Archive for category: Reviews

Utterly remarkable footage of the last days of the Afghan war, embedded with American troops/advisers in Helmand Province, then with the Afghan forces after the Americans withdrew. The story wasn’t much, and there were perhaps too many scenes of soldiers looking at each other, talking on the phone, and just thinking; but the portrait it painted of the two forces was devastating: the Americans exuded competence, the Afghans were amateurs. You wondered what 19 years of American training had accomplished; or, conversely, what we were doing there at all. There was no discussion or explanation of why the Taliban were such superior fighters, or even what the war was about. And footage of the withdrawal itself–what a mess! As a scrapbook of a doomed war, this should be a keeper.

What a spectacle, what a production! If there was an ounce of originality in the story or characters, however, I missed it. The dialogue might as well have been cartoon bubbles; action scenes came straight from Moby Dick, Wizard of Oz and Titanic, just to name obvious sources. Any drama was dissipated by the three-hour length. And attempts to make the incredible plausible–e.g., the discussion of breathing underwater–just called attention to the logical absurdities–e.g., every arrow hit its target, while the machine guns mostly missed. And call me a racist, but I didn’t find the Navi terribly appealing.

This was three films in one, but none dug as deeply as I would have liked. Nan Goldin’s crusade to make museums expunge the Sackler name bookended the documentary, but we never saw how the museums grappled with the issue. Second was Nan Goldin’s loveless upbringing, which produced the film’s title and her sister’s suicide, told through scrapbook phots. Third, and most intriguing, was Goldin’s artistic output, but the movie didn’t address the question I’ve always had: how did her photographs of grungy people in their underwear make her an art star? You could say her upbringing led to her art, and the success of her art enabled her to accomplish her crusade, but a film that concentrated, instead, on any of those three topics could have been better.

A fairly literal relocation of Ikiru, by Akira Kurosawa, from Tokyo to London, with the estimable Bill Nighy playing the role created by the incomparable Takashi Shimura. As I watched, all I could see were the echoes of the Japanese original (somewhat like seeing David Copperfield as I read Demon Copperhead). By cutting 40 minutes from its source, the English movie loses texture and context: Mr. Williams’s tortured relationship with his son and daughter-in-law is among the losses. The biggest loss, however, is the devastating social satire: Ikiru commented on the Japan of 1952, when it was released. A 2022 film about England as it supposedly existed 70 years ago carries no bite. And I found it hard to believe that the mores of Tokyo and London in 1952 were so identical. In short, I found this an interesting experiment, but I can’t judge it on its own merits or lack thereof.

A buddy film about fighter pilots and their planes that had the bad timing to be released the same year as Top Gun: Maverick. Its only ace was the (true) story of its Black hero overcoming racial discrimination in the military during the Korean War. Curiously, however, Jesse Brown was portrayed by Jonathan Majors with a huge chip on his shoulder while the hurdles he overcame were only briefly mentioned, resulting in a less than inspiring hero, while Glen Powell, his White wingman (and movie Executive Producer), took over the Tom Cruise role. Basing the film on a true story limited its dramatic impact as much as the predictable, cliched scenes that populated the script.