Mostly one for the fans, but still offering an engaging (if almost punishingly long) profile of a pop star, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry charts the meteoric rise and overwhelming success of its teenage subject.
Film
The most talked about documentary of the year thus far, Framing Britney Spears gives an impassioned overview of efforts to free one of the biggest pop stars in the world from a court order that has restricted her career and personal life since 2008.
Lee Isaac Chung’s period drama Minari is one of the best films ever made about the Asian-American immigrant experience. It’s also one of the best films ever made about rural living and the seemingly never-ending chase for some to achieve “the American dream.”
Some Kind of Heaven, the first feature-length documentary from filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, is a moving and honest look about people growing older but never fully growing up.
A keenly detailed and emotionally charged snapshot of a young woman in free fall (both figuratively and literally), Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft. is a monumental achievement on an intimate scale.
An intelligent, but uneven sci-fi thriller that never settles on a proper tone, Synchronic mostly flounders, but still has some flashes of genuine ingenuity and entertainment value.
Supernova is an achingly beautiful, progressive, tender, morally complex, and empathetic love story that takes subject matter often reserved for television-movie-of-the-week fodder and turns it into something truly special and original.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is a gleefully silly affair in the tradition of Dumb and Dumber. It’s also a comedy where the old adage “your mileage may vary” holds a lot of weight.
The teen romance sequel To All the Boys: Always and Forever is a decided comedown in quality when placed along its two genuinely charming predecessors.
The multilayered dark comedy Breaking News in Yuba County is one of those films that’s nowhere near as good as it looks on paper.