Based on story idea by Sam Shepherd. One day Wal Henderson receives a call from a remote town in Texas: a man called Travis Henderson was found passed out in a bar. He needs help. Walt flies out to Texas, rents a car, and picks him up: it is his long lost brother who disappeared for four years after his marriage broke up. He has been wandering the dessert, we assume, or the environs, but we never get any details about how he didn't starve to death, and meet with any other unfortunate demise. Walt picks him and brings him home to his sympathetic wife, Anne, and son Hunter. Only, Hunter is actually Travis' son, which creates a bit of tension with Anne who doesn't want to lose custody. Travis eventually connects with his son and sets out to find his mother who we learn is living in Houston from where she deposits money into an account for Hunter on the same day of every month. Those are the incidental details but "Paris, Texas" is really about the harsh, wasted, vacant landscape of the outposts in the wilderness and the sterile cityscapes of America, and how the emotional life of some men and women is as dislocated and unattached as the dessert gas stations and motels and city apartments in the sensitively filmed story-- accented beautifully by Ry Cooder's music, mostly slide guitar and dobro. The slow-moving story gets to you, hauling you along pace-fully on these long road trips, dawdling conversations (some of which sound improvised), and characters gazing out at the cityscape, the airport, and the highways. It is America, emptied of contrivance and illusion, wounded and desperate, lonely and alone. Wenders is a meditative director, but he will also toss in a sequence of man on a bridge preaching to no one, warning hysterically of an impending doom that no one can escape. Hunter is played with quiet delicacy by the child of co-writer L. M. Kit Carson. The ending was not satisfying to me-- Wenders is an optimist there. It felt to me like Jane had no life other than waiting for Travis to show up and that long last scene in the peep show seemed as remote from the rest of the film as the last scene in "Wings of Desire" in the bar where the characters clumsily enunciate their soulful desires to each other. Perhaps he felt the audience needed a light at the end of the tunnel. It also reminded me of the last scene of the searchers, but in a diminished form. It also should be observed that Travis's account of his early marriage to Jane will make you cringe, but Jane doesn't even communicate her discomfort with the incidents he describes, and the film doesn't seem to resolve the tension between his solicitude at the peep show and his consciousness of just how badly he managed the relationship early in the marriage. It's all a little too pat, too facile.
Harry Dean Stanton, Natassia Kinski, Dean Stockwell, Aurore Clement, Bernhard Wicki, Hunter Carson, Tom Farrell
Bryan Fogel is an amateur cyclist who, shocked by Lance Armstrong's revelations, sets out to prove that athletes can get away with doping on a grand scale because of laxity among the authorities enforcing the doping rules at international competitions, including the Olympics and the Tour de France. But along the way, the story takes a big detour into the affairs of a Russian doping enforcement administrator who actually facilitates doping for Russian athletes and, bizarrely, agrees to help Fogel with this scheme. Fogel takes up elaborate procedures, taking shots and storing his urine, while bigger events unfold involving Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian facilitator. The Sochi Olympics comes along-- with the Russians taking a record haul of gold medals-- and the Rio Olympics coming up, and Rodchenkov leaves Russia and is questioned by U. S. authorities, and the New York Times which writes an expose. Scandal erupts but the Russians hunker down and the IOC ignores advice from it's own investigative teams and allows the Russians back into competition, while Rodchenkov, fearing for his life, must go into hiding. An uneven film-- I'm skeptical of Rodchenkov's accounts, and a good deal of screen time is occupied by sequences not convincingly connected to the central point. Rodchenkov is, after all, the bad guy here, who turned on his masters, but Fogel becomes so attached to him that his perspective is untrustworthy. I am surprised-- then I am not surprised-- that it won "Best Documentary" at the 2018 Oscars.
Bryan Fogel, Dave Zabriskie, Grigory Rodchenkov, Don Catlin, Richard McLaren, Dick Pound, Thomas Bach, Vitally Mutko
Robie and Alex Flores return to their home town of Eagle Pass, Texas, to meditate on their childhood in the border city, the collusion of Latin and American culture, their parents, and the loss of their brother, Marcelo. We are not told in the film that Marcelo died in Mexico after, probably, having an epileptic seizure while near a body of water. So Robie and Alex process their grief while showing us numerous scenes of activities in Eagle Pass, the border, a park, teens and children playing sports, and themselves being filmed and filming. It all doesn't amount to very much-- there's no real substance to their reflections or visuals.
Robie Flores, Alex Flores, Marcelo "Mars" Flores
Lively, fascinating story of Tyrus Wong, a brilliant Chinese artist who worked for Disney for a while (on "Bambi") but also, amid widespread discrimination against Asian artist, developed his own career as an artist. Intimate look at his family life and his background poverty, and his honorable father who borrowed the money to send him to art school.
Tyrus Wong
Elwood, a promising young black high school student, is caught in a car driven by a car-thief in Florida and is sent to a reform school, Nickel Academy (named after a founder) where he meets and befriends Turner. "Nickel Boys" dramatizes the horrifying events that actually happened at many of such institutions (for blacks and for indigenous Americans) though it is based on a fictional novel by Colson Whitehead. Elwood is inspired by the civil rights movement while his friend Turner is far more cynical and believes nothing about American racist culture will change. They become aware of torture, possible sexual abuse, and even murder at the academy and decide to flee, but guards chase them down. The film unusually shoots from the perspective of either of the two main characters, sometimes alternating, sometimes viewing from behind a character's head. Unexpectedly (to me) this works, even when they sometimes flip characters in the middle of a sequence. Well-filmed and beautifully acted, and with a daring, stirring, original soundtrack.
Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-TAylor, Ethan Cole Sharp, Sam Malone, Najah Bradley, Gabrielle Simone Johnson, Gralen Bryant Banks, Luke Tennie, Trey Perkins, Craig Tate, Tanyell Waivers
Also written by Line Langebek Knudsen. Karoline is a young woman living in Copenhagen in 1919. Her husband has been to war and not returned. She works for Jorgen sewing uniforms, and flirts with her. When she becomes pregnant, he agrees to marry her but his mother disapproves and the wedding is off. Karoline's husband returns, disfigured, from the war, and wants to resume their marriage but she rejects him. She meets a woman, Dagmar, who knows who to handle illegitimate babies, finding loving families for them, and Karoline brings her baby to her, and eventually joins her in her store where she helps with other illegitimate babies. We learn some very uncomfortable truths about women's lives at the time, the fate of the babies, and the harsh options available to women in Karoline's position. Filmed beautifully in black and white, with a stark, searing soundtrack, and astonishing recreations of the city-scape, the film builds up a corrosive sense of sustained suspense and lingering horror-- not at any violent or horrifying monster, but at the monstrosity of life in that era, for women, for soldiers, for everyone. Karoline is neither an innocent victim nor an instrument of justice or retribution. The male characters arrive with the viewer's expectation of violence or abuse but they are merely the vessels of the institutionalized social norms of the time. We are surprised by the twists this movie does not take, until it takes one very shocking turn. Brilliantly acted and directed, and unforgettable.
Vic Carment Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Joachim Fjelstrup, Tessa Hoder, Ava Knox Martin, Soren Saetter-Lassen, Benedikte Hansen
Hard to believe this is by the same director as "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" but it is. If the TV sitcom "Seinfeld" is supposed to be about nothing, "Clouds of May" really is about nothing. Muzaffer wants to make a film using his parents, Emin and Fatma, and nephew Ali, as actors. He hangs around, films them talking about being in the film (or not wanting to), and follows Emin to his land which he is worried about: the government is sending agents around to tag the trees and claim the property. It's not clear how this works exactly. Emin wanders his property, gives line readings with the aid of prompter, while Muzaffer directs. Muzaffer's friend Saffet is considering moving to Istanbul to find a job and Muzaffer discourages him and they argue about his prospects there. Ali has to carry an egg without breaking it for 40 days to get a watch from his dad. Ali and Muzaffer find a tortoise and study it for a time. And that's about it. Why did the film win such acclaim? Because it wouldn't be cool to dis a film that is so anti-film as this? Or did some critics really love the cinematography and editing and sound? I suspect a bit of both. It's a kind of folk film: just us normal people hanging around doing what we usually do, mostly, and talking about making a film which we never know much about. It's a diversion, not unpleasant, but not really as special as its partisans would have you believe.
Emin Deylan, Muzaffer Ozdemier, Fatma Ceylan, Mehmet Emin Toprak, Muhammed Zimbaoglu, Sadik Incesu
Lavish, delicate, impressionistic film of Proust's "Time Regained". Ruiz tries to capture the flavor and tone of Proust's alleged masterpiece, with subtle shifts in time, having characters sometimes face their younger selves, or watch re-enactments of scenes from memory, including parties and teas and numerous conversations. Marcel remembers women he adored and men indulging homosexual liaisons. Sometimes it is suggested that he is present, observing from a discrete distance. Other times, we hear conversations Marcel is not likely to have heard-- his imagination, I presume, of what was talked about. The characters age, talk about the war (World War I), about friends who were changed. These are privileged folk, living in extravagant mansions, with servants and maids attending to them, some with discernible mild distaste for their chores, as one would expect. Does it all work? I'm not sure-- the milieu is so distant from my own that it doesn't always feel connected to a familiar reality. But it is beautiful to watch.
Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Vincent Perez, John Malkovich, Pascal Greggory, Marcello Mazzarella, Marie-France Pisier, Chiara Mastroianni, Arielle Dombasie, Edith Scob, Elsa Zylberstein, Christian Vadim, Dominique Labourier, Philippe Morier-Genoud, Mathilde Seigner
Based on a novel by Scott Heim. Two boys, Neil and Brian, are sexually abused by their little league coach. Based on Heim's personal experience, this very odd contrivance veers towards uncomfortably empathetic treatment of the pedophile coach-- he is very nice to Neil, grooming him, obviously, and Neil doesn't, at first, seem very disturbed by this experience. Why? Because he's gay? The film doesn't want to imply that he became gay because of the experience, but the implication hovers over it's treatment of Brian, who, the film would have us believe, blacked out and repressed the memories of the abuse. This is discredited dime-store psychology. Neil grows up to be a male prostitute and we see extended sequences of him having sex with creepy male customers, including one who brutalizes him. Brian, in the meantime, has a memory of a UFO. He somehow-- no explanation-- links his memory lapse to Neil, seeks him out, and together they break into the house formerly owned by the coach (on Christmas Eve, with the tree and presents visible), so Brian's memory can be prompted. The implausibility of this and many other sequences is disturbing, given the context. Is Araki trying to say something about sexual abuse, or is it a character portrait of two troubled youth? If it's meant to be a portrait, it's a banal excursion. Gordon-Levitt is okay in the role, but he seems completely unattached to the world he lives in-- he doesn't even lock the door when leaving the apartment, and he seems clueless about the signals given by the abusive customer. The child Neil, who is supposed to be eight, is left unattended by his mother, and is able to spend time at the coach's house with accountability. That's possible, but the film doesn't show us how that's possible. Unusually, the film does show more about the sex than we can expect (apparently, filmed in such a way that the child actors did not actually perform some of the intimate scenes). Araki has the distinction of having directed a film that Roger Ebert gave zero stars to his trilogy including "Totally F***ed Up".
