Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying opens this year’s New York Film Festival with a seriocomic drama about friendship in the midst of a topical treatment of the consequences and effects of war. With a script by Linklater and author Darryl Ponicsan, Last Flag Flying bridges the gap between Vietnam and Iraq, attempting to highlight the humor, pathos, and universality in soldiers’ experiences, in war and out of it.
The pilot for CBS’s new spinoff series, Young Sheldon opens with a shot of a train set accompanied by a voiceover from, uh, old Sheldon (Jim Parsons) explaining how he would have been a ticket taker if he couldn’t have been a physicist. What this means, except as a throwback to the original TV show, I am at pains to parse out. Young Sheldon spends the opening of the show playing with his trains, but they're never referenced again, nor do they form any thematic basis for the rest of the pilot.
Dabka opens with a voiceover from its protagonist, Jay Bahadur (Evan Peters), explaining that he hates voiceover in films because it’s lazy filmmaking. This self-aware smugness unfortunately sets the tone for the film, which wavers between comedy and serious drama without much clear direction or purpose. And it’s a shame, because the true story of Dabka, about an aspiring journalist who embedded himself with Somali pirates for six months, is about as exciting as you can get.
Difficult to understand and impossible to codify, Manifesto is a stirring post-modern rumination on artistic meaning filtered through the persona and performance of Cate Blanchett.
Despite its undoubted ambition and an excellent central performance from Rami Malek, Buster’s Mal Heart slips into the traps that so often face thrillers of its type.
