Archive for category: Reviews

I thought I didn’t need, or want, to see anything more about Covid but was totally transfixed by this documentary based on the outbreak as it happened in Wuhan. To have simply obtained the footage of Chinese citizens struggling to obtain medical treatment, of hospitals trying to provide care, and of officials trying to sanitize the news would be enough to make this a remarkable documentary. But director Nanfu Wang goes well beyond this extraordinary reportage by placing peoples’ reactions in the context of the Chinese police state–and then contrasting the results of that suppression with the just-as-bad results in our own land of the free. When I couple Time Magazine’s  recent report on the Chinese Communist Party’s push to create a uniformly Han country, eliminating all ethnic cultures, with this movie’s depiction of mass patriotic rallies, the Chinese threat to civilization as we know it is chilling. Our combined inabilities to deal with a global pandemic may be more immediate but ultimately no less troubling.

Not exactly Rent, not quite West Side Story, but a clear precursor to Hamilton. The story was far too thin to support the boatload of production numbers that followed on each other’s heels–so many that, despite their individual brilliance, they became tiresome. “How about a good song, instead of another ensemble dance?,” I found myself thinking. Unless you were charmed by the actors–and only Melissa Barrera as Vanessa came close–it was hard to buy into the narrative, except as a parable celebrating Latinx culture.

More style than substance, Christian Petzold’s fourth film was a disappointment after his remarkable earlier trio of Barbara, Phoenix and Transit. The title plus a Wikipedia search clued you in to the possible water-spriteness of the female lead (the excellent Paula Beer), but the myth in question didn’t track the plot, nor was it clear why Undine was alternately at home in the water and almost drowning. Her on-land docent tours of architectural Berlin likewise may have constituted a subplot for savvy Germans but was lost over here. In short, there was little to take away beyond a conventional love story (and for that you had to believe in the appeal of Franz Rogowski’s commoner character) and the pleasure of watching a well made film.

A retrograde anti-propaganda film, if such there be, taking down Soviet Communism for its top-down bureaucracy that creates inequality, inertia, oppression and distrust. Filmed in black-and-white and recalling Russian cinema of the late ’50s (The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad of A Soldier, etc.), Andrei Konchalovsky’s take on a 1962 workers’ strike that was brutally suppressed is cleverly told through the story of a committed Party member who is, conflictedly, a mother. If the plot was an eery parallel of Quo Vadis, Aida?, the depiction of the USSR echoed the mini-series Chernobyl.

While this was more effective as a romance than an anti-bullying message film, what most sticks in mind is the brutal picture of life in China for high-school seniors. Made in Hong Kong in 2019 (but up for an Academy Award this year), could it have been intended as a critique of mainland education, which seemed to consist solely of uniform-wearing, slogan-spouting, exam-cramming, when not being harassed by uneducated, brutal thugs. The slowly growing bond of the two young leads gave us plenty to care about, while the Mean Girl villains played a role consistent across all cultures. The legal result made little sense to our American experience; but, as we’re continually learning with Spiral, human nature may be universal but judicial systems aren’t.