Patti Cake$ is Hustle ‘n’ Flow (2005) with a sprinkle of 8 Mile (2002) and a lot of New Jersey.  This is a dirty, base-shaking, crowd-pleasing, hip-hop heavy dramedy about keeping a dream when on the grind. Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald), a.k.a Killa P, a.k.a. Patti Cake$ is an aspiring rapper fighting through a world of strip malls and strip clubs on a quest to make it big in the rap game. This is a movie about the grind.  Patricia…

Wind River is as cold as its setting.  Taking place in the frigid mountains of Vermont, where it is negative degrees in spring time, this is a place where everything hurts and blood stains the angel white snow. Writer/director Taylor Sheridan, the writer behind such films as Sicario (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016), completes his, what has now been called, The New American Frontier Trilogy, with the same intensity and style as the the two films I just named….

Dayveon tells the story of Dayveon (Devin Blackmon), a 13-year-old boy who, after the death of his brother, joins a gang in Little Rock, Arkansas and learns about the brotherhood and violence of gang life. One of the best things about coming to Sundance is seeing movies that expose me to different parts of life.  Whether it takes me to another country, or shows me inner workings of other cities across the U.S., Sundance always broadens…

Landline is director Gillian Robespierre follow-up to her 2014 sleeper hit, Obvious Child, a film that I absolutely loved and one that put star Jenny Slate on the must-watch list.  You can tell both Robespierre and Slate have both grown as artists in the last couple years, as Landline is a bigger, cleaner, breezy, wonderfully acted family comedy. Landline looks at the flaws and insecurities of one family in the mid-90’s.  Dana (Jenny Slate) is recently engaged…

City of Ghosts is one of the most horrifying and shocking documentaries you will ever see.  Director Matthew Heineman gives us an in-depth look at a group of journalists in Raqqa who use guerilla news reporting to show how ISIS is torturing and ruining Raqqa. The extraordinary lengths these reporters go through is unbelievable.  The reporters, who run a protest/news group called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, has a role and every person is in…

The Incredible Jessica James should really be titled The Incredible Jessica Williams, because that woman is a star.  Williams, who stars as our titular character, is most known for her work on The Daily Show (2012) and supporting roles in films like Delivery Man (2013) and People, Places, Thing (2015).  But here, in her first starring film role, she is a revelation, in a romantic comedy that is endearing and hilarious. Jessica James (Williams) is an aspiring playwright in…

Icarus is one of those stories that if I didn’t see it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it to be true.  This is one of the wildest documentaries I have ever seen.  It starts off as a sports documentary documenting performance enhancing drugs in the Olympics and other sports and evolves into an espionage thriller, similar to that of a John le Carré novel. Icarus starts off as a look into P.E.D. use in sports….

To be honest, the only thing I knew about corals before going into Jeff Orlowski’s latest global warming documentary, Chasing Coral, was what I learned in Finding Nemo (2003).  As you can imagine, Finding Nemo did teach me much.  But, unlike the adorable animated movie, Orlowski’s film teaches you everything and anything about corals, from their anatomy to the unfortunate future of corals. Chasing Coral is a film about a group of divers, photographers, and scientists who set out to find…

After seeing Split, I am officially claiming that M. Night Shyamalan is back.  After starting off his career with a bang with The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (200), and Signs (2002), he then became the laughing stock of cinema by consistently making uninspired, awful films, like Lady in the Pool (2006), sorry, Water, Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013). But with Split, Shayamalan has made a movie like that of his first three. …