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elizabeth Shue, Chase Ellison, George Webster, Rachael Nastassja Kraft, Lisa Long, Chris Mulkey, Bill Sage, Michelle Trachtenberg, Riley McGuire, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Mary Lynn Rajskub
Iman is a judge-investigator for the Islamic administration in Tehran. He has just been promoted and receives a handgun for protection, because of dissident threats to the government. His wife is pleased, and delighted at the prospect of more money, better housing, and the prestige, but his daughters are sympathetic to some of the protests going on after the real-life death of Mahsa Amini, the 22 year-old Kurd, who was arrested by the moral police for not wearing her hijab correctly. Iman is at first reluctant to execute the government's harsh measures but learns to compromise. His wife harangues here two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, to remain uninvolved in any activity that could endanger Iman's position, but when a friend of theirs, Sadaf, is seriously injured in a demonstration, tensions rise. Then Iman's pistol goes missing. And suddenly, "Seed of the Sacred Fig" becomes and entirely different movie. From a thoughtful, expressive, insider look at Iranian culture and politics, it transforms into a cheap horror-thriller, with Iman madly hauling his family off to a remote residence that is embedded in some kind of ancient ruin-- with prison cells! The absurdity of this sequence becomes manifest when the three women escape on foot and decide to separate. There is no comprehensible explanation for this strategy, especially since they all reunite when required for the penultimate resolution. It was really quite bizarre, and hugely disappointing. The film went from an eight to a five in the transition. I cannot even imagine what the producers and editors were thinking. Even more bizarrely, the film nominated for best foreign film at the Academy Awards for 2025. Be it also noted that because the story line was considered too intense for teenagers, older actresses (31 and 32) had to be used for the roles of what were intended to be teenage daughters and their friend (who were about to enter college).
Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Setareh Maleki, Mahsa Rostami, Niousha Akhshi, Reza Akhlaghirad
Based on novel by Ford Maddox Ford. BBC series about a doomed marriage between Christopher Tietjens and Sylvia Satterthwaite. She is a sophisticated, amoral shrew who torments Christopher precisely because he is so "good" and pure and forgiving. She can't stand it. There's a good lesson in human moral behavior here: he is a constant reminder to her of her own deficiencies and cruelties. But Christopher also belongs that class of English male protagonists who might as well go around hitting themselves in the face with a 2 by 4. He is so self-righteous and pious that one almost roots for Sylvia. His true love, in this scenario, is Valentine Wannop, played by the incomparable face of Adelaide Clemens who was 23 at the time but looked 17. I say face because I'm not sure if she can act or not: she's just so compelling to look at, that one gets Christopher's obsession with her immediately. Valentine is introduced as a suffragette who becomes a teacher and is so besotted with Christopher's purity and perplexity that she explicitly offers to ruin her own reputation and prospects gladly for an hour or so with him. It's unclear what was all left on the cutting room floor but there is no doubt the story meanders unpredictably and sometimes inexplicably. Christopher is sent to the continent as a horse wrangler but is maliciously sent to battle by people who detest him for the same reason Sylvia does. Sylvia pursues him to publicly accuse him of having a mistress-- she identifies Valentine-- which he righteously denies. Sylvia has affairs (she doesn't know if her son, Michael, is Christopher's) and then doesn't (she declares that she has been chaste for five years, then complains that she made the sacrifice for nothing). Somehow a tree called Grobby is central to something but it wasn't clear to me what it was. Cumberbatch, as Tietjens, looks like he's still working on his craft at this stage of his career, and sometimes merely appears prissy and prim and masochistic. He refuses to divorce Sylvia, but, in the end, it is suggested that he will shack up in his lavish mansion with Valentine anyway. Entertaining at times, but I wouldn't watch it again.
Roger Allam, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ellio Levey, Patrict Kennedy, , Tom Mison, Adelaide Clemens, Miranda Richardson, William Ellis, Rebecca Hall, Janet McTeer, Rupert Everett
Captain Douglas, on loan from British Petroleum, is put in charge of a small team to go behind German lines (400 miles) and blow up a fuel depot. Colonel Leech is the cynical commander of the group who is instructed to just make sure Douglas makes it back alive (after other British officers on assignment with him did not). This is a familiar trope: disreputable men, with criminal records and dispositions to brutality, form a capable team that, through cunning and ruthlessness, are able to accomplish what more conventional men cannot. (We see another British team, dispatched for the same mission, fail spectacularly). Leech is so brutal that he forces Douglas to watch helplessly as the Germans launch a surprise attack on a British platoon. Douglas begins to learn from him and the team becomes ruthless in pursuit of their mission. But, this being the late 1960's, "Play Dirty" is pessimistic-- even cynical-- about the purpose of missions and the military in general, ending with a sardonic "don't do it again" in response to one more atrocity. Similar to "Bridge on the River Kwai" in that respect. Compelling action sequences, and the spectacle of real practical effects make it very watchable, even enjoyable on that level. Well-acted and written.
