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 […]
The problems are well-worn: a journalist’s too-close relationship with a source; a couple’s inability to communicate after a child is lost; teens hazing a classmate who is ‘different’; parents and teens navigating the shoals of adolescence. What is new is the setting, the world of the web and social media, where communication is typed and […]
A physical cripple bonds with an emotional cripple in a movie so gritty and realistic that we overlook the implausibilities of plot. TK is a feral animal with no apparent sense of responsibility, living on instinct and the occasional stolen sandwich, locking up the worst-father-of-the-year award in his spare time. Anna is beautiful but somewhat […]
Call me stupid, but I didn’t understand the book and I didn’t understand the movie. What was the absurdly unbelievable tale of coexisting on the Pacific for 225 days with a Bengal tiger about? I gather it is meant as a parable, or allegory, but of what? On top of that, my anti-Indian prejudice based […]
What one thinks of this movie will depend on the views one brings into the theater. For me, I think the “war on terror” is the gravest policy mistake our country has made since the Vietnam War. Of course, any and all who perpetrated the horrors of 9/11 should have been pursued and brought to […]
There are a bunch of jokes that make you laugh, but never uproariously, and that’s about it. Overhanging what there is of a story is a monumental disconnect: husband and wife are both in low-paying (or non-paying) jobs and they are facing bankruptcy, yet he drives a BMW, she a Lexus; he gives his father […]
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