Spielberg without a decent story, and, well Spielberg being Spielberg. Tedious sequence of jungle trails, chase, screaming, a few extras becoming snacks, more chase, more screaming, various nefariousnesses, and so on. You get the sense that no one's even trying to make a serious movie anymore: just put dinosaurs on the screen and let the actors yell. Add a helicopter and a ship and a few guns.
Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Richard Attenborough, Vince Vaughn, Vanessa Lee Chester, Peter Stormare, Richard Schiff
Outstanding TV series about the guests at an exotic hotel in Thailand under the umbrella of "The White Lotus". It's a bit of destination-porn, but the drama, characterization, writing, and filming are all very good. We get three old friends, Kate, Laurie, and Jaclyn, one of whom is a successful actress (who is paying) reuniting for a dicey week of snippy envy, jealousy, and judgement. They collide over sex with a hunky staff member, Valentin. There is a family, the Ratliffs, supposedly there so Piper can do some research on Buddhism. The father, Timothy, finds out that prosecutors are after his company and him and he is likely to face a harsh prison sentence when he returns. There is a woman employee who is training, it appears, but wants to open her own spa. She sees Greg, the man she suspects murdered Tanya in the previous series, and her son suggests they blackmail him. Another staff, a guard, is courting beautiful young Mook, but she wants someone more ambitious. He tries to fit the bill. Then there is Rick Hatchett, with his girl friend, Chelsea, who plans to murder the owner of the resort, Jim Hollinger, whom he believes caused the death of his father years ago. "White Lotus" is fresh and there are wonderfully unexpected plot twists-- and a few holes (would Timothy really forget what he left in the blender before going to bed?) But the characters are well-drawn and acted, the sets are entrancing (of course), and the weirdness quotient is just about right. A bit of satisfaction, a bit of heartbreak in the end.
Jon Gries, Jennifer Coolidge, Natasha Rothwell, Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Novla, Patravadi Mejudhon, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong, Aimee Lou Wood, Arnas Fedaravicius, Christian Friedel, Charlotte Le Bon, F. Murray Abraham
A company named Lumon has developed a procedure by which employees can severe their minds so that all of their experiences at work are completely isolated from their experiences at home. At work, they are known as "innies" and at home, "outies". They have no memory of the work at home or of home at work. For all they know, they could be married to a co-worker. We mostly follow Mark Scout, though the other characters are given generous space. Mark's wife died in a car accident so he embraced the idea of having a large part of his day "severed" so he didn't have to think or even know about his loss. Of course this is problematic (how do you keep language, and technical knowledge, separate from incidental memory?). But the set up is intriguing. Especially when the worlds begin to collide, as when the co-workers, Mark, Helly, and Dylan, and Irving-- find a way to temporary integrate the personalities. Or, rather, let the "innie" out into the world for a brief time. Since we're not sure what Lumon is really up to, the consequences are mysterious. And what does Lumon actually produce? What do they want? It appears that the company may be mostly about the process of severance itself, but Erickson is obviously saving that kind of revelation for later seasons. The acting is very good, especially Adam Scott and Britt Lower, and-- hell, everybody. And the first two seasons are mostly satisfying. But there is a hint of a tendency to wallow in cinematically beautiful scenes without providing a good narrative drive to them, as when Harmony meets an old friend, Hampton, in her home town and then meets him at the factory and then the house where Sissy lives. Is this really going anywhere? The concept is rich and has a lot of resonance with the realities of corporate culture and mindless management tropes and occasionally it profoundly touches on issues of human connection, love, and identity. I am just not sure at this point that it's really going anywhere-- the real challenge.
Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Dichen Lachman, Patricia Arquette, Michael Chernus, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Marc Geller, Sarah Bock, Karen Aldridge, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Micahel Cumpsty
Rambling, shambling film that follows a 12-year-old, Marta Ventura, as she prepares for her confirmation in a small town in Italy. Marta's family is from Switzerland but has moved back to this small town in Southern Italy, one assumes because the father has abandoned them. Very low-key, prosaic story, Marta fighting with her sister, attending confirmation classes with a number of disinterested village children, discovering a box of kittens, ending up, through happenstance, traveling with the priest to his own hometown to pick up a large crucifix. Marta says little, and articulates nothing in speech, but conveys her alienated personality through action and body language. The church is shown to be hopelessly distant, irrelevant, and silly through Rohrwacher's realistic depiction of the rites and ceremonies and the darkly uncaring priests and a bishop who take part in the confirmation. There is a riveting sequence at the church in the priest's abandoned home town: an elderly priest at first believes Don Mario is stealing the crucifix. While Mario takes a call outside, Marta asks him the meaning of the latin phrase of "my father, why has though abandoned me" and he gives Marta a stunning lecture on Jesus and how he was rejected by everyone and his own family thought he was insane. When Marta later tells Mario what Don Lorenzo said, he veers off the road and hits a barrier and the crucifix flies off into a river. Refreshingly free of mission: none of the adults are really bad, nor good. The priest, the uncle, the man who hauls away the kittens-- they don't threaten. They are just part of the community Marta cannot connect to. A remarkable, uncompromising slice of life.
