Rita Baghdadi/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Sirens (2022)
“Sirens” is pitched as a documentary about a year in the life of Slave to Sirens, Lebanon’s only all-girl heavy metal band. What “Sirens” is actually about is the difficulty of being gay in a society where gayness isn’t widely accepted. The ensuring drama both experienced and created by band members who are also lesbians is completely fascinating, but it reduces three of the band’s five members to mere window dressing. Their names are barely even mentioned, and that’s just not fair. But this is what happens when drama takes over: the attention follows. We just can’t help it.
Continue reading “Rock the Kasbah” »
Nick Wall/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)
The optics aren’t great. Here we have a movie about a mixed-race Irish sex worker teaching a posh white British woman about her capacity for physical pleasure in which race is not mentioned once. The major concern expressed by the woman is for the man’s relationship with his family, who do not know that he does sex work, which you would not think would be brought up so much, but that is a red herring to distract from the more obviously uncomfortable issues. So with difficulty, we’ll set the temptation to use the word “colonizer” to describe Emma Thompson’s character aside, and assess the movie on its own terms. “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is a two-hander between one of the best actresses of our lifetimes and a total unknown (unless you watch the Irish soaps) who burns through the screen with the impact of a new Marlon Brando. It’s about a former teacher who has waited for her husband to die before she begins the exploration of her own body. She pays for the privilege, of course, but with her privilege she thinks it will only cost her money. Leo, the handsome young man she hires (Daryl McCormack), will have to teach her more than one lesson.
Continue reading “Let’s Talk About Sex” »
Alfonso Herrera Salcedo/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
A Love Song (2022)
A woman (Dale Dickey) is waiting. She is waiting in the middle of unusually gorgeous scenery. A large mountain in the distance towers over a gentle plain that glides down to the lake she is camping by. She is waiting in a trailer, brand new in the 1970s, hitched to a pickup truck. She has a bait trap with which she catches crawdads, almost the only thing she eats. When she makes her morning coffee she listens to music on a Longines Symphonette, a lucky radio; whenever you twist the dial it magically plays the perfect song. It’s about 10 minutes before a word is spoken aloud, and that feels like no time at all.
Continue reading “Some Catching Up to Do” »
Benjamin Loeb/A24
MOVIE REVIEW
After Yang (2022)
Asians are often derided as robotic; in “After Yang,” the titular Asian is literally a robot. Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) form the performatively picture-perfect interracial family, and Yang (Justin H. Min) is part of that picture, too, albeit it enters slightly later, both literally and figuratively, during the film’s opening sequence.
Continue reading “At Your Own Yellow Peril” »
Eric Lin/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
I’ll Be Your Mirror (2024)
Essentially “Lost in Translation” with the sads and more interactions with the locals, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” takes place in Japan, the seeming destination of choice for lonely whites in search of je ne sais quoi. Newly widowed photographer (bien sur, what else could she possibly be?) Chloe (Carla Juri) arrives in the Land of the Rising Sun, which she previously visited with now-deceased husband, Peter (Gustaf Skarsgärd). She is apparently there taking pictures of the Japanese doing Japanese things, and she greets everyone and everything with wide-eyed wonder and amazement like Nicole Kidman shilling for AMC Theatres.
Continue reading “Roast in Translation” »
Ilkka Saastamoinen/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Girl Picture (2022)
It was disorienting to watch “Palm Trees and Power Lines” and “Girl Picture” back-to-back at the Sundance Film Festival. One is about a 17-year-old girl who throws herself into an abyss. The other is about three 17-year-old girls whose lives are full of fun. Both movies are award-winning depictions about groping teenage attempts to grow up and/or feel something, but “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is the ne plus ultra of horror. Fortunately “Girl Picture” is its opposite, a relaxed and humorous tale bursting with life in a safe environment. That’s not to say there’s no sour mixed in with the sweetness, but for a hopeful and charming tale about growing up, you could not do better.
Continue reading “Peas in a Pod” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
The Janes (2022)
“The Janes” opens with archive street footage of fabulously dressed women in the 1960s. The immediate point that makes is that while fashions change, people more or less stay the same. But codirectors Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin use the fashions of the late ’60s and early ’70s to make a quiet point in their story of the Jane Collective, an underground network in Chicago, at a time when abortion was illegal, that safely arranged at least 11,000 abortions in five years.
Continue reading “Women Helping Women” »
Wilson Webb/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Call Jane (2022)
Years ago, this critic attended a talk by Euzhan Palcy, director of “A Dry White Season,” the 1989 antiapartheid box-office bomb that was the first major Hollywood production directed by a Black woman. She told a roomful of righteous undergraduates that she centered Donald Sutherland’s character because his was the one with the story arc; all the Black characters already knew of the atrocities keeping the apartheid regime in power and that racism is bad. She calmly explained that you have to start from the beginning every time, because there will always be people who simply don’t think they are affected by something like racism, and the constraints of a movie’s running time mean it’s more interesting to focus on the people who need to change. That same logic went into the choices that make up “Call Jane,” a major Hollywood production about why abortion is good. Should we need to start from the beginning on this subject? Of course we do. And when it’s done this well, it speaks for itself.
Continue reading “Unplanned Parenthood” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022)
In her first book, Mindy Kaling has a section where she discusses romantic comedy tropes, one of which is the Typical Mother Character. To paraphrase Ms. Kaling, basic math makes it clear that the Typical Mother Character became a parent at an uncomfortably young age, which means that her backstory can’t really be discussed, because it is automatically more interesting than anything happening in the romantic comedy. Writer-director Cooper Raiff, who also stars in “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” evidently took this statement as a challenge. His incredibly charming movie is about how an open-hearted young man and a jaded older (but not much older) woman suddenly find themselves with an unexpected potential romantic situation, and the all-encompassing question of what they are going to do about it.
Continue reading “The Graduate” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Palm Trees and Power Lines (2022)
“Palm Trees and Power Lines” immediately joins the rare pantheon of movies that are so emotionally disturbing they can only be watched once. But earlier examples such as “Requiem for a Dream” and “Million Dollar Baby” are kiddie cartoons compared to the brutal nihilism and emotional horror within this film. In her first feature film, director Jamie Dack, who also wrote the script by Audrey Findlay, has immediately vaulted herself to the front rank of American directors, but she’s done it with a story so difficult to enjoy that she – and it – are not going to get the attention they deserve.
Continue reading “Mind the Age Gap” »