Archive for category: Reviews

In anticipation of tomorrow’s awards show I watched the five nominated Documentary Shorts and rate them as follows:

1. The Martha Mitchell Effect. The only traditional historical documentary in the field, this was a refreshing recapitulation of the time the Attorney General’s wife captured the spotlight for herself, by speaking out to the press, calling Nixon on his phone, wrong-siding the Administration on Vietnam and more famously Watergate, then being muzzled by the GOP and divorced by her husband. It was great fun to revisit this bit of history, when an ethical lapse could bring a President down.
2. The Elephant Whisperers. Gorgeous nature photography and a glimpse of a totally foreign world: an obscure, isolated elephant rehabilitation center in India with a leading man that looked, acted and sounded like an Australian aborigine.
3. Haulout. A remarkable study of an isolated Russian marine biologist spending autumn in a hut surrounded by walrus. The only explication came with the credits and it was anticlimactic: if the loss of 600 walrus out of a pack estimated at 100,000 is the worst effect of climate change, then what are we worried about?
4. How Do You Measure A Year? This rates only because it’s a cute idea: taking a video of your daughter answering questions on every birthday from 2 to 18. But really, this was more a home movie than an Oscar candidate.
5. Stranger At the Gate. Maybe the first five minutes provided a context I missed, but the story of an Afghan War veteran in Muncie, Indiana, who goes from planning to bomb the local Islamic Center to adopting the Muslim faith wasn’t terribly well made and was boring.

An acting tour de force from Andrea Riseborough, who inhabits this down-and-out but deviously charming alcoholic named Leslie. Just when you think you can’t watch her another minute, the story turns and we end up with tears in our eyes. The plot, above all the ending, doesn’t withstand much scrutiny; but you want to go along, thanks to the performance by Riseborough.

With cinematography by Walker Evans, dialogue by Kahlil Gibran and star turns by Ben Whishaw as Anthony Perkins and Rooney Mara as the non-Virgin Mary, this film had serious and artsy engraved on every tableau. Unfortunately, it just didn’t connect with me. I couldn’t tell if it was a fable, a parable, a women’s dream, a philosophy class or a visitor from an alternate universe, one where the Southern Cross is visible in the Northern Hemisphere and census workers broadcast “Daydream Believer” from their van.

A simply shot, mesmerizing courtroom drama, semi-opaque as a drama but evocative of ideas. Of maternity, of personal responsibility, of colonialism, of man and woman, of race, more of race, of journalistic objectivity. From our viewpoint, it is also curious to observe and try to understand the French criminal justice system (with six seasons of Spiral as our background). We never quite understand the two Black women at the story’s center, the writer and the defendant who murdered her child. It is not our place to understand them. But they are unforgettable.

A one-trick pony on an unpleasant journey. I take it this was based on Annie Ernaux’s experience seeking an illegal abortion in 1963 France (similar in monotone to her 2002 memoir which I’m currently reading about her affair with a Russian diplomat). The acting was impeccable and realistic, a la Francaise, but the film wasn’t easy to watch. From the start we knew where we were going, just not exactly how we’d get there. The subject, an important one, was handled more to my appreciation in Call Jane.