Oléo Films
MOVIE REVIEW
Maestra (2023)
The first thing that happens in "Maestra," a documentary by Maggie Contreras following an international group of female orchestral conductors, is the sound of someone screaming in rage or agony or anguish over a black screen. A viewer primed by the film "Tár" for the psychodramas of the profession will suspect the person shrieking might be about to stab someone with a baton; but when the lights come up it turns out to be Mélisse Brunet, a modest and experienced French-born conductor guiding a young student through a spot of primal scream therapy. Ms. Brunet advises her pupil to "Wear what you want and do what you want" at the podium, the film's first approach to the expectations that can restrict female conductors, and the likelihood that they will be told to do neither of those things. The individuals followed by "Maestra" are diverse, talented and committed; but by the end you appreciate why Ms. Brunet's screams might be coming from the heart.
Continue reading “The Music Lovers” »
Slot Machine
MOVIE REVIEW
Eureka (2023)
“Eureka” has too many ideas and no shape for them. It's especially irritating as some of the images were the strongest of the Cannes Film Festival. But images need a plot; and a plot needs structure, or at least more than this.
Continue reading “Just Wandering” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Settlers (2023)
On a windswept pampas a group of English-speaking men are building a barbed wire fence in silence, until the machinery makes an awful noise and a man lets out a scream. It was only his arm, he says from the ground, as the severed stump pulses blood and the others watch in silence. He'll be up and back at work in just a moment, if someone would bandage it. No one moves, except the overseer, a Scottish lieutenant named MacLennan (Mark Stanley), who rides up on horseback. The injured man's affirmations that he’s absolutely fine reach a higher pitch as MacLennan sighs in frustration, unholsters his gun, and shoots the injured man in the head. That's how callously death arrived for you at the turn of the last century in Tierra del Fuego, the literal end of the world.
Continue reading “A Killing Spree” »
Disney/Pixar
MOVIE REVIEW
Elemental (2023)
Possibly the greatest piece of recent cultural criticism was the tweet which said all Pixar movies are about whether something has feelings. Cars, toys, fish, robots, planes, rats, feelings themselves. In “Elemental,” the newest Pixar/Disney movie and the closing film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, this concept is taken one further. What if the basic elements of life (air, fire, water and earth) had feelings, and furthermore what if some of those feelings were racist? This is quite an extrapolation for a kids' movie, especially one that overlooks the fact that kids having parents of different races is not remotely unusual anymore. Some really stunning visuals, a refreshing attitude to gender roles, and the first explicitly gay women in a Disney movie go some way to make up for this throwback of a concept, but it's unfortunately not enough to make the movie any good.
Continue reading “Out of Her Element” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Taste of Things (2023)
“The Taste of Things” is like a tender lover, leaving you both sated and ravenous for much, much more. It is a movie about the art of cooking and how food and its preparations are a gift for those you love. It’s set in the 1890s, features a character repeatedly and sincerely called “the Napoleon of gastronomy” and deserves every single possible plaudit for how respectfully it takes the art of pleasure. Writer-director Tran Anh Hùng won the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which should be the first of many, many awards for this exceptional film. Everyone it goes it should be thrown a parade, followed by a feast.
Continue reading “Recipe for Love” »
Brad Garrison
MOVIE REVIEW
Chasing Chasing Amy (2023)
Art does unpredictable work at a distance, one reason among several to leave it where it is no matter what you might personally think or what its makers get up to. In the case of Sav Rodgers, suffering through an unhappy late-2000s high school education in Kansas and the casual homophobia of fellow students, Kevin Smith's then-decade-old 1997 film, "Chasing Amy," became comfort food, lifeline and object of fascination. "Chasing Chasing Amy" is the very personal story of how Mr. Smith's film – the one in which New Jersey comic-book writer Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) is smitten with Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams) and loses his bearings when he hears that she is a lesbian – worked the spell that art can work, closing the gap between a viewer and everything outside despite the movie's own flaws or nature. Having waited for its moment to spring into someone's life disguised as a VHS tape, Mr. Smith's work proceeded to change that life, the right tool in the right place.
Continue reading “From Jersey With Love” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Bonnard Pierre and Marthe (2023)
Pierre Bonnard was a leading post-impressionist painter, an artistic revolutionary who never quite achieved international fame and prominence, though he is well-known in France. Director Martin Provost, who also wrote the script with regular collaborator Marc Abdelnour, has significant previous experience in shining a light on the personal lives of underappreciated French artists. The Cannes Film Festival is the natural home for this work, a solid piece of entertainment which demonstrates that life may imitate art, but art imitates the human heart.
Continue reading “The Portraits of a Lady” »
Vertigo Releasing
MOVIE REVIEW
Reality (2023)
They say “the truth hurts, so write fiction” but rarely are we meant to take an axiom so literally. Nowadays the dust barely settles on a real-life event before a dramatization of it is made (for some reason Mark Wahlberg specializes in this, though Viggo Mortensen isn’t above it either). In the last decade verbatim theater, in which actors use transcripts of genuine real-life words to act out the thoughts and feelings of the characters, has become commonplace. But this happens less in film, though things are changing there too, with “Reality” at the head of the pack. Director Tina Satter has adapted her own play, “Is This a Room,” with cowriter James Paul Dallas for the script of “Reality.” I say script; the text is based on the two-hour-ish recording made by the F.B.I. on June 3, 2017, when it arrested Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) on suspicion of espionage. It has been condensed but a disclaimer at the start promises authenticity. And there are enough strange little asides and people stumbling over their words in the ways people talk in real life but written dialogue rarely captures. This adds an air of wait-for-it to the proceedings, but for dramatic strength it leaves much to be desired.
Continue reading “Oversharing” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The New Boy (2023)
Cate Blanchett became a global superstar so quickly after her movie debut that it’s been a very, very long time since she has played an Australian. Evidently life in lockdown had her reconsider; and she worked closely with writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton to bring “The New Boy” to the screen, starting with the Cannes Film Festival. She is one of its producers, as is her husband Andrew Upton, and their daughter Edith Upton is credited as a “morale officer.” It is a showcase for herself and the 9-year-old Aswan Reid as the new boy, in a parable of religion, duty and how rules for living both create and prevent happiness. It is a strange and sad experience, and unfortunately not imaginative enough to have its desired effect.
Continue reading “Leap of Faith” »
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
Strangers by Night (2023)
Longtime readers of this site will know this critic has a serious weakness for the genre of romantic comedy where the couple spend the night walking around a city, talking and getting to know each other as they explore the world instead of each other’s bodies. The previous entry in this genre was the Toronto charmer “Stay the Night,” while “Strangers by Night” is set in Paris. Its couple is older, with less reason to get together than most, but the irresistible pull between them is something the movie does a wonderful job exploring, up to a point.
Continue reading “Before Sunrise” »