Yile Yara Vianello, Salvatore Cantalupo, Pasqualina Scuncia, Anita Caprioli, Renato Carpentieri, Maria Trunfio
The pitfalls are obvious: curmudgeonly old man (single of course, or virtually single in this case) meets young mom with cute kid and proves that he has a heart of gold. "St. Vincent" does a remarkable job of dodging the obvious traps. Vincent remains curmudgeonly to the end, and he really is an asshole-- not just a safely anodized version of one. Melissa McCarthy is also a gift here, allowed to act rather than mug. She is Maggie, a young mom moving in next door to Vincent, with a young son, Oliver, who is played very well by Jaeden Martell. He isn't too cute or contrived or passive. He has a personality and he develops a great repartee with Vincent. Vincent, through happenstance, becomes Oliver's babysitter while mom Maggie works at a hospital. Vincent demand to be paid and he takes Oliver out on unsuitable excursions to the bars and horse tracks. They do some betting together and Oliver becomes attached to Vincent even while he seems to disdain him. Vincent's wife, Olive, is in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer's. Daka is a prostitute who is pregnant and services Vincent on a regular basis though Vincent, in financial trouble, sometimes doesn't pay her. Perhaps the one false note is when the nursing home informs Vincent that it cannot continue to care for Olive if he stops paying them. Vincent acts as if this is an act of cruelty, as if we live in a system in which premium care should be or is offered to anyone regardless of ability to pay. But Vince berates the nursing home director as if the system is her fault. The film resolves the issue without really dealing with it by side-stepping it. The cinematography is good, if nothing special, but the music, songs by Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, Dylan, and others, is excellent.
Bill Murray, Naomi Watts, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O'Dowd, Terence Howard, Jaeden Martell, Kimberly Quinn, Dario Barosso, Ann Dowd
Incomprehensibly dull comedy about a murder in the White House. "World's Greatest Detective" Cordelia Cupp (flatly portrayed by "Orange is the New Black" actor Uzo Aduba) is summoned to the scene and basically holds an entire state dinner entourage hostage while she bird-watches and then interrogates staff and witnesses until she succeeds in assembling a disordered collection of useless incidents providing the audience with an incoherent impression of conniving, lying, self-seeking suspects. The story doesn't just have a few red herrings: it has only red herrings, and the viewer is bludgeoned with arbitrary plot twists and revelations until it doesn't care who did it any more. There is an occasional laugh. But there is also the unforgiveable fact that Cordelia Cupp is incredibly boring. She gives long-winded, tedious speeches that are supposed to impress or amuse us in some way but the plot is so ridiculously thick and under-developed that I began to wish someone would just shoot her. Inexplicably, IMDB gives it an 8.3. What??!!! The Guardian gives is 4 our of 5 stars and calls it "gleeful escapism". Perhaps for masochists. The fundamental problem is the satirical elements don't hang on any kind of structured narrative that gives you revelations or nuance. It's all just patter and misdirection. I don't sense any real awareness of how people might behave in the situation being parodied. The makers couldn't even be bothered to identify Republicans or Democrats-- as per Hollywood's pernicious commitment to the principle of lowest common denominator. Al Franken is pretty good as Senator Filkins but even he becomes tiresome after the umpteenth iteration of witnesses refusing to identify who they saw leaving the room where the body was found. And you begin to feel really sorry for the cast that has to sit around and look interested while Cordelia prattles on and on about her "brilliant" theories of the case, which is mostly half-baked mystery thriller cliches from Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives. The penultimate revelation is so protracted and ridiculously contrived that it just fizzles. It can be done: Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau comes to mind, but not with the dreary approach and uninspired performances of this series.
