Critic's Notebook

Hoot Dreams

Magnolia Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Support the Girls (2018)

By SARAH MANVEL

Women’s work is never done, they say. Lisa (Regina Hall), the lead character in Andrew Bujalski’s charming “Support the Girls,” knows that better than most. The movie opens with her crying in her car, before another day in the restaurant off a Texas highway that she manages begins.

Lifting the Iron Curtain

Sony Pictures Classics

MOVIE REVIEW
The White Crow (2019)

By SARAH MANVEL

I blame John C. Reilly. “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” had such fun with the clichéd template of the artistic biopic that the genre still hasn’t recovered. Now biopics have to have an angle. For example, the Alberto Giacometti biopic, “Final Portrait,” focused on one specific sculpture of his. “The White Crow” similarly tries to have its cake and eat it: to focus both on the month Rudolf Nureyev spent in Paris before his famous defection in 1961, but also on the development of his talent as a child and as a young man. It doesn't quite succeed, but it’s such a Murderers’ Row of little known international dancing and acting talent that it's well worth seeing regardless.

Little Trouble in Big China

Berlin International Film Festival

MOVIE REVIEW
The Crossing (2019)

By SARAH MANVEL

Peipei (Huang Yao) turns 16 the day “The Crossing” starts. She lives in Shenzhen, a port city in southern China, but goes to school in Hong Kong. This means morning and night she must cross – by herself - the international border. Her father (Liu Kai Chi) lives in the shipyard where he works, and her mother (Ni Hongjie) is a party girl who only pays attention to her hangovers and her friends. But, in spite of all that, Peipei is a good kid. Since this is the instant she’s old enough, after school she gets a job as a waitress; but when a customer complains that’s the end of that. She’s desperate for independence, not least because her wealthy best friend Jo (Carmen Soup) has been planning for them to take a trip to some hot springs in Japan for some time.