Unremitting footage of Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinian homes made a depressing, discouraging point if not compelling cinema. All honor to the Palestinian-Israeli filmmakers who bravely documented the cruel destruction of a defenseless West Bank village, humanizing the Palestinians with their goats and chickens and dehumanizing the Israeli soldiers with their uniforms and tanks. Rather […]
Oh, for those simpler times, when we could think terrorists were Bad and Israelis were Good. It’s hard to watch this movie about the Munich Olympics without the overlay of Israel’s current genocide of Palestinians and realizing that no progress has been made in this conflict over the last 50 years. As a study of […]
Jason Reitman took every actual or apocryphal or imagined crisis in the month or two leading up to SNL’s premiere and packed them into the 90 minutes before showtime. The result is an absurdist scrapbook more than a movie. Still, there are plenty of jokes and it’s fun to see actors impersonate Chevy Chase, John […]
A day before the official awards, and still not having seen all the contenders, notably The Brutalist and the Documentary Features, here for the public record are my choices: Best Picture: A Complete Unknown. Not a perfect movie in a class with last year’s winner, Oppenheimer, this film took on a difficult challenge and produced […]
Somehow there is no tension and little emotion in the story of a former Congressman in Rio being “disappeared” by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1975. 25- and 40-year-later codas add nothing to the drama but appear inserted to honor the true-life events the film is based on. Fernanda Torres is rightly receiving award nominations […]
A crowd pleaser from Peru with handsome leads and beautiful cuisine. We know where the story is going pretty much every step of the way, but that makes it no less enjoyable. Ditto for the fact that the tale is a total fantasy: who is ever rescued from poverty by starting a restaurant?
It was worth spending time with Renate Reinsve, but the film itself was no more than an O.Henry short story. Curiously, Sebastian Stan was nominated for a Golden Globe for this performance, which I found inauthentic, as opposed to his Oscar-nominated role in The Apprentice, which I considered brilliant. This passed the time on a […]
A feel-good story of prison inmates putting on a play, with an Oscar-worthy performance by Colman Domingo anchoring an amateur cast of real-life prisoners playing themselves. The play’s not the thing. What we get to see and feel is inmates experiencing their own humanity through performing in prison and by extension in this movie. There’s […]
A meditation on dying and friendship with lots of close-ups of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. They are obviously both fine actresses, but the formal, slightly stilted dialogue sounded as though it were written in a foreign language (Spanish?) then translated. I felt I was at a dramatic reading with attractive settings. Still, a must-see […]
A quiet look at Japanese culture on the surface, and below that at man’s relationship to nature. Elegiac in its simplicity, the film bespeaks director Hamaguchi’s mastery and confidence – as in, who needs a plot when an image says so much. A review kindly called the ending “ambiguous,” whereas I’d say “inscrutable.” Or another […]
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