The things that elevate Chiwetel Ejiofor’s film are those that elevated Rob Peace’s life overall.
When Hudson is singing her heart out, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, the effect is transportive.
At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary characters feel as if they’ve been air-dropped into a universe where they don’t belong.
The tea leaves tell us that this is a more unpredictable Oscar race than most people are perhaps willing to admit.
Dee Rees’s film scrutinizes how World War II laid bare the unsustainable hypocrisy in America’s bigoted divisions.
The London Sessions announces itself in its very title as a jaunt outside of Blige’s comfort zone.
A collection of comments about winning, losing, perseverance, discipline, violence, compassion, exploitation, responsibility, and ambition.
For anyone who prefers their assertive homilies to crust over like a syrupy sweet, this loose adaptation of Langston Hughes’s beloved holiday tradition will come on like a dream fulfilled.
A Mary Christmas is an undeniably listenable but sadly too-safe hodgepodge of department-store standards.
Rock of Ages eventually ends, but that doesn’t change the fact that enduring it feels like eternal torture.
My Life II…The Journey Continues (Act 1) feels like a corrective, one which intends to restore soul back to prominence.
The Help represents a pitiful lack of progress, and that’s hardly an indictment of the ways its characters and events are depicted on screen.
Blige, as always, does her damnedest to sell every clichéd platitude and mixed metaphor.
I Can Do Bad All by Myself is as polished and eager to please audiences as it is remarkably inoffensive.
It’s hard to get beyond the very title of Mary J. Blige’s eighth overstuffed collection of affirmations, self-definitions, and keepin’-it-real-isms.
Is there a general consensus in the industry that Mary J. Blige is owed something?
What’s a retrospective when entire chunks of a career are unaccounted for?
In many ways, Breakthrough does present a more grown-up Mary.
First the good news: Love & Life is vintage Mary.