216 Movies Like Top Gun: Maverick (2022) (Page 14)

A fascinating kernel of certainty is padded out with giddy speculation in this documentary about a pair of unlikely art thieves. The facts are as such: 32 years after a $160 million painting by abstract artist Willem de Kooning was crudely cut from its frame in an Arizona gallery, a trio of small-town antique dealers discovered it in Jerry and Rita Alter’s estate sale. The Thief Collector is less interested in the painting itself  — in fact, it's openly dismissive about its artistic value — and more curious about how it fell into the hands of the mysterious couple, who frequently took exotic trips around the world despite their modest teacher incomes.

There are certainly intriguing questions raised by the Alters’ possession of the painting and compelling evidence that places them as the thieves, but this documentary can’t offer any convincing original theses of its own. It does try, by suggesting that the short stories Jerry wrote — about more thefts and gorier crimes — were thinly disguised autobiographical recollections, but it finds nothing to back these theories up except for a few loosely relevant anecdotes from relatives. With too many what-ifs to go on, it all makes for an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying deep dive.

Genre: Crime, Documentary, Drama

Actor: Glenn Howerton, Matt Pittenger, Sarah Minnich, Scott Takeda

Director: Allison Otto

In terms of the quality of the material delivered in Son I Never Had, this special is really just okay at best. Heather McMahan has charisma and personality, but she has a tendency to run directly into the set-ups for her jokes, without the kind of build-up between segments that would make the whole hour flow better. And the comedy here is pretty standard, lightly raunchy fare that's often amusing but never really cuts deep into the various topics McMahan brings up. Where she's really successful, instead, is in the way she uses humor to contrast the lingering but gentle grief she feels over her father's passing. Son I Never Had, in its own roundabout way, becomes a sort of extended eulogy, emphasizing how our loved ones remain with us in our every memory.

Genre: Comedy

Actor: Heather McMahan

Director: Jen Zaborowski

Rating: R

Based on the novel by Women Talking author Miriam Toews, this adaptation of All My Puny Sorrows holds clear reverence for its source material but falls short of making a case for its existence as a film. Toews's prose—significant parts of which writer/director Michael McGowan has kept intact in the dialogue—may be appropriate for a book that allows full internal access to its narrator, but on film her words come across as overly articulate and artificial, even if they speak beautiful, harsh truths about grief. And without a defined visual identity or proper flow of ideas to back up its admittedly complex characters (played with authentic tenderness and force by Alison Pill, Sarah Gadon, and Mare Winningham), the film ends up stuck in its own darkness, unable to give a proper form to all its thoughts.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Alison Pill, Aly Mawji, Amybeth McNulty, Boyd Banks, Donal Logue, Elizabeth Saunders, Mare Winningham, Marin Almasi, Martin Roach, Michael Musi, Mimi Kuzyk, Morgan Bedard, Racine Bebamikawe, Sarah Gadon

Director: Michael McGowan

Rating: R

Hallmark is the last place you'd expect to find a low-budget movie that decries excessive automation and advocates for local businesses, but for some reason this is the setting against which Love & Jane's story is told. And the movie doesn't come across as insincere either, as it uses a familiar romcom template to actually encourage its protagonist to grow beyond the romance novels she loves and to engage with her own experiences and emotions. Unfortunately, the rest of the film feels oddly obligatory, including a bland love interest and his half-baked chemistry with the heroine, and the inclusion of Jane Austen herself, who really has nothing to do here.

Genre: Comedy, Romance, TV Movie

Actor: Aadila Dosani, Alison Sweeney, Benjamin Ayres, Corina Bizim, Debbie Podowski, Dreyden Free, Eduardo Britto, John Prowse, Kehli O'Byrne, Kendra Anderson, Lynn Whyte, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Nevin Burkholder, Vivin Oommen, William Vaughan

Director: David Weaver

Rating: G

With a premise that just seems inherently emotionally manipulative, it should take an especially sensitive touch to make a story like this work on screen. Unfortunately, See Hear Love—itself based on a South Korean webcomic—is both overdramatic and not nearly stylized enough in any meaningful way to help its subject matter evolve beyond melodrama. It remains a well-shot and decently acted film that, at the very least, treats its characters as adults and not as caricatures with disabilities. But the movie makes little effort to place these characters in believable situations that should shed a light on what it's like to live with blindness or as a Deaf person. See Hear Love takes the easiest (and slowest) way out, bringing its two lovers together under somewhat creepy circumstances, and having them endure cartoonishly exploitative "antagonists"—all for the sake of portraying the romance as grand and artificially tragic.

Genre: Drama, Romance

Actor: Dai Watanabe, Daikichi Sugawara, Mahiro Takasugi, Maika Yamamoto, Mari Natsuki, Masaya Kato, Motoki Fukami, Sayaka Yamaguchi, Tomohisa Yamashita, Tomoki Kimura, Yuko Araki

Director: John H. Lee

The new stand-up special from Pete Davidson won't win over any skeptics, but there's something to admire in how the comedian heads straight towards edgy material, tells us he's going to go there, and still manages to surprise when he follows through. Which is to say Davidson's audacity might be more impressive than any of his actual writing in this special, with a good number of his jokes highlighting the bizarre situations his fame leads him into, but little more than that. It's stoner comedy for better or worse—observations about a strange world from a hazy point of view that may not always be coherent.

