A young professional woman (Claire Foy), traumatized by irrational visions of a stalker from thousands of miles away, visits a therapist. She’s done everything she can do to escape his presence, yet she still sees him, suddenly, in the eyes of other men. She confesses to the counselor that she has, in the past, harbored suicidal thoughts. All of a sudden, after signing some … [Read more...]
‘Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?’: A harrowing look at a racist cold case
In October of 1946, a white, racist Alabama shop owner named S.E. Branch fatally shot a black man named Bill Spann in the rural town of Dothan, 18 miles from the Florida line. He was charged with first-degree murder but did not serve time. Scant information about this crime exists outside of Spann’s death certificate, but documentary filmmaker Travis Wilkerson, who is S.E. … [Read more...]
‘Wrinkle in Time’: Hokey, clunky, but its heart is in the right place
Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time is the first $100 million feature to be directed by a woman of color. This is a big deal for the news chyrons and for DuVernay’s rising clout in an industry dominated by white males. But headlines about budgets and box-office returns give us critics the blues, because they rarely have anything to do with the art and politics of cinema. For … [Read more...]
The Oscars: Who and what will win, and why
This year, the Academy Awards turn 90, and the race for the best picture of 2017 is pretty wide open. This is certainly no runaway Titanic or Lord of the Rings year, and by the same token, as long as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are kept far away from the envelopes, it seems unlikely that there will be audible gasps in the wee hours of the morning after Sunday. … [Read more...]
‘The Party’: Where the drinks have nothing but bitters
The Party, renegade Briton Sally Potter’s first film in six years, is shot in a flat and unpretty black-and-white — no luminous chiaroscuro here. Rather, it’s a harsh and dressed-down cheapie, populated by actors whose drooping faces and worry lines betray minimal makeup. It reflects of a time in movie history when directors eschewed color for economy, not artistry. Shot … [Read more...]
‘Game Night’ has a monopoly on other people’s ideas
While enjoying, to a point, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Game Night, I spent much of the picture wishing it had gone in a completely different, and subtler, direction. It’s easy to imagine some other project titled Game Night gestating and then languishing in the primordial muck of preproduction: a lo-fi, low-budget, semi-improvised mumblecore ensemble about a … [Read more...]
‘In Between’ boldly explores Palestinian women’s quest for identity
The Palestinian experience, as captured by most movies set around and among the splintered territories, is one of fallen rockets and suicide bombers, checkpoints and forbidden communiqués, apartheid and suffering. Division is the key word: intractable, punishing, irreconcilable. There are dividing lines separating the characters of In Between as well, but it’s unlike any … [Read more...]
Kruger stands out in otherwise clunky, morose ‘In the Fade’
If you didn’t feel sufficiently suicidal after seeing last week’s South Florida opening of Michael Haneke’s Happy End, writer-director Faith Akin’s medicinal tragedy In the Fade has more than enough blunt despair to finish the job. The difference is that unlike Haneke’s formally precise, even darkly comic burrow into the splintered human condition, Akin’s humorless litany of … [Read more...]
Strong female characters get numerous Oscar nods
A mute cleaning lady at a Cold War aerospace facility who falls in love with a sea creature. An outraged mother who uses outdoor advertising to shame the police into finding her daughter’s killer. A young woman coming of college age, butting heads with her overprotective mom. The nation’s first female publisher of a major daily newspaper deciding whether to risk it all for … [Read more...]
‘Mom and Dad’: Hell is mother (and father) people
In a season that has brought us Lady Bird and I, Tonya, stories about fraught, dyspeptic and sometimes-abusive relationships between parents and their offspring are at the fore of the cinematic consciousness. Mom and Dad, an anarcho-punk satire as black as a demon’s heart, is the most extreme depiction of this rift. It has something to say about the curdled ambitions and … [Read more...]