Archive for category: Reviews

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.

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 trans-Pacific flight, whereas I couldn’t stand more than ten minutes of either Fall Guy, in which Ryan Gosling is insufferable as the main character in a film despite being only a stunt man, or We Live In Time, which to the extent I could follow it seemed insipid. I did manage to watch a relatively painless movie from start to finish en route home, but for the life of me I can’t remember now what it was.

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 for Almodovar completists

A poignant, sympathetic look at a fading art form and its star practitioner. The direction was unusually realistic for an American film, although I found the jittery hand-held camerawork distracting. Pamela Anderson played ditzy well, but Jamie Lee Curtis’s supporting performance was to me more interesting. Sweet and sad.

A wonderfully acted character study of three screwed-up sisters who await their father’s death just as we await a plot. Instead of a resolution, or even some character development, however unlikely, we are given a final scene that is either Magical Realism, a projection of someone’s inner thoughts or the director’s cop-out. With only one setting, one wonders if this could have been, or was, a play?