Michael Caine, Nigel Davenport, Nigel Green, Harry Andrews, Patrick Jordan, Daniel Pilon, Bernard Archard, Mohsen Ben Abdallah, Mohamed Kouka, Vivian Pickles
Another cautionary tale about directors who think they don't need a writer. Director Corbet wrote this script, with help from his partner, Mona Fastvold. And it shows. A lot of sequences play like actors improvising, sometimes tastelessly and badly. Laszlo Toth is a concentration camp survivor who makes it to America (in a very bad, hand-held jerky camera sequence) and takes menial work to survive though he was an accomplished architect back home in Budapest. His cousin Attila, and Catholic wife Audrey (Attila-- Jewish-- is assimilated) takes him in, gives him a room in his shop, and sets him up to work in his furniture store, through which he meets the Van Burens, a very wealth family. He designs a library for them and after initial rejection (and validation by an architecture magazine) is hired to build an ambitious community centre. But they hedge on his work, hiring a second architect to review his drawings. Laszlo, in the meantime, succeeds (with help) in bringing his wife and niece over from "somewhere" in Europe-- a displaced persons camp. My point is, none of these details is carefully thought through or developed with any sense of reality. Well, it is "loosely based" on "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, and it shows. Laszlo, we are given to understand, is the genius who visionary designs are impeded by mediocre men who can't possibly comprehend his monumental intellect. For all that, the buildings we see are incomparably ugly. There is a reason "brutalism" never caught on. (Habitat 67 at Expo 67 in Montreal is "Brutalist".) Some very weird, cringy sequences, like when Laszlo meets Attila for the first time after the war and they hug and hug and hug with homoerotic overtones. He also has an intimate relationship with Gordon, a black man, with no discernible purpose in the story, or individual characters. Virtue-signalling? (Laszlo stands up for him a relief service when the kitchen runs out of food.) He seems to exist only to prove that Laszlo is less racist than the other characters. Laszlo doesn't seem sexually interested in his wife, after she arrives, but we don't really get any development there either. His niece, Zsofia, seems to have a sexual encounter with Van Buren's son-- or does she? Is it rape or consensual? Laszlo has an opium addiction. The discussions with the building foreman, Leslie Woodrow, and Laszlo and Van Buren seem detached from any real process or situation or detail, as if the actors improvised those scenes without regard to the narrative. I assume we are supposed to get how visionary geniuses are often obstructed by mediocre men, which is what Ayn Rand would have us know. Queerly, this kind of dynamic resonates most famously with Nazi Germany, and the Brutalist structures echo Speer's vision of German architecture under the Reich. Like Coppola's "Megalopolis", "The Brutalist" is a mess, sloppy, unconvincing, and indulgent. Brody always seemed to me to be angling for another Oscar, while most of the supporting cast were actually quite serviceable had this been a more coherent film.
Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwayn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Isaach De Bankole, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde, Jonathan Hyde
It's hard not to believe that "Black Box Diaries" was only nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary for ideological, political reasons. This is a mediocre vanity project in which Ito, directing herself, filming herself, recording herself, weakens the political point by making the story about herself, her own passion for not being ignored. It's about me. As a result, we get very, very little information about the alleged miscreant, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a celebrated Japanese journalist. The fact that Yamaguchi is probably guilty doesn't alter the fact that "Black Box Diaries" is not good journalism and not a good documentary. There is no attempt to present a journalistic survey of the issues, the personalities involved. There are gratuitous scenes (like Ito trying to chase down a member of parliament) that have no bearing on story or content. We barely know what Yamaguchi is accused of, exactly. Even worse, Ito asks us to feel for her story because we feel sorry for her, because she cries on camera, threatens to commit suicide, is mocked and ridiculed on social media. But because she hasn't laid out the stakes or the social context of the story, we are unmoved. She's not wrong about the issues, but inviting the viewer to respond to them because we feel sorry for her is still manipulative and short-sighted. Showing herself bobbing to "I Will Survive" in a car after the verdict in her favor is nearly cringy. This should have been a podcast. It should be nowhere near the Oscar for best documentary; it isn't remotely in the class of many brilliant previous winners like "The Fog of War", "Grey Gardens", "Bowling for Columbine", "Citizenfour" or many others.