Uzo Aduba, Giancarlo Esposito, Molly Griggs, Ken Marinao, Randall Park, Susan Kelechi Watson, Jason Lee, Al Franken, Jane Curtin, Kylie Minogue
Another testament to my principle that most directors should not be delusional enough to assume that they can also write. "Canadian Bacon" is more a series of bad sketches than a comedy. An unpopular U. S. president is urged by advisors to find a new enemy to rally the electorate around in opposition. After a series of clumsy accidental incidents, he settles on Canada, which is holding a woman who came over with a group of vigilantes to litter. The woman is being held in a hospital (free health care). Not always or even often funny, there are few good gags, like the OPP officer demanding that graffiti on a stolen van be translated into both official languages. There are references to the Blue Jays and the CN tower. A lot of filming appears to have been on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, including the power station. Confirmed: filmed in Niagara-on-the-Lake, St. Catharines (12-mile creek), Oshawa, Pickering, etc. Not much effort made to a develop a coherent plot (and there are several ridiculous holes), and there are obvious borrowings from "Dr. Strangelove". Rip Torn does a sub-par impression of George C. Scott in "Strangelove", and Moore conjures up something like a "war room". Passably enjoyable but meandering and soft.
John Candy, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman, Kevin Pollak, Rip Torn, Kevin J. O'Connor, Bill Nunn, G. D. Spradlin, Steven Wright, Jim Belushi, Brad Sullivan
Lane Dixon is a former medical student on the run from something. While hitch-hiking (in California somewhere) he is picked up by Bob Goodall, a black man with some formidable skills and creepy mannerisms. The story of the two of them navigating northern California runs parallel to the story of Frank LaCrosse, an FBI agent tracking a serial killer, who wins the sympathy of a local Sherriff Buck Olmstead, for reasons that might remain mysterious to us if we don't put much weight on intuition and gut sense. Olmstead is running for re-election against slick McGinnis, who isn't all bad. Anyway, the serial killer has kidnapped LaCrosse's own son (because we won't care about him catching the kidnapper - murderer unless it's personal, I assume) and left mysterious clues about how to find him, which will only work if a large number of random factors don't mess up the timing of it all. In the meantime, Serial Killer Bob offs several people he has known for years. Why? I think they were supposed to be clues to LaCrosse. Yes, it's all pretty preposterous, and features the horrible Hollywood trope at the time (and today) of having the monster, who we think is dead except we know he isn't, come back to life, once, twice, hell -- why not five times-- to once again threaten the handsome hero. A bigger problem in "Switchback" is that Jared Leto is invisible as a character.
Jared Leto, Danny Glover, Dennis Quaid, Claudia Stedelin, Ian Nelson, R. Lee Ermey, Ted Levine, William Fichtner
Thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested in his home by a formidable squad of police who also take evidence and transport him to a detention centre. His parents and sister are shocked. Each episode of the four runs in real time from beginning to end, so the first one follows his arrest and processing by the police, an interview with his father, and details the procedural steps required by the police to handle a youth charged with murder. The second episode focuses on the school Jamie attended and the efforts by the police to find more information about Katie Leonard, the victim, and to try to locate the knife that was used. Jamie's friends try to evade questioning because one of them may have been complicit. The fourth and most powerful episode-- it's actually stunning-- is an interview of Jamie by Briony Ariston, a psychologist, seven months after the murder. In a searing sequence questions and answers we learn a lot about Jamie's mind-set, his attitudes, and his character. It is clear that Briony is not favorably impressed, and nor are we. Jaime is frighteningly volatile, and continues to refuse to take responsibility. The last episode stays with the family, on dad, Eddie's, birthday, and the melancholy attempts by the family to find some normalcy. This is challenged by an act of vandalism: someone painted a slur on Eddie's truck (he is a plumber). As well, an employee of a hardware store confronts Eddie to express his "support", while Eddie is painfully aware that Jamie deserves to be in prison. Jamie is not excused or rationalized in this series: he is a mystery but one that we grasp, a boy with a good upbringing and all the advantages, who is probably bullied at school and mocked by some of the girls, who just explodes in rage at the decisive moment. It is a real and as gripping as a drama ever was about this troubling subject. Uniformly well-acted and filmed (all in one take for each episode).
