Review: "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" Provides Wonderful Family Entertainment

By Christopher James

It’s been 18 years since Antonio Banderas’ Puss in Boots first flashed his huge eyes onscreen in box office smash and Cannes in-competition film Shrek 2. Though the Shrek franchise faded with each half-baked sequel, Puss in Boots got the origin story treatment in a 2011 installment. A decade later you'd assume that this Puss in Boots: The Last Wish would feel stale and dated. Instead it's a charming winner filled with imagination and fun! The story is a familiar one, centering around wish fulfillment and a grand race. Yet, there is plenty of juice left in this fairy tale world. The film blends childlike mania with poignant themes of belonging to make this perfect programming for families looking for a movie this holiday season.

When we catch up with Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), he’s leading a sing-a-long about his prowess while getting in a fight with both a town and a giant...

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Donnie Linko

• Esquire wonderful profile of Jake Gyllenhaal who is (maybe) at a career crossroads
• Shadow and Act suggests actresses for the upcoming Angela Davis biopic. It's certainly going to be a killer role for the right person. Have any suggestions of your own?
• Independent Sydney Sweeney talks about her work on Euphoria and that people aren't paying attention to the performance, just the nudity
• Playbill Antonio Banderas is doing Sondheim's Company as Bobby in Spain right now. He's surely the oldest Bobby ever (at 61 when the plot is very much about being in your 30s) but we'd so love to see this.

Review: "Uncharted" Stays Straight, Too Straight, On Course

by Jason Adams

When is a cannonball not just a cannonball? When it's a sight-gag aimed straight at Tom Holland's crotch, that's when. Rolling up out of nowhere in the explosive and overblown finale to Ruben Fleischer's fitfully entertaining but mostly lifeless video-game adaptation Uncharted -- which involves two full-sized pirate ships being swung below dueling helicopters careening through tropical passageways; don't ask --  the cannonball strikes me as more than just a cannonball and more than just a kick-in-the-nuts punchline. The cannonball becomes a Mousetrap-type puzzle-piece that Uncharted doesn't have the madcap skill to deploy in any interesting fashion. It's a what-could-have-been in the movie that never was.

Because a better filmmaker would've introduced that cannonball, or, even better, dozens of them, earlier...

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Nathaniel in Venice: "Official Competition" and "107 Mothers" surprise

Nathaniel reporting from Venice, a smorgasbord of days 3 through ??? ... I've lost track of days. What is time?

107 Mothers (Péter Kerekes)
A ‘tough' movie doesn’t have to be hard to watch. 107 Mothers isn’t ‘easy’ in its characters or themes, but it’s a surprisingly gripping watch, even entertaining. For a few scenes in the beginning of 107 Mothers, a new film from a Slovakian director Peter Kerekes, it feels like you’ve stumbled into an unfeeling doc about a women’s prison for violent offenders. And, indeed, this narrative feature is based on real stories about a specific prison in Odessa, Ukraine and Kerekes usually does documentaries. The establishing scenes interview several of the inmates, all pregnant, about their crimes which usually involve murdering their boyfriend/husband or his lover. It’s a curiously incongruous feeling that settles in: how could such hard-eyed numb women muster enough passion to commit a “crime of passion"?

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Horror Costuming: The Skin I Live In

In October, we'll be celebrating the excellence of costume design in horror cinema.

by Cláudio Alves

Pedro Almodóvar's 19th feature harkens back to a time two decades earlier when the Spanish director was one of European cinema's most shameless provocateurs, an enfant terrible willing to rub the face of polite society in utter tastelessness, jolly amorality, and lustful perversity. Adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a sordid tale that mixes melodrama with horror, handsome mad scientists and beautiful Frankenstein monsters. More than anything, as its title suggests, this is a film about skin and the places people inhabit…

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