An affectless Jeremie returns to a small French village (apparent population: 6) and shakes everyone’s world while mainly strolling through beautiful fall woods with mushrooms sprouting. We’re never sure what’s on Jeremie’s mind; like many a good French film, it’s all about relationships. It gives us time to think, and wonder.
A fun and funny dramedy set in a remote Arizona diner where (spoiler alert) everyone gets killed. Everything you need to know about each character is evident from their looks, and is confirmed once they open their mouth. You feel like you’re watching a movie from the ’60s, with no stars, one set and a budget under a million. And unlike the France in Misericordia, the scenery is no advertisement for Yuma County.
A remarkable challenge to Iran’s theocracy, this Cannes Award-winning film not surprising earned director Mohammad Rasoulof an eight-year prison sentence. The first half was a compelling political drama, intertwined with family dynamics and believable characters. The second half went off the rails, so much so that streaming it on two separate nights we felt we were watching different films.
A stylish espionage caper with fine performances by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender that disguised the holes in the plot. I.e., I had no idea what happened by the end and wondered if the film, by Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp, was satirizing the genre. Put six very flawed spies around a table and see if you can guess who did it, without really knowing what “it” is.
The characters in this Zambian movie about family might as well have been guinea fowl, so little did I relate to them. I waited in vain for a plot. The lead actress was good, but she didn’t relate either.
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 than offer even a sliver of hope, the movie left us with our knowledge of how much worse the Palestinians’ plight has since become.
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 journalistic enterprise and ethics, the film raises ever relevant questions: is the journalist’s duty to report or to help; when is it okay to defy the authorities; when does the urge to be first fudge normal cautions to get the story right? Watching this back-to-back with Saturday Night drove home the complexity of putting on a TV show, with the added factor that this story was real.
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 Belushi, et starry al.
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 for playing the mother who has to hold everything together, but even her performance, and the movie as a whole, pales in comparison to Argentina 1985 from 2022. I did like the portrayal of Brazilian family life and the daughter who reminded us of our exchange student Camila.
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?
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