PREVIEW PICKS
Sundance Film Fest tickets, “One Night in Miami” are top picks.
1. Barry Gibb
With luck, last month’s Bee Gees documentary has enlightened some to Barry Gibb’s status as musical polyglot and not just a purveyor of admittedly fetching disco. Bee Gees fans who know “Marley Purt Drive” could hear the country music influence in his work a halfcentury ago, long before he wrote hits for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. “Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1” finds the last living Bee Gee working with Parton and other Nashville players, like Jason Isbell, connecting musical circuits decades in the making.
Where: Available now through music retail and streaming services.
Andrew Dansby
2. ‘Cobra Kai’
Some fans will have already buzzed through Season 3, since Netflix nudged its release up by a week. Picking up from last season’s cliffhanger, the show nudges along the savory story of battling dojos, sweet soapy content that masks a deeper undercurrent about how we sometimes create our own mythologies in our youth, with heroes and villains who aren’t exactly heroes and villains. Rewatching the first two “Karate Kid” films is recommended, though not essential, for a contextual assist.
Where: Streaming on Netflix Andrew Dansby
3. ‘One Night in Miami’
Regina King has made a name for herself in front of the camera in “Watchmen,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and so many other projects in recent years. Now, she goes behind the lens with her first feature, and it’s an impressive calling card. Written by Kemp Powers (who codirected and co-wrote “Soul”), it sets up a fictional conversation that Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adair), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) had after Ali’s legendary 1964 defeat of Sonny Liston in Miami. The ensemble cast simply knocks it out of the park.
Where: Opens Jan. 8 at Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra, Katy; Cinemark 17, The Woodlands; Cinemark Pearland; begins streaming Jan. 15 on Amazon Prime.
Cary Darling
4. Sundance Film Festival
Tickets have just gone on sale for three of the Sundance Film Festival’s satellite screenings taking place in Houston at the end of the month at Moonstruck DriveIn. Screening are: “Passing,” (photo) starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in a story of two African American women in 1929 passing as white (Jan. 30); “I Was a Simple Man,” about a Hawaiian family facing the death of a family member (Jan. 29); and “Coda,” a drama involving a hearing child of deaf adults who has to choose between abandoning her parents and her love of music (Jan 28).