Genre: Comedy

Actor: Pete Davidson

Director: Jason Orley

Rating: R

Yet another drama designed to be emotional without actually doing the heavy lifting to get us invested, Prisoner's Daughter takes the easy way out at every turn, mistaking its use of capital-I Issues and dramatic plot points for substantial writing. This doesn't mean that the film itself isn't still watchable and competently performed (by a typically strong Brian Cox, but especially by Kate Beckinsale); it just fails to make a statement about any of its disparate parts mashed together. At the end of the day, it feels as if the film doesn't have enough faith in the already complex and difficult relationship at its center, so it attempts to dress it up with prison, cancer, drug addicts, and epilepsy—which only cheapens what's already there.

Genre: Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Brian Cox, Christopher Convery, Chuti Tiu, Cinthia Moura, Ernie Hudson, Jon Huertas, Kate Beckinsale, Mark Kubr, Mark Oliver Everett, Steven Littles, Tyson Ritter, Yonel Dorelis

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Rating: R

Playing the lead in an addiction drama has long been shorthand for “I’m a serious actor,” but that’s not something Florence Pugh needs to convince us of, especially not when the drama is as contrived as A Good Person is. Though it has a solid foundation from which to explore worthy subjects — Pugh’s character Allison begins abusing painkillers after accidentally causing the death of two people in a car accident —  writer-director Zach Braff overstuffs the film with too many distractingly histrionic happenings for a compelling reflection on guilt and forgiveness to really emerge.

What’s more, any potential A Good Person has is squandered by the film’s frequent and bizarre tonal swerves from tearjerking sincerity to generational comedy, a jarring effect mimicked by the soundtrack’s wild veering from moody melodies to bright piano music in a single cut. Though Pugh does her customary excellent work here, she’s ultimately undermined by all the overlong, transparently manufactured, and downright whiplash-inducing melodrama around her.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Alex Wolff, Brian Rojas, Celeste O'Connor, Chinaza Uche, Drew Gehling, Florence Pugh, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Jackie Hoffman, Jessie Mueller, Lauren Yaffe, Molly Shannon, Morgan Freeman, Nichelle Hines, Oli Green, Ryann Redmond, Sydney Morton, Toby Onwumere, Victor Cruz, Zoe Lister-Jones

Director: Zach Braff

Better known as a podcast host, Stavros Halkias proves that he does have the writing ability and (the lack of shame and/or pride) to come up with effective jokes from his own perspective. But his momentum just doesn't hold throughout this hour-long special; he starts strong and keeps a coherent train of thought throughout the whole routine, but the latter sections begin to rely on gross-out comedy and potshots at the audience more than anything. Halkias knows who his audience is and he's very fortunate to be able to perform in front of people who seem to be very familiar with his style. But for a wider range of people watching through streaming, his more relaxed style of storytelling may come off as him simply droning on without particularly great timing.

Genre: Comedy

Actor: Stavros Halkias

Director: Ben O'Brien

As exciting as it sounds to have a real person transported into a fictional story, An American an Austen really doesn't do much with its protagonist's foreknowledge of the plot, nor is it particularly clear about the rules or consequences of Harriet's situation, if any. This means that much of the film consists of watching Pride and Prejudice play out in a slightly more tongue in cheek fashion, as the main character comments on things without doing too much about them. Similar to Hallmark's other recent Jane Austen-themed movies, however, there is a thoughtful message here about learning to face reality and not idealizing fictional romances—delivered in a pretty competent visual package. It's just a shame that this is buried at the end of a plot that has no stakes to speak of.

Genre: Comedy, Romance, TV Movie

Actor: Bert Seymour, Calypso Cragg, Catherine Hannay, Charlotte Wakefield, Dominic Andersen, Eliza Bennett, Erica Ford, Grace Hogg-Robinson, J.R. Esposito, JR Esposito, Kate Nichols, Nell Barlow, Nicholas Bishop, Olivia Benjamin, Richard Gibson, Robert Portal, Robin Weaver, Sarah Ferguson, Shin-Fei Chen

Director: Clare Niederpruem

Rating: G

As documentaries go, They Called Him Mostly Harmless is pretty standard, if not forgettable, fare. There isn’t a lot of information regarding the case it focuses on, so it relies heavily on interviews with related persons and “internet sleuths” who have taken it upon themselves to solve the mystery of this hiker’s identity. It moves slowly, bogged even further down by unnecessary backstories that do nothing to get us closer to cracking the case. To be sure, it’s impressive that the missing man in question was able to scrub all evidence of his existence in this digital age, but the documentary fails to build on that intrigue and instead gives us something that sputters till the end.

Genre: Crime, Documentary, Mystery

Director: Patricia E. Gillespie

Girl in the Closet is a low-budget TV movie that gives us a peek into the lives of trafficked children, but nothing more beyond that. There is no compelling story or drama; no suspense as to how the children might possibly escape, or rousing speeches about how the system failed these kids. Instead of a real plot, the movie strings together one shocking abuse after the other and constantly jumps forward in time (one year later, five years later, nine months after) in an attempt to rush towards its predictable ending. It would’ve been thoroughly unwatchable if it weren’t for some dedicated performances, namely by Peters and Roman, who give much more than what the flimsy script and loose editing deserve. 

Genre: Drama, TV Movie

Actor: Daijah Peters, Danielle LaRoach, Remy Ma, Stevie Baggs Jr., Tami Roman, Teisha Speight, Willie Raysor

Director: Jaira Thomas