1. A Separation and Amour. Every year, it seems, there is a critical favorite that avoids the smaller cities until the deadline for my list has passed. Last year it was A Separation, which opened in 2011 but was far and away the best film I saw in 2012.
I can’t say I rate this highly as a film – there was way too much of one woman’s story, for instance, and too much of that was a side issue – but the overall thrust was compelling, so much so that it has already brought change and will, one hopes, bring more. The regularity […]
Perfectly pleasant if forgettable scrapbook of memories from the ’60s: Peter, Paul & Mary, Phil Ochs, Buffy Ste-Marie, Judy Collins, Don McLean, John Sebastian and many more. If you hadn’t been there, however, I’m not sure what, if anything, the movie would have meant to you. Plus, it featured annoying cartoon flashes between scenes and […]
The title and the opening scene give away all suspense, so what we are left with is a Danish Lincoln, which undoubtedly means more to the Danes than us Yanks. The costumes are nice, but can’t compare to recent dramas from the French court. It’s fun to meet actors we’ve never seen, although Queen Caroline […]
There is not a single scene in this film from Taiwan that is either original or credible. The acting is amateurish and the story has the sophistication of a yak. One complaint of many: time after time our hero is thrown into a treacherous situation – wild dogs attacking, crashing off a hillside, wrecking his […]
There is a story, but mainly this is a feature-length indictment of Muslim culture and, indirectly, the peril of non-assimilation, in this case into Canadian society. Wives are abused, treated as chattel, and sons are in thrall to hard-line parents. The “spiritual leader” ruins everyone around him and is finally arrested, symbolically, for sending money […]
A small-scale Indian Ikiru, in which a dotty old man brushes his teeth, gets his flip-flops mended and dogs the local bureaucracy until he gets the streetlights near his house turned off when the sun comes up. It is what is known in painting as a genre scene. I can’t imagine what an Indian would […]
The movie’s title and opening suggest a one-joke plot, but it turns out that the film is not really about sex, or kids, but about intimate relationships and the difficulty thereof. Conspicuously covering the waterfront, we are given a straight couple, a gay couple, an interracial couple, an older couple, a single mom, a single […]
Another psychological thriller from the bad old days of East Germany. Maybe it’s easier to make a compelling movie about times, like World War II, when things are so black-and-white. Here, everyone is under constant strain, not just to be a good person, but to live up to your own principles while suffering under the […]
Perfectly well made movie, and Lea Seydoux was luscious, but I spent the whole film hoping, waiting for the little thief to get caught, and the last half-hour waiting for the film to end. I don’t know if we were supposed to feel sympathy for the poor 12-year-old Simon, “forced” to steal in order to […]
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