginative mess. In terms of quality, it's more along the lines of Battlefield Earth with its stilted dialogue some of which is cringe-inducing. The exposition feels very lazy and poorly integrated. There are too many characters, including a robot named Jimmy (voice of Anthony Hopkins), each of whom are poorly introduced and underdeveloped. There's a lot going on in Rebel Moon, but none of the beats land. It's neither thrilling, fun, suspenseful, exciting nor entertaining even if you check your brain at the door. There are shades of far more thrilling sci-fi movies like Star Wars and Dune each of which has a more compelling plot, interesting characters and surprises. Rebel Moon certainly knows where to take ideas from, but not where to take ideas to. What ensues is an increasingly anemic, underwhelming, tedious and mind-numbing experience. Rebel Moon has decent CGI and set design, but it's overproduced and bombards the audience with too much visual effects while sorely lacking heart and soul beneath the surface. None of the actors or actresses manage to rise above the clunky, shallow screenplay that treats their characters like plot devices. The action scenes, like one involving a large spider, go on for too long. Tighter editing would've helped the film to flow better because it doesn't justify its running time which clocks past the 2 hour mark and feels more like 3 hours. At 2 hour and 14 minutes, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire is an exhausting, overproduced and lackluster bore. It's this generation's Battlefield Earth.
 Wonka  Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) dreams of opening a chocolate shop in Paris, but ends up indebted to Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman), who runs an inn/laundromat. She locks him up in the basement and forces him to work at the laundromat. With the help of his new friend, Noodle (Calah Lane), who's been imprisoned there, Wonka hatches a plan to escape. The screenplay by writer/director Paul King and co-writer Simon Farnaby is a dull, unfocused and heavy-handed mess that's only mildly engaging. There are too many characters and too many subplots, yet very little actually sticks.The filmmakers have a terrible command of tone. One minute Wonka attempts to be funny and campy, another minute it's trying to be poignant, another minute it's trying to be a thrilling adventure, and the next an exhilarating musical. So, expect some tonal whiplash. The characters barely even feel lived-in; they're caricatures at most which makes it hard to be emotionally invested in anyone, especially Wonka. The flashbacks to his childhood memories with his mother (Sally Hawkins) provide exposition for his passion for selling chocolate, but they quickly become repetitive and somewhat maudlin. Out of all of the characters, the most annoying one is Oompa-Loompa (Hugh Grant) who has some cringe-inducing lines that are neither funny nor witty. Wonka's systemic issue, though, is that it tries to please everyone without taking any major risks and also tries too hard to please the audience without slowing down to breathe life into the characters or any scenes. Timothée Chalamet is a decent and charismatic actor, but he's miscast as Willy Wonka. He fails to rise above the bland screenplay and doesn't impress like Ansel Elgort does in West Side Story during the song and dance numbers. Among the ensemble cast, Olivia Colman shines the brightest in an over-the-top performance as Mrs. Scrubbit, but her role is underwritten like everyone else's. The major strengths, though, are shallow ones: stylish costumes and set designs which are quite colorful and lively which helps to at least provide some eye candy, but nothing for the heart, mind or soul which the film sorely neglects. At a running time of just under 2 hours, Wonka is visually dazzling and mildly engaging, but overproduced, tonally uneven and emotionally hollow.
 The Zone of Interest  Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and five children at a large house near the camp. Loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis, the screenplay by writer/director Jonathan Glazer eschews a conventional approach to depicting the Holocaust. Glazer focuses on the lives of Rudolf and his family in the titular "zone of interest", an area outside of the concentration camp. The film opens as the family enjoys a peaceful swim before gradually shifting to their time inside their home which includes a beautiful garden. Exposition is kept to a minimum, but you gradually learn that Rudolph is a Nazi officer which is clear when you see his folded-up uniform. Hedwig learns that he will be transferred to Berlin, and she's unhappy to leave their current home. The Zone of Interest is a very cold film with very little palpable emotion and no warmth, but that's precisely the point. Rudolph and his family are dehumanizing people who dehumanize themselves as well. There's a lot going on inside of them emotionally, but it's all buried under the many masks that they wear. Rudolph's mother eventually visits, and you can observe where Rudolph got his lack of empathy, apathy, coldness, shallowness and lack of introspection from. Much of the film feels eerie, creepy and foreboding like a horror film. The horrors of the Holocaust remain off-screen and in the imagination of the audience, so Glazer grasps the power of one's imagination---in the things that are not seen and not spoken about. That's where truely terrifying horror can be found. The cinematography is exquisite with many shots that add visual poetry. The images throughout The Zone of Interest speaks louder than words. One of the most poetic scenes is when Rudolf and Hedwigs talk by a river with a very strong current, but it's up to you as an intelligent, critically-thinking audience member to decide what the river represents symbolically. The same can be said about the sound design which plays a significant role while adding both style and substance, especially during the first few and last few minutes of black screen with sounds that bookend the film. Poetry is often a form of protest, so The Zone of Interest is ultimately a powerful protest against hate. The performances are effectively cold with very few glimpses inside any of the characters' heart, mind and soul. It's ironic that Hedwig and Rudolph maintain a beautiful garden in her backyard and that Rudolph's mother comments on it, but neither of them manage to recognize the garden of their soul which they neglect. They hate themselves and have no shame in cutting their own flowers and in cutting other people's flowers, so-to-speak, which makes them all the more dehumanizing to both themselves and to others. At a running time of 1 hour and 45 minutes, The Zone of Interest is a spellbinding, haunting and terrifying psychological horror film.
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