1. The Mangrove / The Trial of the Chicago 7. It is fitting in this year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests that my two favorite films showcase police brutality and protest. That both involve real events from 50 years ago only added to their poignancy and relevance.
If theater requires the suspension of disbelief, cartoon features must require the suspension of rational thought. After about 20 minutes of watching this, I asked my wife, “Wouldn’t you rather watch the Bee Gees?” and was greeted with a sigh of welcome relief.
The abstinence-only strictures of the Catholic Church take on the rising hormones of a 16-year-old naif in this indie charmer of a movie, and guess who wins? Natalia Dyer is perfect and perfectly believable as a teen. The hypocrisy and absurdity of Catholic sex “education” may be a tad over the top, but it’s a […]
A nostalgic, surprisingly grainy look back at the presidency of one of the most decent humans to hold the position, at a time when we’re watching someone at the opposite end of that spectrum. Other than telling us that Jimmy Carter liked rock’n’roll, as well as country, jazz and classical music, there wasn’t much point […]
An earnest effort at a feel-good romance, which felt like it was made during the era it depicted, 1957-62, not necessarily a good thing, but with the pleasing difference that almost all the characters were Black and discrimination was at most a minor issue. The acting was a bit obvious and the story was predictable, […]
The second installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, Lovers Rock was a disappointment. Unlike The Mangrove, it had almost no story and just as little context. The acting was convincing and I’m sure there were dance parties that looked and felt just like that in West London in 1980 (I read). Maybe it was convincing as […]
A short story of a movie (unlike, say, Kelly Reichardt’s earlier period Western, Meek’s Cutoff), which tries to absorb us into the gentle friendship between a sweet but slow trail cook and a more ambitious Chinese frontier entrepreneur. Their business of selling dolly-cakes could also be read as a metaphor for American capitalism: the drive […]
Finally, a serious movie. And I mean, serious. Beautifully photographed empty landscapes of the American West set a metaphorical scene for the bleak nomadic life of the widowed, childless Fern, living in a van, subsisting on minimum-wage temporary jobs when she can find them, meeting other nomads but resisting any close connections. I can’t say […]
Not fun. Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman play characters that are so unremittingly unpleasant you almost don’t want them onscreen, and the usually reliable Jeremy Shamos is just as bad–that is, sickly fawning–in the other direction. The movie comes across as a play: e.g., stop the action while a character tells his life story. The […]
Exhilarating. The story combines George Floyd and the Chicago 7 in 1970 London, and I was stunned at the end to learn it was also based on a true story. Steve McQueen creates a foreign world–a community of Caribbean immigrants in Notting Hill–and populates it with people we believe in and come to care deeply […]
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