A quiet look at Japanese culture on the surface, and below that at man’s relationship to nature. Elegiac in its simplicity, the film bespeaks director Hamaguchi’s mastery and confidence – as in, who needs a plot when an image says so much. A review kindly called the ending “ambiguous,” whereas I’d say “inscrutable.” Or another way of saying, the plot doesn’t matter.
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 pile of erotic nonsense.
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?
A parade of moral dilemmas kept us hanging and thinking until the end, and beyond, as the Clint Eastwood film held off providing any answers at all. As in almost every courtroom drama, this realism-loving ex-lawyer found many “I-don’t-think-so’s” as the action proceeded, but the essential question of how to get to “justice” came through. And the interplay among 12 very human jurors struck a chord from my own limited experience.
A remarkable, riveting portrait of New York City in the ’70s as a set for the young Donald Trump and his mentor, Roy Cohn. The acting by Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan was a step beyond perfect, and the way they portrayed the rise of Trump and fall of Cohn as intersecting axes was breathtaking. Some of the story, such as Cohn’s adoption of Trump and his bumbling business efforts, would have seemed implausible if we didn’t know they actually happened. The seeds of Trump today were all planted in director Ali Abbasi’s young Trump, but it wasn’t the scary foreshadowing that made the movie or remained in the mind’s eye. It was the face of Jeremy Strong.
This decidedly naturalistic film went off the rails near the end, and I’m not sure what track it was on before that. It seemed to raise a dozen issues about city life, health care, women’s roles, religions, corporate bullying, sisterhood, love, Indian culture in general, but none went anywhere, nor were the characters particularly interesting. The pace and mundanity reminded me of classic Satyajit Ray films of the ’50s, which meant very slow for 2024. And very unusual, I didn’t like the score.
A culturally rich police procedural that gives a glimpse of everything you might want to know, or not know, about India for the common man. Director Sandhya Suri comes from documentaries and it shows in the realism of the people, places and events. The story plays like one of the better TV series we watch–e.g., The Tower– but it’s India, with constant reminders of caste, misogyny, poverty and disregard for human life.
Beautifully framed and film story of a large family in a remote village in the Italian Alps toward the end of WWII. Except for the presence of a paterfamilias who looked like Sam Elliot, everything could have come from an Italian movie of the 1950s or ’60s. Its lack of originality produced a lack of interest in this viewer, and its slow pace made the ending seem long in coming.
Less a documentary than an Impressionist, or more accurately Cubist, study of colonialism, with the (Belgian) Congo as its subject and American racism in the wings. Snippets of Black jazz greats, bold headlines and memorable archival footage, especially of the U.N., paint a rather condemnatory portrait of big power politics, business interests and Cold War frenzy trampling any concern for rights or humanity. Even accepting the obvious political viewpoint, there are too many problems with the film to list, but chief among them are a disregard for narrative arc, a failure to sufficiently connect the jazz interludes with the events in Africa and a meandering length that led me to walk out about five minutes from the end.
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