Shiori Ito, Norijyki Yamaguchi
Fascinating, powerful, impressionistic documentary on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, focusing on the events leading up the coup, and counter-pointing them with a slew of jazz performances, linked by a tour of the Congo and other African countries by Louis Armstrong who, unknowingly, was being manipulated by the CIA, to provide a distraction or cover for various nefarious goings-on in the Congo and it's breakaway state, Katanga. The heart and driving force of the story is, of course, the incredibly valuable metals mostly found in the Katanga province and coveted by the U.S. and Belgium, including uranium, radium, copper, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, germanium, manganese, silver, gold and tin. As Lumumba took control of the Congo government after Belgium was finally forced to cede it's independence, the Western powers realized that the mining company, UMHK (Union Miniere du Haut Katanga) might actually to return some of the value of the products to the people of the Congo. Even worse, Lumumba, who was receiving support from Khrushchev (as well as India, and many other recently independent African countries), might consider other markets, like the Soviet Union. When it was evident that most of the Congo supported Lumumba, the Americans and Belgians began bribing parliamentary representatives in the Congo to vote to depose Lumumba. At the U.N., Dag Hammarskjold was clearly manipulated into sending a peacekeeping force that actually became a tool of the Katanga separatists (led by When that didn't work, they recruited a Colonel (why is it always a Colonel) named Mobutu (later known as Mobutu Sese Seko) to lead a coup, arrest Lumumba, and eventually assassinate him. Malcolm X famously reacted to Kennedy's assassination with the phrase "the chickens have come home to roost", alluding to the assassination of Lumumba. It was an altogether despicable and appalling episode in American foreign policy (led by Allan Dulles) and Belgian colonial history. The film is bold and daring, building momentum through its carefully curated segments of jazz by artists like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Mile Davis, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and, of course, Louis Armstrong. The music is not background: it is evocative of the chaos of events at the time, the various solos, ensembles, and discordant acts of various elements of the disaster, and the intense personalities of vital players like Lumumba, Castro, Malcolm X, Nasser, and others.
Patrice Lumumba, Nikita Khrushchev, Dag Hammarskjold, Dwight Eisenhower, Louis Armstrong, Andree Blouin, Joseph Kasavubu, Paul Henri Spaak
Sincere documentary about the residential schools in British Columbia near the Sugarcane Indian Reserve, St. Joseph's Mission in Williams Lake. Noisecat is the grandson of a surviving victim of the abuses at the Catholic-run school. The style is more impressionistic, investigating the emotional and psychological impact of the abuse on generations of indigenous families, rather than documentary. And here weaknesses show, in the focus on how the trauma of the residential schools personally harmed the relationship between Julian and his father. I watched this one day before watching "Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat" and noted how "Soundtrack" was relatively free of the somewhat self-serving narrative of "Sugarcane". Yes, the residential schools were terrible and the priests and nuns who ran them-- and the Catholic church as an institution-- are responsible for the grievous harms they caused. But it is also clear that the subjects of the film find it convenient to attribute substance abuse, neglect, and other personal failures to the demon of the schools. We didn't need to see Julian pressure his father into admitting he was absent to get the point. It nudges the film into personal therapy and virtue signaling, at the expense of the drama. On the plus side, we hear from Rick Gilbert and his wife Anne, devout Catholics, who seem more ambivalent about the issue-- smartest element of the movie. But they do travel to Rome to hear Pope Francis give a disappointing "apology" for the schools. It is quite possible that he doesn't entirely believe the schools were not a fundamental "good" in the lives of the indigenous children, in spite of a few shortcomings (a la Strangelove). The music is good-- sparse and evocative-- the cinematography is okay.
Willie Sellars, Charlene Belleau, Whitney Spearing, Ed ARchie Noisecat, Julian Brave NoiseCat, Kye7e Kye7e, Jean William, Rick Gilbert, Anne Gilbert
One of those French movies in which characters announce how they are so existential and conflicted and where the is moved by the same ennui that seems off-putting to the viewer. Stephane works for Maxime, who runs a shop that repairs violins for well-known musicians. They meet Camille, an astonishingly beautiful violinist (who seems about 20 years younger than the married Maxime) who needs some work done. She falls for Maxime at first, and he leaves his wife and acquires a new apartment for the two of them. But Stephane is the introvert, the sensitive, soulful partner, and she is moved by his more sophisticated awareness of her amazing talent. Or is she? It's hard to tell what moves her. And the characters have that mode of sophistication in which Maxime actually seems to be angry at Stephane because he has made Camille unhappy by not hitting on her-- which, of course, makes her more infatuated with him. What is Camille's relationship with Regine? Hard to tell-- but if it weren't for the year the film was made in (1992) one would suspect they were lesbians. One also suspects that maybe Stephane is homosexual-- how else to explain his lack of interest in bedding Camille? It may have seemed deep and interesting in 1992 but it doesn't today. The dialog is stiff and schematic. Stephane's dry resistance offends more than intrigues. Maxime would strike one today as a predator. Camille doesn't seem to have anything to offer Stephane anyway, other than her beauty. Incidentally, Emmanuelle Beart is quite credible as a violinist, though that is not her performance that you hear. Impressive.
Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Beart, Andre Dussollier, Elizabeth Bourgine, Brigitte Catillon
Prabha and Anu are nurses working in a hospital in Mumbai. Parvaty is a friend who is having landlord issues. "All We Imagine as Light" is a symphony of quiet interactions, conflicts and resolutions, uncertainties, resolves, and friendship. Prabha has a husband in Germany she has barely met-- an arranged marriage. Anu has a boyfriend and a family beginning to urge her to accept and arranged marriage. Parvaty is being evicted from her apartment by a crooked landlord and decides to return to her village. It is through her that Prabha learns lessons of acceptance and friendship, expressed towards Anu, though the transition is somewhat mysterious: she performs cpr and mouth-to-mouth on a drowning victim, which evokes a mystical experience with her husband, though it was never clear to me if this was fantasy or projection or myth. Ultimately, it's not about that: it's about friendship, impermanence, aspiration, and love, and mostly, loneliness. A beautiful, affirming film.
Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad, Anand Sami
Yuval Abraham is a Jewish journalist and friend of Basel ADra, a Palestinian activist. "No Other Land" documents the struggle of a small Palestinian community in the West Bank to survive years of harassment by the Israeli military attempting to "persuade" them to leave. The courts have prevented Israel from simply interning them, so, instead, the JDF bulldozes their buildings, harasses them, arrests them at protests, and so on, until, finally, Israeli settlers move in an actually attack (with guns) the community. Compelling for content, not style. A lot of the footage is very shaky, poorly composed shots of stuff happening, and aimless conversations between Basel and Yuval, talking about how they don't get enough media attention. They're right but it gives the documentary an off-putting polemical tone. I suspect that a portion of the favorable reviews it gets is due to the political content, not to the power of the film. The film doesn't fairly represent the Israeli view, the suspicions they may have about the community's loyalty to Palestinian hostility to Israel.
Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal
Elliptical, obtuse film about two boys who get into trouble at school, told from different points of view a la "Rashomon". First, Minato's mother, Saori Mugino, gives her experience dealing with her son's teachers and principal after an incident in which he is struck and insulted by a teacher. The teachers and principal prove to be incredibly obtuse and cryptic about what happened, while profusely apologizing. We get the point of view of the teacher, Hori, who is alleged to have been at a "hostess" event the night the building caught fire. We get Minato's version, and then his friend, Hoshikawa's version. Other bit playes-- particularly the principal, and a classmate-- also offer deceitful contributions. All of the accounts vary considerably and we have to extract the truth from their varying accounts, where we discover that the adults have been manipulative, deceitful, and oppressive, while the two boys have been innocent, natural, and wholesome. All of this to get the message out that the boys, who are "different" (ie. homosexual) are oppressed and harmed by the adults (and their classmates) around them. The music, by Ryuichi Sakamoto, is delicate and impressionistic and works well; the cinematography is pedestrian. The acting is reasonably good. The two boys have chemistry though one does wonder about the adult nature of the story they are asked to tell.
Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, Soya Kurokawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Akihiro Kakuta
Controversial operatic film about a Mexican cartel lord who decides to transition to female, while moving his family to Switzerland to protect them. His transition serves two purposes: it allows him to go into hiding and exit the cartel business, and he really wants to be a woman. After five years, however, he longs to be reunited with his family and employs the lawyer, Rita, who arranged his transition, to convince his wife, Jessi, and children that he is a cousin of the disappeared husband and father, and they must move into her house in Mexico. Complications ensue, as one might expect, particularly when his ex-wife takes up with Gustavo and wants to marry Jessi. Karla Sofia Gascon, who portrays Emilia, is a trans woman actress, and is reasonably convincing in the role-- the audience might be surprised when she is encountered years after the transition-- but Zoe Saldana as lawyer Rita is the real star of the film. Unfortunately, the clever cinematography, striking musical numbers, and excellent performances can't deflect some major flaws, not the least of which is the ridiculous suggestion that helping family members recover the bodies of family members killed by the cartels is somehow admirable when led by Emilia-- who, as Manitas, was responsible for a lot of deaths himself. It's insulting and trivializing of the issue. Latino critics have also been scandalized by the absurdly inaccurate accents employed by Saldana (Rita) who was supposed to be native Mexican and Selena Gomez as Jessi. And there's more! LGBQ+ advocates don't think the portrayal of the trans Emilia was honoring enough of their cause. In emotional tone, the movie spirals into a trans "Wuthering Heights" at times, and the director couldn't resist the temptation of a spectacular ending at the expense of credibility (who would bring ransom to the kidnappers at an isolated location where they would have no reason leave a witness). It just doesn't live up the grandiose schematic in the end but it's great fun at times and Zoe Saldana really does give an Oscar worthy performance.
Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir, Eduardo Aladro
Dry, passionless story about a woman with terminal cancer, Martha, who reconnects with an old friend, Ingrid, partly in order to arrange to have someone with her when she terminates her life with a pill acquired through the "dark web". Mysteriously reviewed kindly by several reviewers, I am baffled that the director of "Matador", "All About My Mother", and "Talk to Her", is capable of such a flat, life-less production on such a compelling subject. Firstly, the dialogue is remarkably banal, predictable, and cliche-ridden (as when Ingrid cites Martha's work as a journalist based in Paris, of course, or when Ingrid tells Martha she is busy moving- "you know what moving is like"-- as if she assumes we need to know that Martha may have moved sometime previously). Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton are both, normally, capable actresses, but here they seem completely unrehearsed, at times as if they are reading from cue cards. All the twists-- well, not really "twists"-- of the plot are transactionally, flatly rendered. Any possible complications are tidily resolved. Damian is introduced as a token former lover with no discernible role in the outcome. The police seem weirdly interested in whether a terminally ill cancer patient might have offed herself, and the threat of being caught hovers over the narrative as if it really had any relevance. Ingrid and Martha have a near gay experience with each other, intimate, affectionate, but nothing much is made of it. Then, ridiculously, Michelle, Martha's daughter, enters the plot, played by Tilda Swinton , desperately trying to look twenty years younger (and failing). There is some kind of reproachment between the deceased Martha and Michelle, we are supposed to believe, but it is handled with numbing flatness. The music is mostly string-quartet-ish: pretty good but not enough to move the viewer. Almodovar makes sure we know how positively the two women feel about even transient sexual relationships.
