Archive for category: Reviews

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.

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.

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