A Secret Love Provides Simple But Heartwarming Pleasures

A Secret Love will receive one of my shortest movie reviews in a while. However, that shouldn't be taken as a comment on it being lackluster in quality or not being substantive. It's just that the movie sets out to do something relatively simple and achieves it. Sometimes you can break films like this into complex explanations for how they secured their artistic success. Sometimes, though, a movie like A Secret Love reminds you of its success in more basic, but no less worthy, terms. A documentary that wants to be a heartfelt tearjerker succeeds in being a heartfelt tearjerker. You don't need 3000 words to explain why this one works.

Beastie Boys Story Isn't Substantive But It Is a Fun Trip Through the Past

Beastie Boys Story is a reunion in a number of ways. The most obvious example of this is that the two surviving members of the band The Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, are coming together to tell tales about their experiences working together over the last thirty years. In another sense, this provides director Spike Jonze a chance to reunite with The Beastie Boys after directing a number of their music videos (including the one for Sabotage) in the early 1990s. Everybody's reunited and it feels so good. Those good vibes aren't enough to make Beastie Boys Story something outstanding but they are enough to make it a pleasant watch.