John Turturro, Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Alex Hogh Andersen, Victoria Luengo, Esther McGregor
Erratic but entertaining series about "Slough House", a division of MI5 where failed agents go. In each of the four seasons (so far), they inadvertently become enmeshed in a very big, significant intelligence screw-up (usually due to corruption or nefarious rogue elements) and somehow manage to overcome the bad guys but still end up looking like screw-ups. Well acted and well filmed, clever, a bit over the top at times, but fresh and diverse.
Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hugo Weaving, Jonathan Pryce, Ruth Bradley, James Callis, Joanna Scanlan, Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Rosalind Eleazar, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Kadiff Kirwan, Naomi Wirthner, Sean Gilder
Charming, genteel, modest meditation on friendship, love, and languor. Four women arrange a month-long vacation in an Italian castle on the coast of the Mediterranean in April and find the experience pleasant and invigorating. Not much really happens: they arrive out of the dismal English rain and their shabby dissatisfying lives and revel in the sunshine and beauty of the villa (including a staff of cook, cleaner, and handyman-gardener). Rose is moody and reserved. Lotty is vivacious and optimistic. Mrs. Fisher is older, tidier, more fixated on order and punctuality. Caroline is a beautiful actress who is having an affair with Rose's husband and there is a lovely moment of astute forbearance when he surprises the group by arriving to connect with Caroline without knowing that his wife is there as well. Not much happens, other than the women talking and exploring and napping and reveling in a newfound sense of pleasure in themselves. It's almost likes "Babette's Feast" with a garden standing in for the food. Even Mrs. Fisher lightens up. It's all very pleasant and wholesome without being sentimental or contrived and you realize how the movies have trained you to expect bitter conflict or ridiculous coincidence or despair and how refreshing it is to see this film deliver it's unexpected affirmations of simple conviviality. "Enchanted April" was filmed in the same castle where author Elizabeth von Arnim wrote the novel it is based on, while staying there for a time. There is no road leading to the castle: cast and crew had to walk up a hill for mile to reach the location.
Alfred Molina, Joan Plowright, Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker, Josie Lawrence, Neville Phillips, Jim Broadbent
The idea must have seemed good: a close look at a companion to the sickly Lytton Strachey, a young woman who seems, at first, to identify as a boy, but later becomes rather vividly heterosexual, and her enduring relationship with the writer. They meet and flirt-- not seriously-- and eventually establish a menage a trois with a man named Ralph Partridge. Partridge eventually fell in love with another woman and broke the arrangement. Carrington longed to marry Strachey but he wouldn't have it and she was so anguished at his death of stomach cancer that, a month later, she shot herself. Contrary to some critical opinion, "Carrington" is lifeless and dull, though lavishly filmed in old mansions and gardens. Emma Thompson never finds her character, never evokes the charisma Carrington is said to have had (numerous men fell in love with her and wanted to marry her), and Pryce seems steadily distant and morose. It just doesn't work. Even the love scenes seem perfunctory. We never do find out what Strachey was famous for (mostly critical tomes on the Victorian era, though he was "inspired" by Dostoevsky) or what he really cared about, other than himself. The film is restrained, I suppose, but so restrained that it seems static and rote.
Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce, Steven Waddington, Samuel West, Rufus Sewell, Penelope Wilton, Janet McTeer, Jeremy Northam, Alex Kingston, Peter Blythe
Here's the outline of the story: Elizabeth turns 50 and shockingly discovers that men prefer younger women. After a car accident, she is offered "the substance", a magical potion that will make her young again. She accepts it and a younger Elisabeth is born-- like the alien in "Alien" from her body-- and gets to live the life for seven days before she must hibernate for seven days while Elisabeth goes back to her own 50-year-old body. The new Elisabeth, now called Sue, goes for an audition, becomes a hit, and is so absorbed in her delightful new life (she is actually joyfully accepting and embracing being judged for her physique) that she starts to hedge on the rules, resulting in grotesque permutations of her body. Dennis Quaid plays a slimeball producer named Harvey. I assume he represents all of us disgusting men, leering and chortling while eating-- always a dead giveaway for the villain-- and promoting Sue to the New Year's Eve extravaganza. And then it all breaks down as does the film, into a voluminously overcooked final scene starkly reminiscent of the restaurant scene in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" (except, in comparison, the Python sketch had taste. Once again, we have women making a corrosive film about how they feel about what they think men feel about beauty and youth and sex. Even better: what lesbian women think men think. And they are absurdly wrong about nearly every aspect of it. Well, wait-- I suppose there is a category of men who admire thongs and large breasts-- clearly, that is what Fargeat thinks most men are obsessed with. But then she inadvertently proceeds to create a striking, vulgar, obscene, grotesque symphony to the idea that aging women are not beautiful. She tries to shift the blame here to men, but it's Elisabeth who buys into the equation. Fargeat makes a token attempt (when Fred bumps into Elizabeth and expresses an interest in her) to suggest that there might be a rare man who does care about character, but it is Elizabeth who finds herself inadequate and in spite of Fargeat's manipulation, it really is her own fault. This monumental film fails to make the case for the feminist critique at the heart of its concept. There's the irony: she eviscerates men for judging women by their physical beauty but ends up building the entire edifice of her film on the argument that beauty really matters-- it's just that men don't judge it correctly. It's like Amy