Critic's Notebook

Siren Song

Nabis Filmgroup, Nevada Cine

MOVIE REVIEW
The Klezmer Project (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

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.

Darkened Door

"Suzume" Film Partners/Crunchyroll

MOVIE REVIEW
Suzume (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

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.

Secret Mission

Reinhold Vorschneider/Heimatfilm

MOVIE REVIEW
Till the End of the Night (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

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?

Bitter Sweet Symphony

Faktura Film/Shellac

MOVIE REVIEW
Music (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

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.

Painted Into a Corner

Wolfgang Ennenbach/Focus Features

MOVIE REVIEW
Inside (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

It's tough to imagine a movie about a man (Willem Dafoe) trapped in an apartment not immediately drawing pandemic parallels, but “Inside” is such a compelling puzzle that it takes a while for the metaphor, if that is what it is, to become apparent. This is more about how art helps you survive when the immediate necessities, like running water and windows that open, are denied you. Instead there's a refrigerator that plays “Macarena” when you leave the door open too long and a collection of modern art so impressive it's listed in the credits. If you have to be trapped, it might as well be in the nicest apartment anyone has ever seen, but still, it's no way to live.

Identity Crisis

Gariza Films, Inicia Films

MOVIE REVIEW
20,000 Species of Bees (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

“20,000 Species of Bees” is about an 8-year-old child coming to the realization that they are not the gender assigned to them at birth, and whether or not the child’s family will be able to accept and adjust to this news. As the child, Sofía Otero, who is 8 herself, has just won the gender-neutral Silver Bear for Best Actor prize at this year’s Berlinale. This is an achievement on par with Quvenzhané Wallis’s Best Actress nomination for “Beasts of the Southern Wild” at the age of 6. But a film about a child whose gender identity is being questioned is such a hot-button topic that first-time writer/director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren had 20,000 different ways to mess this up. It’s delightful to report that none of them happened.

Missed Connections

Lu Films

MOVIE REVIEW
The Shadowless Tower (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

The White Dagoba is a thousand-year-old temple in Beijing, built on the orders of Kublai Khan, that was, according to this movie named after it, carefully designed and built so as to cast no shadow. In the streets around the temple, whether or not you cast a shadow yourself is not guaranteed. It's quite a striking visual metaphor, but the movie is so overwrought it doesn't quite know how to make the best of it.

Twist of Fate

Films Grand Huit

MOVIE REVIEW
Disco Boy (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

Sometimes the best thing to do is just to dance. Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) got a raw deal; a Belarusian orphan doesn’t have many ways to make a better life for himself. His childhood dream with his “comrade in misfortune,” Mikhail (Michał Balicki), was to make their way to France, enlist in the Foreign Legion, and after five years depart as French citizens with French names and the slate wiped clean. But dreams can curdle into nightmares, as Aleksei finds out firsthand in the Nigerian Delta, of all places. It’s not the plot the “Disco Boy” title leads you to expect, but for writer-director Giacomo Abbruzzese that’s the point, how the expectations and prejudices of others limit your own life.

Boys' Club

Wyatt Garfield

MOVIE REVIEW
Manodrome (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

If the pitch for “Manodrome” wasn't “ ‘Taxi Driver’ meets ‘Fight Club’ ” someone should be fired. What movies have better depicted a crisis of American masculinity than those two? But the key difference is that both of those movies knew what they were fighting for. “Manodrome” doesn't. It doesn’t know what it wants. It doesn't even know who to blame for the mess it’s in. Its incoherent hatred is an accurate reflection of the sickeningly violent and misogynistic ethos that is flooding social media and the minds of teenage boys all over the world. But real-world accuracy and production values worthy of the Berlinale don’t necessarily make a movie good.

Passing Down the Family Business

Benjamin Baltimore

MOVIE REVIEW
The Plough (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

A movie about three generations of a family running their own puppet theater in Paris is an unusual setting for exploring how a person chooses their life. Of course the multiple metaphors, starting with the title, play their part, but so do family expectations, the limits of the body, and who a person falls in love with. Philippe Garrel won the Best Director prize at this year’s Berlinale for his work, a startling choice since there’s nothing overtly flashy here, which is the entire point.