Extremely popular but mediocre dramatization of how the British Post Office and it's contractor, Fujitsu, brutally ripped off numerous Postmasters or subPostmasters (referred to as "Horizon IT Scandal") between 1999 and 2015. Essentially (and contrary to the implications of the narrative), the software used to manage the postal operations was buggy and prolifically added significant charges to the accounts of more than 900 subpostmasters, who were then convicted of fraud or forced to cover shortfalls out of their own pockets. Some (actually, a lot: 236) were actually imprisoned for it. Some committed suicide after being financially ruined and having their reputations publicly destroyed. It's a great story with great potential. IMDB users seem to love it. But the acting is strikingly awful, the dialogue is banal, and the narrative lacks any kind of detail or reasonable facsimile of detail about exactly what the software does, how it works, and how people respond to errors. Did the writers think viewers would be bored by details, or by the actual language you might hear at inquiries into the issue? The drama is also not very compelling. When Alan is waiting to see how many people show up for the first meeting, it looks more like a gathering of cult members than a group of independent business owners seeing each other for the first time. One man comes late to the meeting and says "sorry I'm late" before showing any interest in confirming that he's at the right place. (Even if he was sure, the more human thing to do is to ask: "is this meeting of the subpostmasters?" or "Are you Alan?". More alarming is the passive character of Alan Bates' leadership of the subpostmasters action. The series alludes to the enormous disappointment when the award (about 59 million pounds) will mostly be paid to the lawyers and "investors" in the action. Bates is conspicuously approved of by key members of the group-- we know that many if not most may have felt (justly) betrayed by Bates' ineffective management of the cause. They "won" but only after extremely lengthy delays, and the victory was pyrrhic. The flattering coda showing Bates still fighting on raises suspicions. It's a point that shouldn't have needed to be made.
Toby Jones, Monica Dolan, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Shaun Dooley, Ian Hart, John Hollingworth, Katherine Kelly, Lia Williams
Perverse but sometimes brilliant short series about a pair of newscasters (presenters, or what have you), Madeline and Douglas, who, outwardly, at least, have "chemistry", until some anonymous person tweets that Douglas made an off-color "sexist" joke while drunk at a wedding. The first mistake in this series is Douglas seeming to admit that he made the joke without remembering what it was (he is asked to repeat the joke over and over again). The second major mistake is having Douglas, supposedly a well-known media personality, be completely clueless about how to manage a softball lob from an anonymous hater (or, as far as we know, a prankster) until, when necessary for a plot twist, he suddenly and dramatically seizes the moment. It's sudden assertiveness is as if from a different character altogether. Douglas and Toby, his producer, immediately act as if the tweet will be believed by everyone and can't be readily disputed. The most obvious path, to simply dismiss it as fake news, doesn't seem to occur to them. If he doesn't remember the joke, why confirm it at all? Add to this the ridiculously preposterous suggestion of crafting an actual anodyne joke of mild offensiveness for Douglas to admit, and one begins to lose faith in the narrative. But then we go back in time to have the scintillating conversation in Toby's apartment between Toby and ambitious young presenter Madeline. Toby, like Harvey Weinstein, suggests (without saying so directly) that Madeline will get the position she lusts for if she has sex with him. Spoiler alert!!! This is big problem for the series. Madeline doesn't leave, in disgust, even when Douglas appears at the door to invite her down to the bar. Douglas, seeing "Do Not Disturb" on the door handle, assumes, without judging harshly, that Madeline has accepted the proposition and goes away. Madeline later blames him for not rescuing her. From what? Herself? She could have walked out, obviously, at any time. Why is Douglas at fault here, as the story obviously firmly decides? And here is where the series is, finally, gutless: the story would have made sense and could have been powerful if Madeline had, in fact, made the bargain. But "Douglas is Cancelled" wants it both ways. They want to condemn Toby for making the proposition and Douglas for not stepping in while preserving Madeline's dubious virtue by having her reject Toby's advances and then, ridiculously, photograph him naked in his bathtub as if that could be used to blackmail him. But Madeline did not-- when Toby's intentions became clear-- reject the offer and leave. "Douglas is Cancelled" treats this but like a feature. The writer (Steven Moffat) also seems to have forgotten that Toby is single. Why should he give a damn if a young ingenue broadcaster posts pictures suggesting that she was in his bathroom while he was taking a bath? It's plainly ridiculous. And it would still be his word against hers as to how the circumstance came about. It would also look like Madeline had accepted the bargain. It also definitely shows that Madeline did get her position through manipulation rather than merit (Moffat seems to assume the audience will believe that she automatically has the merit). And it is also clear that Madeline has manipulated events to get rid of her co-host, Douglas, to have the program platform all to herself. For all it's flaws, the one brilliant segment, Madeline's dialogue with Toby in his hotel room, is remarkable, daring, and provocative. Too bad the rest of the series doesn't live up to the quality of this sequence.