Schumer constructing entire films in order to contrive a scenario in which men find her irresistibly attractive-- while condemning men for preferring more conventionally beautiful women. "The Substance" is a reimagination of "The Picture of Dorian Gray", though far more repellent and obscene. In fact, what it's missing is the soul of the Wilde story, a structure that reveals something about character and relationships. There is nothing in "The Substance" that probes beneath any surface whatsoever. It's all about shocking scenes of vulgarity and disgust-- mostly, women's disgust with their own bodies. The most dishonest feature of the film is the focus on the "male gaze" when we know that women judge each other far more harshly than men do. That said, it's a clever film. The direction is creative and fresh and striking and involves hundreds of technicians creating colorful sets and then it's all spoiled by herky-jerky handheld shots to conceal the failure to conceptualize action sequences. Many shots, mostly close-ups of needles and flesh, are dragged out to the point where you really wish Fargeat would just get on with it. Other scenes are arbitrarily repetitive with no dramatic effect. Why on earth did this receive a standing ovation at Cannes? Liberals relishing anything that smacks of reverse misogyny? Or the transgressive effect, where something you think other people will find shocking must be daring and original, like Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist" or "Nymphomaniac"? Audiences can sometimes fail to distinguish between something is shocking because it is artistically or intellectually daring (like "Rashomon" or "Monsieur Verdoux" or Von Trier's "Dogville".
Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Edwward Hamilton-Clark
Ah ha! Written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg's nephew! Unfortunately, that helps explain this mediocre fluff-piece in tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The main focus is on her landmark case before the 10th Circuit (not the Supreme Court) over whether a male bachelor was equally entitled to a tax break for hiring a care-worker for his elderly mother while he worked at his job (Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue). But we get a generous dollop of her relationship with her husband, Martin, who, as the film shows, was very supportive, successful in his own career, and progressive politically. The film fares less honorably in the portrait of Melvin Wulf, the head of the ACLU, who is shown to be sexist, bullying, and unenthusiastic about taking on Moritz. In fact, the ACLU almost immediately supported the case. Two of the women, Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray, never participated in preparations for Moritz as shown in the film, which is too bad, because Pauli is one of the few characters in the film that breathes any life. This is a painfully mediocre film, poorly acted and poorly directed. Felicity Jones is way to young to play Ginsburg at almost any age (she was barely older than the actress playing her daughter), and the scene in which Ginsburg presents her rebuttal-- taking a long time to gather her nerves (I presume)-- is pure bad melodrama. And it never happened. Ginsburg did not flub any part of the presentation and did not even give a rebuttal.
Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Sam Waterston, Kathy Bates, Cailee Spaeny, Jack Reynor, Stephen Root, Chris Mulkey, Wendy Crewson, Sharon Washington
The first twenty minutes or so are compelling. Dr. Robert Neville, a military scientist of some kind, is all alone in Manhattan having survived a terrible virus that was supposed to kill cancer but instead killed most humans, or changed them into vampire zombies. They have to stay in the dark, so we have the best part of the film: Neville wandering around abandoned Manhattan. Hunting. And trying to find a cure for the virus. Good use of silence and pretty good special effects until the CGI intrudes, and until the idiot director resorts to jerky hand-held camera movements to generate vicarious "action". This is early CGI and not very good. The zombies were supposed to be actors in make-up by it was decided they looked too much like mutant mimes so they were also replaced by CGI creatures, also to the films disadvantage. The biggest problem is that Will Smith is a lousy actor who inhabits this role with all the gravitas of a wet mop. The one scene in which he is marginally effective is, well, marginally effective. But when he does his scientist thing it's hard to believe that this man knows the difference between a test tube and a microscope.
Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Willow Smith
(Developed by David Simon) "We Own This City" (6 episodes, on Crave) is one of the best drama series on policing and crime I have ever seen. Based relatively tightly on a true story about corrupt police offices in Baltimore in the aftermath of the Freddy Gray scandal, it dissects the tension between the public demand for "tough on crime" policing and the efforts of the justice department (under Obama) to reign in police abuse and racism (an effort that died with the election of Trump).Jon Bernthal, as Jenkins, is terrific, and most of the cast is also very good. The series flips back and forth, cleverly, between incidents of corruption (the police stealing money and drugs from dealers, and money from other innocent people who happen to fall into their crosshairs) and the investigators from the FBI and the justice department, as well as a Civil Rights investigator who has a hard time persuading people that there is any hope of change. The police force in Baltimore was so rife with corruption that it became difficult to prosecute anyone even for actual crimes because so many potential jurors had had run-ins with the police and were prejudiced against them. (Note: it's not really prejudice when your attitude is well-founded). Surprisingly, many of the cops caught in the investigation become eager to cooperate (except for two of them) and the court system did seem to pull through in convicting them.
Jon Bernthal, Jamie Hector, Josh Charles, Dagmara Dominczyk, Wunmi Mosaku, Delaney Williams, McKinley Belcher III, David Corenswet, Domenick Lombardozzi, Nathan Corbett, Don Harvey, Treat Williams, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Bobby Brown
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