Doc Corner: HBO's 'The Sentence'

By Glenn Dunks

If I told you The Sentence was a documentary about the frustratingly pedantic injustice of the American judicial system and how it directly targets minorities and in particular one specific mother of three in Michigan, you would probably think there is much ground to cover and any number of directions the film could go. Unfortunately for viewers intrigued by the subject, The Sentence isn’t that film. In its place is a documentary that too often feels like just a collection of home movies strung together with little insight into the processes and machinations of the system.

The Sentence follows the story of director Rudy Valdez's own sister, Cynthia, and the efforts that eventually lead to her pardon in 2016 on drug charges. Cynthia was jailed in the mid-2000s due to something of a loophole known as “the girlfriend problem” despite years apart from the man who actually committed the crimes and now living a life of domestic normalcy...

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Barry Jenkins on the Red Carpet

Barry Jenkins was in Rome Sunday to promote If Beale Street Could Talk. Was he...

...so overwhelmed with the adulation that he passed out on the red carpet?
...just really jet-lagged?
...super chill about his glamorous life as an auteur?
... Other ______ (write in votes accepted in the comments)

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Stage Door: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

by Dancin' Dan

You'd be forgiven for thinking, as I did way back in 2013 when it was first revealed a Harry Potter play was in development, that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was going to be an unmitigated disaster. The last time a stage show based on a billion-dollar book and film franchise requiring inspired technical elements opened on Broadway, it was Julie Taymor's legendarily disastrous Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, a production plagued by poor decisions and bad luck from the start. You'd even be forgiven for still being skeptical when Cursed Child opened in London in 2016, and reports from the West End were nearly all rapturous. After all, Rowling and Potter are national treasures, so surely the Brits might have been blowing this a bit out of proportion, right?

Well, dear reader, I'm here to tell you to believe the hype...

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Halloween's Big Weekend and More...

by Nathaniel R

The return of Jamie Lee Curtis to the Halloween franchise meant big business in movie theaters over the weekend, continuing a strong October. Meanwhile A Star is Born held on to second place for a third consecutive week. It's already the highest grossing release of 2018 to never hit #1, since its surpassed the Mamma Mia  sequel's gross. A lot of platform releases kicked off this week to in the rev up to awards season. More after the jump...

Weekend Box Office (October 19-21)
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
1. 🔺 Halloween $76.2 *NEW* Review	1. 🔺 Free Solo $1 on 251 screens (cum. $3.6)

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Beauty vs Beast: Scream in your PJs

Jason from MNPP here - if you went and saw David Gordon Green's Halloween this weekend did you catch that voice cameo in the classroom scene? Mirroring a near identical scene in John Carpenter's original we see the granddaughter of Laurie Strode discussing the subject of Fate in her English class, and the voice of her teacher is none other than that of P.J. Soles, aka Lynda from the first movie and a total Horror Icon. Totally! And so we feel like giving some love to P.J. today, whose seal of vocal approval must count for at least 50 million dollars of its insane opening weekend box office. Totally. Just two years before Halloween Soles memorably co-starred in Brian De Palma's Carrie as Norma, another example of "girls making really bad choices in their best friends, and so let's face them down...

free polls

PREVIOUSLY Clearly we're on a Halloween kick, having gone the Jamie Lee Curtis route last week - only this time it was Linsday Lohan who got shivved with a knitting needle in the neck, JLC taking just under 90 PERCENT of your vote on our Freaky Friday poll. Ouch, way to kick a redhead when she's down, y'all! Said Mareko:

"Lohan is indeed great in this movie—it still pains me to think of what could’ve been had she stayed focused on her talent vs. celebrity—but Curtis is the real MVP, no question. Love that the NYT stanned for her so hard in 2003, as you do, and she should’ve *easily* scored an Oscar nom over the likes of Naomi Watts and even Samantha Morton."