Karen Gillan, Hugh Bonneville, Ramanique Ahluwalia, Simon Russell Beale, Alex Kingston, Ben Miles, Nick Mohammed, Madeline Power
The redeeming characteristics of this melodramatic contrivance are the spectacular crowd scenes and the glorious location settings (including a steam locomotive), and real winter scenes. The rest is meh. The real inspiration is a man named Cornelius Rost, an Austrian private, who gave us a "tall tale" rife with exaggeration and fancy about his spectacular escape from a Siberian gulag after he was imprisoned at the end of World War II. The name used in the story is Clemens Forell. The real story is not even close to the wild adventures author Bauer transcribed from Rost's oral accounts. There was a German doctor who helped Forell by encouraging him to leave immediately one night and giving him a backpack full of supplies after which he committed suicide. There were two hunters who adopted him as part of their team until one murdered the other and then pushed him down a cliff. There is a Russian officer, Kamenev, who, like Javert in Les Miserables, pursues Forell across the continent and keeps popping up at inopportune moments, as when Forell finally makes it to the bridge leading into Iran. There is a beautiful indigenous woman who nurses him back to health and makes love to him in a teepee. It's all quite preposterous and badly acted and contrived, but the scenery is fabulous. The music is drab, perfunctory semi-classical background colour. The film is mostly in German with the Russians talking Russian until they don't-- they suddenly talk German. Forell, we are told, can speak some Russian, but that doesn't explain the other inconsistencies. In some wintry scenes, breath is visible for some shots and not for others. Many sequences seem to have only a passing familiarity with the realities that inspired them: vague procedures and practices are shown that leave you wondering if any of this is based on real memory. The consensus in Germany now is that the entire story is a fabrication, as is another film "The Way Back" about a man named Slawomir Rawicz.
Bernhard Bettermann, Anatolly Kotenyov, Iris Bohm, Irina Pantaeva, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Andre Hennicke, Antonio Wannek, Irina Narbekova, Vladimir Korpus, Igor Filchenkov
Unusual, mystical animation about a group of animals trying to survive a cataclysmic flood. As the waters rise around them, a retriever, cat, secretary bird, capybara, and ring-tailed lemur find a stray boat and jump aboard and are swept along by currents and then, after finding a sail boat, the wind, through an odd world of decaying ancient buildings. No humans appear and the animals never talk: they make their natural sounds, and behave mostly like real animals, until it becomes necessary for one of them to man the tiller of the sailboat, or rescue some of their number from a dangerous predicament late in the film. Also, dogs can't or shouldn't eat fish: the bones will choke them. And there is a long stretch where you worry about them finding food. The cat finds some fish, but you will wonder what they are going to do for food. Beautifully animated almost entirely in Blender, magical at times, compelling because we want the cat to survive, and we enjoy them working out little compromises that ensure their survival. Synthetic music, mostly, effective and allusive. Relatively free of the worst of contrivances you often see in animated films about animals. Enigmatic ending suggestive of some kind of self-realization.
No Actors No Actors for "Flow"
Based on book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of Rubens Paiva. True story about the disappearance of Reubens Paiva, a former Congressman in Brazil in 1971. Told from the point of view of his wife and family who struggle to get by while wondering if he is alive or dead. His wife, Eunice, and daughter Eliana, were also arrested at the time but released after a few days. Most of their friends and professional acquaintances are too frightened to be much assistance, and the government, officially, at first denies that they are holding him, but eventually the truth comes out: he was tortured and then murdered and his body either thrown into the ocean or buried in a mass grave. None of the soldiers involved, though identified, were ever brought to justice. Eunice eventually became a rights lawyer with a particular interest in the rights of indigenous peoples whose land was being taken in the Amazon forest. Well-acted and film, if not as compelling as films like "Missing" or "Z". It's power lies in the mundane details of the family's life after Rubens is taken, the delicate conversations in which they avoid the obvious, hiding information from the younger children and the daughter living in England at the time. I assume we are meant to see mostly the triumph of Eunice's will to make something of her life afterwards, the successes of the children, and the tragedy of her last years when she suffered from Alzheimer's. We are given the moment she receives his official death certificate from the government, but I was not as moved by this as I think the film intended. What good is the acknowledgement of an evil for which no one is really held accountable? And actress Fernanda Torres played better as the much older Eunice than the earlier scenes in which her purported age was not altogether convincing. A brilliant touch, however, was having Torres mother play the elderly Eunice: that worked. But over all a good film on an important issue.
Fernanda Torres, Fernanda Montenegro, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, Maria Manoella, Luiza Kosovski, Cora Mora, Olivia Torres, Charles Fricks, Humberto Carrao, Maeve Jinkings
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 they are so 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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