'Spenser Confidential': Film Review

“Tape,” a guerrilla indie drama that confronts some of the ways sexual harassment has been embedded in the entertainment industry, begins with Rosa (Annarosa Mudd) getting ready to go undercover — but really, she’s dressing for battle. After rigging herself up with a hidden camera, she mutilates her body in homage to Lavinia in “Titus Andronicus,” piercing her own tongue and using a razor blade to carve a bracelet of blood around her wrist.

[Note: In the wake of SXSW's cancellation this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Movies about boys in high school and college spill over with reckless partiers, nerdy loners and aggrieved misfits eager to show the world what they're made of.

There will likely be no shortage of movies dealing with #MeToo themes, but Deborah Kampmeir's indie feature scores points by being one of the earliest. A hard-hitting psychological drama about an actress who surreptitiously monitors her former assailant and his current prospective victim, Tape benefits from its well-executed thriller mechanics and terrific performances by its three leads.

Young Deragh Campbell is a hard actress to forget, even in offbeat roles like an obsessed researcher of family history in MS Slavic 7or its docudrama precursor Never Eat Alone, both by filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz. Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft.

Refreshing as a river dip on a hot day, but also mildly melancholic, as though perhaps it is the last swim of the summer, Guillaume Brac’s wise, witty “À l’abordage” is an optimistic portrait of gentle disappointment, the kind a youthful generation has to experience before growing up a little bit.

Red Heavenis timely in a way that the filmmakers could not have anticipated when they started making the documentary five years ago: It gazes head-on at isolation, confinement, boredom and stress — issues that nearly everyone is confronting in some combination or another as the world goes on coronavirus lockdown. But there's a lightness to the film as it explores weighty matters, along with a dash of reality show dynamics, framing cosmic questions in a familiar format.

Mark Wahlberg is speaking candidly about his past criminal behavior as well as his difficult upbringing. The 48-year-old actor spoke with The Guardian, the British news outlet, to promote his new Netflix film “Spencer Confidential,” when he was asked about growing up in a difficult part of Boston and his past experiences engaging in criminal behavior.

Netflix’s action comedy film, Spenser Confidential, has proven to be a hit with movie fans who have been stuck indoors due to the coronavirus pandemic. It is directed by Peter Berg and stars Mark Wahlberg, Black Panther and Us actor Winston Duke, Alan Arkin, Bokeem Woodbine, and Post Malone. In the movie, roommates Spenser (Wahlberg) and Hawk (Duke) team up to take down criminals after two Boston police officers are murdered.

Every time a new mental-health therapy arrives, it’s propelled by the ideology — and the testimonials — of a religion. Sigmund Freud’s descriptions of psychoanalysis all point to the miracle-cure mythology of the moment when a patient, at long last, touches the nerve of his or her suppressed trauma and is liberated from it.

Like any good science documentary, “Human Nature” starts with a hypothesis. The filmmakers posit that audiences are bored by the dry format of most science docs, but that there is a better strategy to present complex concepts about biology in such a way that both educates and entertains.

Mark Wahlberg joins the Netflix game with Boston set detective story Spenser Confidential, reteaming with his Lone Survivor/Patriots Day/Deepwater Horizon/Mile 22 director Peter Berg. 

Director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg putting their collaborative stamp on the Spenser novels (as well as the television show Spenser: For Hire) was always going to go one of two ways. Either their cinematic style would take the character and property in interesting new directions, or their version wouldn’t vibe.

With his perverse (and some might say perverted) look at the early life of Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister W. L.

LOS ANGELES – Mark Wahlberg exudes the aura of immense humbleness, and he often feels as though he’s still making a name for himself in Hollywood. The Tinseltown staple is a shoo-in for top-billed projects, but that doesn’t stop his approach of not only welcoming new and different challenges but making sure he delivers on each and every project he works on.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – “Man, you get beat up a lot,” an aspiring boxer tells the eponymous punching bag/pulp-fiction private eye Mark Wahlberg plays in “Spenser Confidential.” “And I’ve noticed every single time you get your face pushed in, you come back with just a little bit more information.” That’s a pretty apt description of Spenser’s modus operandi, and one of several self-aware winks that makes this genre-bruising made-for-Netflix action vehicle a lot more fun, if not nearly as

This is a list of all the best new shows and movies released on Netflix the week of March 6 to March 12.

Two older working-class men, both secretly gay, meet by chance and a hidden relationship develops in “Suk Suk,” the poignant third feature from writer-director Ray Yeung. Inspired by a sociology professor’s oral history of older gay men in Hong Kong, the drama incorporates documentary-like elements about end-of-life issues for gay elders.

“Man, you get beat up a lot,” an aspiring boxer tells the eponymous punching bag/pulp-fiction private eye Mark Wahlberg plays in “Spenser Confidential.” “And I’ve noticed every single time you get your face pushed in, you come back with just a little bit more information.” That’s a pretty apt description of Spenser’s modus operandi, and one of several self-aware winks that makes this genre-bruising made-for-Netflix action vehicle a lot more fun, if not nearly as respectable, as Wahlberg’s four

Here’s some perfectly mindless couch viewing.

Leslie Odom Jr. and Freida Pinto make sympathetic, easy-on-the-eyes lovers in “Only,” an absorbing post-catastrophe drama, in theaters and on demand March 6. Consider “Only” a variation on the “What would you do in this horrid situation?” subgenre. Only it’s more a “What would we do?” which can be an exponentially more challenging proposition. (Hard enough to agree on where to get takeout.)