Frank Marshall's The Little Mermaid is sincere, reverent, safe. What it isn't, and what the original continues to be, is a joyous blast.

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 Bettendorf Public Library screening on June 9 in conjunction with the summertime "Find Your Voice" series, a program focused on works about people from marginalized communities that have been historically underrepresented in film.

After you've launched your car into outer space, I suppose there's nothing to do but wait for it to crash back down to Earth, and that's basically what happens in Fast X.

With its cast of Australian talents including Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, Emmy Award winners Anthony LaPaglia and Guy Pearce, and Succession's Golden Globe winner Sarah Snook, the romantic drama Holding the Man will be screened at Davenport's Figge Art Museum on June 1, this 2015 critical hit the first of four award-winning independent films to be shown throughout June in recognition and celebration of Gay Pride Month.

An excuse, as if one were needed, to re-team Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen, Book Club: The Next Chapter, while being a fairly traditional followup, is a very strange movie. By which I mean it really isn't a movie, but rather an opportunity to merely spend a cozy period in the dark watching four Hollywood legends of a certain age hang out in Italy and engage in sightseeing, slapstick, fashion parades, and the guzzling of liquor by the quart.

Presented as the latest in a series of groundbreaking feature-length films that celebrate the remarkable achievements women have made in the cinematic arts, director Ava DuVernay's Academy Award-winning Selma enjoys a May 25 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, this 2014 historical drama a work that the New York Times deemed "a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling."

Before seeing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, I wondered, as I always do with these sorts of “finales” to long-running franchises, how difficult it was going to be to review Marvel Studios' latest without diving into spoiler territory. Thankfully, though, most of writer/director James Gunn's trilogy-ender can be easily discussed without addressing significant plot twists or which of our eccentric world-savers, if any, fail to make it to the end credits. It turns out the stuff that bothered me, which was about 80 percent of GotGV3, is right there in the open.

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.

Pages