Haut et Court – Maipo Film – Versus Production – Good Chaos – RTBF/Sundance Institute
A stark winter landscape in the Norwegian Fjords is the third key player in "Sukkwan Island," in which a father and son set out to spend an entire year together largely isolated from the world, at the father's instigation. It seems that Tom (Swann Arlaud) hopes to strengthen his relationship with teenager, Roy (Woody Norman), after some kind of messy divorce from Roy's mother, Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton, too briefly). But Tom is twitchy from the start. Psychological cracks are clearly going to split open out in the wilderness.
Continue reading "Winter Kills" »
Mstyslav Chernov/Sundance Institute
2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025)
The documentary "2000 Meters to Andriivka" takes its
Sundance Film Festival audience back to the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive against invading Russian forces, an operation with mixed results now recorded in the books and which even at the time seemed likely to turn into grinding costly warfare. That description looks like a light euphemism while watching Mstyslav Chernov's documentary, built around first-person footage from body-mounted cameras worn by Ukrainian soldiers and by Mr. Chernov, embedded in their brigade and coming under as much fire as the rest of them. The military goal is the strategic village of Andriivka, approached via a dead-straight strip of charred forest between two large and deeply cratered mine fields; not the last time that the film's visuals have an aura of the fictional about them, the harshest battlefield a production designer could concoct. A Ukrainian soldier himself says it's "like another planet." But this is all humans at work.
Continue reading "Under Fire" »
Sundance Film Festival
No one in "André is an Idiot" actually quotes the eminent philosopher James T. Kirk and says that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life; but the ethos of Tony Benna's documentary speaks for itself. Fictional and factual art about facing terminal medical diagnoses and imminent reunion with the cosmos isn't exactly thin on the ground, although the universal sympathies of any nonpsychopathic viewer are pulled out freshly painful every time. The success of the art as art comes down to the nature of the person in the frame. In this case that's extrovert ad executive and loving, if mildly madcap, family man André Ricciardi, whose delay in getting a colonoscopy when warning signs appeared at the age of 52 leads to the discovery of a huge Stage IV colorectal cancer tumor, one that had been lining up his destiny for a while.
Continue reading "Death and Other Details" »
Kino Lorber
According to the cliché Paul Schrader's tormented males journal their pain and get it down on paper; but in "Oh, Canada" Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) might struggle to hold the pen. Enfeebled by terminal cancer, stuck in a wheelchair and in need of assistance on and off the lavatory, Leonard does a more cinematic thing and unburdens himself to a camera instead. As a renowned documentarian - the "Ken Burns of Canada" we hear - Leonard is supposed to be telling a camera crew about his life and times, including the 1960s flight from the U.S. Vietnam War draft that took him to the slower waters north of the border in the first place. This testimony involves Leonard directly addressing the camera, which the film, as an inside joke, calls the signature style of his documentaries. Mr. Schrader and anyone familiar with the work of Errol Morris knows that it's actually the Interrotron set-up that Mr. Morris uses for his own documentaries, designed to torment interviewees and lever confessions out of people who know they have things to confess. Leonard fits the bill.
Continue reading "Slow Country for Old Men" »
Apple TV+
STREAMING REVIEW | 'DISCLAIMER'
After enjoying a fruitful partnership with Netflix on 2018’s “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón has doubled down on streaming with a whopping 7-episode miniseries, “Disclaimer,” for rival Apple TV+. It’s of the caliber we’ve come to expect from the Oscar winner’s films. He doesn’t let quality suffer because of quantity here. The series, screening at the Venice Film Festival, more than holds its own against other buzzy world premieres.
Continue reading "Notes on a Scandal" »
Apple TV+
“Wolfs” is the new action-comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney and directed by Jon Watts, who is responsible for the last three “Spider-Man” movies. It should get some butts in seats on these names alone; here we have two of Hollywood’s surviving movie stars who’ve earned their stripes before the industry’s almost complete pivot to IPs in an effort to draw box office. But these household names and their screen personae can be a blessing and sometimes a curse. Case in point: “Wolfs.”
Continue reading "The Odd Couple" »
La Biennale di Venezia
It’s always delightful when a beloved director decides to do a silly one. Based on the overexcited cheers and fervent applause at the piracy warning – not even the opening credits! – before the first press screening at the Venice Biennale, “Broken Rage” is going to be met with howls of delight wherever it goes. It’s a 62-minute-long parody of crime cinema, written, edited and directed by Takeshi Kitano, starring himself. It is also an entirely coherent cinematic experience even as it twists in upon the story it is telling; and it makes the delightful choice of getting stupider by the second. This is unlikely to be the capstone to Mr. Kitano’s career, but regardless “Broken Rage” obeys two important showbiz adages: always leave them laughing; and always leave them wanting more.
Continue reading "Alternate Takes" »
International Film Festival Rotterdam
"Steppenwolf" starts and ends with recreations of the doorway shots from "The Searchers," which is wearing your Western heart on your sleeve; it also reverses one of them to say something different than John Ford had in mind. In between, writer-director Adilkhan Yerzhanov lays other Western homages on thick, and adds some samurai tones via Quentin Tarantino. But the presiding spirit in "Steppenwolf" is Sergio Leone, whose high-drama low-dialogue tactics Mr. Yerzhanov embraces like a favorite uncle. The film is set in some stylized form of the modern era, with truck convoys and armored cars and militarized police stations; but inside them the scowling taciturn men of Kazakhstan show unrefined Spaghetti Western cynicism about anything other than their own self-interest and whale into each other with claw hammers.
Continue reading "Once Upon a Time in the Steppes" »
Fourth Act Film
After centuries of conflict and decades of occupation by the latest foreign army, a country picks up the pieces. Local politics reforms; young men look for work; a diminished government takes stock of its military equipment to work out which guns function and which might fall apart when anyone pulls the trigger. It also ponders, in this case, what to do with $7 billion-worth of the most advanced efficient killing technology in existence, left behind by the United States. For this is Afghanistan in 2021: the weapons are those given to the Afghan government by the U.S. before the latter withdrew chaotically and the former fell apart; and the people finding the stuff left behind are the Taliban.
Continue reading "Arms and the Men" »
Tribeca Festival
Eternal Playground (2024)
Any movie about a group of friends reuniting after a funeral risks comparisons with “The Big Chill,” but this endearing French movie makes that simile a reach for two reasons: the characters are all in their mid-20s, and the location of their reunion is their old middle school. Literally. It’s where Gaspard (Andranic Manet) teaches music, and where he and his late sister, Louise (voiced in his thoughts by Noée Abita), also studied as kids. It’s in the center of Paris, but so ignored in the early summer holidays that Gaspard can sneak his mates in without anyone in the neighborhood noticing. It’s this combination of memory and invisibility that makes “Eternal Playground” a rewarding watch. It’s also a potent reminder to many American individuals what our me-first society has lost.
Continue reading "Reliving Childhood" »