The year just passed was an ordinary one for Hollywood. In a sense, that’s good news since the film industry is still on the rebound from the pandemic and a double whammy of strikes.
Author Barbara Robinson’s 1972 children’s novel The Best Christmas Pageant Ever comes to the big screen in a gentle, family-oriented adaptation, helmed by Dallas Jenkins.
As a small-town church prepares for the annual production of its tradition-bound yuletide pageant, the show’s novice volunteer director (Judy Greer) is daunted to find that a brood of notoriously misbehaving siblings (led by Beatrice Schneider) have bullied their way into the principal roles.
Visual craftsmanship, dramatic force and a powerful performance from Cristiana Dell’Anna in the title role combine to make director Alejandro Monteverde’s Cabrini a riveting retrospective. As the future saint ministers to Italian immigrants in New York City, she gets only tepid support from Gotham’s Archbishop Corrigan (David Morse) but gains more enthusiastic backing from a newspaper reporter (Jeremy Bobb) and a reformed streetwalker (Romana Maggiora Vergano).
Set in the 1830s, The Convert is a lush and intelligent historical drama in which a lay Protestant missionary (Guy Pearce) with a troubled past arrives in New Zealand to serve the inhabitants of a primitive British settlement there.
The military and the mystical continue to blend in Dune: Part Two as the youthful protagonist (Timothée Chalamet) of the 2021 original, now an exile, fights for the desert dwellers (led by Javier Bardem) among whom he’s taken refuge on the titular planet while falling for one of their warriors (Zendaya). Although she advocates a purely secular role for her new love, the lad’s priestess mother (Rebecca Ferguson) continues to insist that he is the messiah figure foretold in various prophecies. Director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve enthralls with sweeping visuals, appealing central characters and an absorbing plot.
Inside Out 2, a worthy successor to the outstanding 2015 animated psychological comedy, returns viewers to the mind of a now-teenage girl (voice of Kensington Tallman) where the onset of puberty finds the personified emotions featured in the first film, led by Joy (voice of Amy Poehler), being displaced by a range of new feelings, Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke) foremost among them, and the lass’ previously upright moral core being threatened by a warped ethos based on the longing for popularity at all costs.
In the fact-based Holocaust drama, Irena’s Vow, a young Catholic Polish woman (Sophie Nélisse) uses her position as housekeeper to a Wehrmacht officer (Dougray Scott) to hide 12 Jews in the cellar of the villa he had requisitioned for his residence.
One Life is an understated recounting of the heroic activities of Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn), a British stockbroker who, on the eve of World War II, rescued hundreds of children, most of them Jewish, from a brutal fate at the hands of the Nazis in occupied Czechoslovakia, a crusade in which he was aided by his persistent mother (Helena Bonham Carter). As the protagonist reflects on these events in old age (Anthony Hopkins), unexpected developments lead to belated public recognition of his accomplishments.
The 1992 murder of a little boy in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project provides the factual backdrop for the insightful drama We Grown Now, which follows two 10-year-old best friends (Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez) as they pursue the simple pleasures available to them as residents of that facility.
Wicked, the first instalment of a lavish two-part screen version of the long-running Broadway musical, provides an origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Erivo) who first appeared in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” As directed by Jon M. Chu, Winnie Holzman’s script, incorporating the stage music and lyrics of Stephen Schwartz, evokes sympathy for the pathos of its misunderstood and shunned protagonist’s plight while garnering laughs from her roomie’s vain ditziness. The tale’s basic message about standing up against prejudice and persecution is congruent with Gospel values.
The Wild Robot, an animated adaptation of the children’s book by Peter Brown, written and directed by Chris Sanders, offers solid and refreshing entertainment for the entire family. An orphaned gosling (voice of Kit Connor) bonds with a shipwrecked alien robot (voice of Lupita Nyong’o), who rises to the occasion, adapting her programming to serve as “mother”, teacher, and peacemaker, while a sly fox (voice of Pedro Pascal) instructs her in the predatory ways of the natural world.