Netflix users may have noticed a new Chinese sci-fi movie called The Wandering Earth pop up on their home page this month. While most Americans probably haven’t heard of the movie, it’s the year’s biggest film in China, where it grossed $693 million (plus an additional $7 million overseas). That makes it the second-highest-grossing non-English film in history following the 2017 hit Wolf Warrior 2, which I reviewed last year.

Arthur Brooks has never been a man short on ideas. While that has served him well as a best-selling author (The Road to Freedom, The Conservative Heart) and president of the American Enterprise Institute, it’s clearly a challenge for him to pack his wide-ranging social and economic ideas into 76 minutes.

Think of them as Marvel movies for the younger set. After Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), and Beauty and the Beast (2017) successively pounced on the box office like Shere Khan on poor little Mowgli, Disney executives are now rolling out remakes of their classic animated films nearly once a quarter, to varying results. Before the next two years are out, audiences will reportedly be treated to a live-action Lion King, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sword in the Stone, and Pinocchio.

A New York moment:

I enjoy the Tribeca Film Festival because it gives more space to projects from film-world outsiders, unlike the New York Film Festival, which tends to showcase films from famous directors that already have theatrical distribution and Oscar prospects. Tribeca feels like a place where anything can happen, where you can find a documentary about a pastor in North Dakota or a feature film in Romanian. 

The soil was dead. John and Molly Chester stood amid their dusty, 200-acre farm in Southern California wondering whether they could coax plants from the hard-packed dirt. They dreamed of turning the land into a sustainable farm, but the earth would not give up its bounty without a fight. The documentary The Biggest Little Farm (rated PG for fleeting bad language and scenes of the birth and death of animals) tells the story of the seven years the Chesters spent turning Apricot Lane Farms from a wasteland into a garden.

If you aren’t passionate about J.R.R. Tolkien and the world he created in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, you might find Tolkien (rated PG-13 for language and war violence) a perfectly pleasant movie.

Set mostly in Edwardian England with brief forays to World War I–era France, the biopic is heavy on pleasingly musty academic atmospheres and lovely pastoral scenes. Picture the misty, cobbled lanes of Oxford leading alternately to overstuffed armchairs in cozy tea rooms and to glades of flowering cow parsley beneath deep forest canopies. 

The U.S. child welfare system is overwhelmed. Over 400,000 kids are in foster care, and child protection agencies field around 4 million calls of abuse or neglect each year. Foster, a new documentary premiering on HBO May 7, offers a view of the situation from Los Angeles County, home to the largest child welfare agency in the country.