A very arty, elegiac and cryptic, but not unpleasant, look at women’s lot in a poor East German farmhouse in three or four discreet early 20th-century years, intercut and largely unresolved. It helped that the director warned, this was not a film about plot or characters; it was an experience that we should float along. […]
Music can make you happy, and this film did, over and over. Good songs, sung with joy to enthusiastic audiences, were played to the end but smartly intercut with snippets of the characters’ daily lives, so they never outstayed their welcome. The characters were all people you rooted for (cf. Marty Supreme) and enjoyed being […]
Given the critical accolades tossed at Josh Safdie and Timothee Chalamet’s film, it’s worth recalling, even a month later, the main reasons I labelled Marty Supreme “unwatchable.” 1. Marty’s character, which dominates the film, is so abhorrent any possibility of “enjoying” the movie evaporates. Yes, Chalamet does a remarkable acting job, presumably at Safdie’s direction, of […]
It’s tricky to make a modern historical drama where the viewer has his own context to compare. It doesn’t help when the American characters played by Michael Shannon and Remi Malek come across as clueless and incompetent, while Russell Crowe’s Hermann Goering is masterful and compelling. But the film seems populated by symbolic figures, not […]
The Teacher Americana. Weapons Sinners Sirat One Battle After Another Blue Moon/Nouvelle Vague F1 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Sentimental Value
A somewhat aimless documentary about our era’s most famous investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. It wanders among clips of stories he covered, a current non-revealing interview and historic shots of him walking, like the directors had trouble coming up with visuals to fill the frame. The film gave me a face and a personality to go […]
A feminist fun-house frolic and frightfest, glued together by the acting chops of Sydney Sweeney. The story makes an inexplicable 180-degree pivot midstream, but I was enjoying myself so much I didn’t mind. It was a good time at the movies, not something to analyze.
So Italian, as with every film by Paolo Sorrentino. The story compresses the last six months of a presidency into three actions, but it is the loneliness of old age that is the subject with the existential question, “who owns our days?” Beautifully acted and shot in a wide-screen format that surrounds every figure with […]
A gorgeous Gothic bromance, better viewed on a larger screen than our home TV. We know the story but have to admire its presentation, along with the appearance of Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz and the rest of the finely costumed cast. Telling the story twice dilutes the drama in favor of sheer spectacle.
A family’s repressed feelings, anger issues and bad legal choices following the death of their son are resolved by therapy and play-acting. The plot, as presented, is manipulative and schmaltzy, more community theater than Sentimental Value.
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