A Golden Globe winner whose critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes calls the film "a poignant, well-acted (movie) that marries cultural specificity with universally relatable themes," writer/director Lulu Wang's comedic drama The Farewell will enjoy a Figge Art Museum screening on May 11 in conjunction with the popular exhibition Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960, the Davenport venue's latest movie series highlighting award-winning, groundbreaking feature films that celebrate the cinematic achievements of women.

Running just shy of three hours and boasting all of its creator's evidently favorite touchstones that include foreboding A-frame houses, headless corpses, and full-frontal nudity for characters you don't necessarily want to see naked, writer/director Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid is one of those movies that naturally engenders a “love it or hate it” tag. Yet while I can easily imagine audiences either adoring or loathing Aster's impassioned, insanely ballsy (in more ways than one) fever dream, I would argue that it's actually incredibly easy to fall into a middle camp: acknowledging the presentational greatness while also admitting that, in the end, it's a meandering, deeply confused wreck.

“Nicolas Cage is Dracula” is such a tremendous hook, and “Renfield wants to escape his toxic work relationship” such a fantastic premise, that it's truly unfortunate that director Chris McKay's and screenwriter Ryan Ridley's comedy thriller isn't more entertaining than it is.

Over the past quarter-century, there have been periods of time – runs of entire years, even – in which I couldn't have fathomed writing the sentence “I wish Ben Affleck made more movies.” Yet as I was driving home from the phenomenally enjoyable Air Jordan origin story Air, which Affleck directed from a stellar Alex Convery script, that was my primary thought, and I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Well … maybe just a little. The guy still has plenty of turkeys to live down.

Even though I couldn't define “paladin” or “druid” to save my soul, I had no difficulty following the storyline. That was kind of the problem. Though based on a role-playing game and not a comic book, this D&D felt like practically every Marvel storyline I'd been following since 2008.

It's not just that director Chad Strahelski's action thriller is great – that it is, for my money, the first legitimately great movie of 2023. But the laughs that I heard (and contributed to) during my weekday-afternoon showing were frequent and joyous, and our Keanu Reeves-inspired “Whoa!!!”s were boisterous and deserved … and there were only about 20 of us there. I can only imagine, with envy, the seismic fun of sharing this knockout experience with 100-plus others.

A Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film that was also named the 30th greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics’ poll, Céline Sciamma's French romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire will enjoy a Figge Art Museum screening on April 6 in conjunction with the exhibition Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960, the Davenport venue's latest movie series highlighting award-winning, groundbreaking feature films that celebrate the cinematic achievements of women.

Everything that's wrong with the super-sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods is effectively baked into the title. Because if there's one thing that fans of the 2019 film (myself among them) don't want, or at least shouldn't want, it's fury – not when the original's appeal was so firmly grounded in the goofy, amiable, touching, and refreshingly inconsequential.

Before getting to the awards – and one particular movie gave us loads to talk about on that front – let me begin by addressing the event itself, because last night's 95th Annual Oscars telecast was a little boring. Intentionally, gloriously, blessedly boring.

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