Michael Moore’s voice-over during the prologue to Fahrenheit 11/9 adopts the tone of an enthusiastic parent reading a nation its bedtime story. And why shouldn’t it? It’s Nov. 7, 2016, and history is soon to be made: The future first female president is about to begin Election Day, and by all accounts will cruise to a landslide victory. Pollsters place her chances of … [Read more...]
‘The Wife’: Close brings novelistic depth to story of frustrated ambition
Swedish director Bjorn Runge’s The Wife is set in 1992, a time when people still used corded landlines and smoked cigarettes. When Glenn Close, as the title character, accepts a cigarette from an infatuated younger man, she smokes it romantically, like a classic movie star, which of course she is. Close’s character, Joan Castleman, is not a smoker, but she’s sitting in a hip … [Read more...]
‘Juliet, Naked’ a charmer despite nods to rom-com formula
The comma separating the two words of Juliet, Naked is flush with sensual possibility, but it’s the first joke in this affable, niche-y romantic comedy. The title is more audiophilic than erotic: What’s being stripped down isn’t Juliet the person but Juliet the fictional album by a fictional singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Kind of like the Beatles’ Phil Spector-less Let … [Read more...]
‘The King’ will leave you cryin’ all the time, and not about Elvis
I try to keep President Trump out of film reviews, I really do. But in documentaries, especially the ones that purport to explore the Way We Live Now, 45’s presence is unavoidable. Eugene Jarecki’s The King is ostensibly a doc about the legacy of Elvis Presley, but it’s also an American travelogue circa 2016, and it can’t help but catalog the fissures of the year’s … [Read more...]
‘Eighth Grade’ gets real with the digital generation
If, like me, you have no unearthly idea what’s going through the mind of the average representative of Generation Z at any given time — heck, I don’t even understand millennials, and I am one — then Eighth Grade is sure to provide some answers. This illuminating coming-of-age film is set during the last week of middle school, a three-year purgatory of anonymity and … [Read more...]
‘Eating Animals’ shocks, depresses, but is unlikely to bring change
In the opening minutes of Eating Animals, as a car drives through miles of unspoiled farmland, plaintive music plants us firmly in the fertile breadbasket of America —land of opportunity, land of natural beauty, land of plenty. Ah, but what a false promise it is. Look a little deeper, and that pink-hued body of water isn’t a natural spring; it’s a pool of hog urine and fecal … [Read more...]
‘En El Séptimo Día’: A slice of migrant life on the margins
On the seventh day, as one best-seller has put it, God rested from all His work which He had done. José (Fernando Cardona), the vacillating hero of En El Séptimo Día, does not have that luxury. His seventh day, which indeed falls on a Sunday, is fraught with an existential crisis. José, an undocumented immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, now living in Brooklyn, is a soccer … [Read more...]
‘American Animals’: Masters of the bungle-verse
For a short time in late 2004, the story was catnip to Kentucky media. Three students — and one college dropout — from Lexington’s Transylvania University attempted a rare-book heist that, to put it mildly, did not go as planned. To say much more about the results would do a disservice to the nervy suspense of Bart Layton’s American Animals, which dramatizes the young men’s … [Read more...]
‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’: The lasting goodness of a gentle progressive
The television I enjoyed as a kid lurches from the requisite Sesame Street to the mindless distractions of G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy and the green slime of many a Nickelodeon game show, with its slapstick schadenfreude. If there was any room for Fred Rogers’ earnest blend of puppet show and talk therapy, I have no memory of it. His iconic … [Read more...]
Like the season, ‘Summer 1993’ is a golden treasure
For most films seeking a mass audience, the best we can hope for is that they leave some time for reflection amid the whizzes and bangs, the laugh lines and shock cuts. Catalan director Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 is all reflection, a childhood memory film as vividly realized as Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos!, but with a style and circumspection that are all Simón’s own. This … [Read more...]