Adenium Productions
MOVIE REVIEW
The Burdened (2023)
This is the first Yemeni movie to play at the Berlinale in the festival’s 73-year history, so for that alone “The Burdened” must be recommended. Further to that director Amr Gamal, who cowrote the script with Mazen Refaat, is clever indeed, for the topic of this movie is a hot-button issue all over the world: abortion. The reasons for which the married couple desperately need not to have another child are both incredibly specific and completely universal; and the empathy for their situation is striking. It’s only to be recommended.
Continue reading “On the Horns of a Dilemma” »
Loris T. Zambelli
MOVIE REVIEW
The Last Night of Amore (2023)
Honestly, it should be in the police manual: If it's the last day before your retirement, absolutely do not under any circumstances agree to one last job. And if on the last day before your retirement you agree to one last job, absolutely do not under any circumstances take your single-parent partner along with you. And if on the last day before your retirement you agree to one last job and take your single-parent partner along with you, absolutely do not under any circumstances agree to any, and that means any, change of plan. Of course if the characters had learned any of this, there would be no movie.
Continue reading “Bending the Law” »
Universal Pictures Content Group
MOVIE REVIEW
The Adults (2023)
This is a minor movie, your enjoyment of which will mostly depend on your tolerance for watching a group of adult siblings squabble like little kids, but if that is your thing you'll have a wonderful time.
Continue reading “Know When to Hold ‘Em” »
Filmgalerie 451
MOVIE REVIEW
Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes (2023)
When did John Malkovich become this generation's Orson Welles? By this I do not mean as a director. I mean as an actor, able to single-handedly enable the financing and carry the weirdest projects with ease just by showing up? If anyone is in doubt of this, I invite you to enjoy a viewing of “Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes,” a ridiculous Eurotrashfire of a movie which could not possibly have existed without him. Why did we stop making movies like this? They are so beautiful and so over the top you feel smarter just for thinking about them.
Continue reading “The Emperor’s New Foes” »
Bunya Productions
MOVIE REVIEW
Limbo (2023)
The town of Limbo is built in the opal mines which dot the Queensland landscape. Literally inside the mines; the town church was hewn out of the rock, as is the eerie motel where Travis (an unrecognizable Simon Baker) pitches up. On arrival the first thing he does is shoot up; he's that kind of a cop. His addiction is controlled, but he's annoyed to be on a fool's errand, a cold case of the disappearance of an Aboriginal girl named Charlotte 20 years ago. But his presence in Limbo won't pass unremarked.
Continue reading “Cold Case” »
Limerencia
MOVIE REVIEW
Tótem (2023)
There's a birthday to celebrate, so sisters Nuria (Monserrat Marañon) and Ale (Marisol Gasé) have a big day of preparations ahead. The party is in their large family home in Mexico City, with Nuria's little daughter, Esther (Saori Gurza), and their niece Sol (Naíma Sentíes, who radiates a knowingness unusual in a little kid) underfoot. Their father, Roberto (Alberto Amador), who speaks with a voicebox, is still seeing his therapy patients in his studio as usual, which hardly helps. Sol's mother, Lucía (Iazua Larios), has had to go to work but she’ll be back for the party, which is for Sol's dad, the sisters’ sweet artist brother, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). He is barely in his 30s, and lives in a slightly separate, quieter part of the house, but no one will allow Sol back in there to see him. He needs to rest before the big occasion. After all, this is his last birthday.
Continue reading “Celebrations of Life” »
Nabis Filmgroup, Nevada Cine
MOVIE REVIEW
The Klezmer Project (2023)
What happens when a self-described “mediocre cameraman” falls in love with a klezmer clarinetist he meets at a wedding in Buenos Aires? They get funding from Austrian television to make a documentary about klezmer music in Eastern Europe, of course. This unusual Argentinian documentary melds three intertwined strands – Yiddish folk tales, the lives of and the romance between the directors and the search for Jewish music in the parts of the world where the Jews were most thoroughly exterminated – into a story of how music and language are used as the building blocks for personal identity, and what personal identity means in a globalized world. It’s not an entire success, largely for reasons which should have been obvious to codirectors Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann before they started, but it’s such an unusual story the weaknesses are easily forgiven.
Continue reading “Siren Song” »
"Suzume" Film Partners/Crunchyroll
MOVIE REVIEW
Suzume (2023)
American cinema currently churns out an endless parade of superhero movies to counteract how powerless most Americans now feel, but Japanese art is the best in the world at metaphors for trauma. “Godzilla” and its uncontrollable rampages through Tokyo and other cities was an obvious stand-in for nuclear destruction, and its many imitators were able to exist because the need was still there. “Suzume” is more specifically about a more recent disaster, that of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, but its combination of the supernatural and modern everyday life builds to create a tearjerker of surprising emotional power.
Continue reading “Darkened Door” »
Reinhold Vorschneider/Heimatfilm
MOVIE REVIEW
Till the End of the Night (2023)
We have a unicorn here, in that “Till the End of the Night” is both a movie that is entirely impossible without the trans character at its core and also completely normal about said trans character. This is, in every way, new, strange and startling, to see a movie which is so matter-of-fact about topics this sensitive, especially when that movie is a crime thriller. Everything stands or falls on the sensitivity, though, which is also fairly special. The crime part of the thriller can’t quite keep up, but then again, when does it ever?
Continue reading “Secret Mission” »
Faktura Film/Shellac
MOVIE REVIEW
Music (2023)
This is a puzzling and frustrating film about – well. It's told in fragments, with only the bare minimum of dialogue, with songs (primarily opera) serving as verbal cues for what is doing on. This kind of minimalism – over four decades pass; and the action slowly morphs from Greece to Germany without anything directly being said about it – is so minimalist it's tricky to know what writer-director Angela Schanelec was going for, though she won the award for Best Screenplay at this year’s Berlinale for it. “Music” is one of those emotional experiences it might take another couple decades for me to process. Does this make it good? I don't know.
Continue reading “Bitter Sweet Symphony” »