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...]
Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival explores America’s soundtrack
For 28 years – five of them under the direction of Ellen Wedner – The Donald M. Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival has been bringing to the county an array of international movies that illuminate the Jewish experience. This year, as always, Wedner and her selection committee sought out the highest-quality films that fit that mission, without trying to feature a particular … [Read more...]
‘The Post’: Poignant, powerful and timely
Journalism movies have me at hello, especially the period pieces. The staccato clack of typewriter keys, the clangor of printing presses, the smoky newsrooms, the barking declarations of crusty editors with their feet on their desks and their ties askew. From His Girl Friday to Zodiac, Park Row to All the President’s Men, show me a shoe-leather reporter on a hot deadline, and … [Read more...]
2017’s Top 10 in film
You would never know it from what the multiplexes were showing in the first 10 months of 2017, but with a November and December delivering a flurry of quality films, this became a top-notch year at the movies. Here are my 10 favorites, with plenty more just barely not making the cut. 1. The Shape of Water – Tapping into the magic realism and political fantasy that fueled his … [Read more...]
Mute Hawkins speaks volumes in creaky ‘Shape of Water’
“That’s the future now — green!” With this correction, about 40 minutes into The Shape of Water, struggling commercial illustrator Giles (Richard Jenkins), proudly toting his commissioned portrait of a nuclear American family huddled around a red gelatin mold, is sent back to the drawing board. Green is the hue of progress, not red. Green is certainly the warmest color in … [Read more...]
‘The Other Side of Hope’: It’s got refugees, and you can laugh to it
The Other Side of Hope is the name of writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s new movie, but it’s also an apt descriptor of the mental and emotional headspace in which his characters have always dwelt. They seek normalcy, love, shelter, a car that doesn’t sputter out, a job that isn’t on the precipice of ending — desires that usually exist just out of reach, so they settle for a cold … [Read more...]
‘Thelma’: Love, guilt and telekinesis
It doesn’t take Thelma (Eili Harboe), the title character in Joachim Trier’s supernatural import, long to experience the world-opening temptations of college life. A shy, small-town girl from a cloistered religious upbringing, she arrives in Oslo for university as an egg that has yet to hatch, a character as virginal as the snow in the biting Norwegian winter. At an … [Read more...]
‘BPM’ paints tough, unsentimental picture of AIDS crisis in 1990s
In this renewed era of protest — by women, by scientists, by environmentalists, by antifascists, by Black Lives Matter — BPM revisits one beleaguered minority whose redress of grievances took the form of guerilla actions and bracing street theater. Writer-director Robin Campillo and co-screenwriter Philippe Mangeot drew on their own experiences with the activist AIDS … [Read more...]