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MOVIE REVIEW
Fighter (2024)
“Fighter” is much, much more interesting than its topline, a.k.a. the Indian answer to “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Born to Fly.” The influence of American war movies and all their cheery flyboys is strong, but “Fighter” is much more pointed than either of the American and Chinese celebration of their armed forces in that it has a clear conflict and enemy: Kashmir, and terrorists who commit crimes against Indian citizens while finding shelter in Pakistan. This specificity is very unusual in recent worldwide blockbusters and means that the relentless patriotism, such as a poem about how no coffin is more beautiful than one draped with an Indian flag, is way more meaningful.
Continue reading “Air Show” »
Eric Zachanowich/Searchlight Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Suncoast (2024)
End-of-life care becomes an issue on almost everyone's plate one way or another. The dilemma faced by the family in "Suncoast" as they place Max (Cree Kawa), a young man dying of brain cancer, into a hospice will resonate a little or a lot with most people; for this is the art and craft of the medical drama, to which few are fully immune. In this one premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Laura Chinn gives the mother of the patient, Kristine (Laura Linney), and her other child, Doris (Nico Parker, daughter of Thandiwe Newton and with some of her mother's wary watchfulness), equal focus in their shared but different grief. So the film is about one parent's agonies and one young woman's coming-of-age at the same time, two films for the price of one. And there's a political dimension, since Ms. Chinn sets her story in 2005 at the same hospice where Terri Schiavo is receiving care, the real-life right-to-die case playing out in the background on all news channels. The tact and delicacy of the film will have much to do with all this being based on experience: the film maker has fictionalized things for narrative purposes, but Ms. Chinn's brother did die in that hospice; it was at that time; and she was that sister.
Continue reading “The Long Goodbye” »
Leo Matiz/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Frida (2024)
Carla Gutiérrez's documentary about Frida Kahlo wants to focus on the artist as a person and a woman, rather than get dragged into the higher showbiz orbit of the cultural presence, Madonna-influencer and biopic subject also called Frida Kahlo, famous enough that her unibrow is enough to spark recognition. The result could be termed back-to-basics. In the absence of any third-party commentary, "Frida" uses Kahlo's own letters and diaries, alongside other contemporary texts written by lovers and friends, all read in voiceover by actors. Meanwhile the screen shows still photos, clippings and newsreel footage, plus views of Kahlo paintings. The film, premiering at Sundance on its way to audiences via Amazon, is after authenticity, fact rather than legend, although Ms. Gutiérrez is an editor by trade and knows that assembling a montage is as much of an active manipulation as a dramatized narrative can be.
Continue reading “Art Attacks” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024)
It’s not so much that this movie has strange ideas about the healing power of art. It’s that it has strange ideas about the healing power of forgiveness. Here forgiveness is not a gift you give yourself. Instead it’s something other people have the right to, without apology or doing the work to set things right. This strange sense of entitlement is the hook on which hangs a difficult family history and how it has shaped an artist. So the choice of the word “exhibit” in the title is appropriate: it’s only a feeling of the real thing.
Continue reading “Ghost From the Past” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Krazy House (2024)
Many European artists – Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, to name a couple – have very skewed ideas about what defines Americana, deduced exclusively from our pop culture exports. The Dutch filmmaking duo Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil is yet another example. “Krazy House,” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, can best be described as “Funny Games” reimagined as a sitcom.
Continue reading “Losing My Religion” »
Courtesy photo
MOVIE REVIEW
Captain Miller (2024)
While it feels like a western and looks like a war epic, “Captain Miller” manages to have its cake and eat it. The movie preaches a message of antiviolence while amassing a body count in the thousands. Five bomb and fire experts are thanked in the credits, which understates how many explosions take place and how much stunt work must have been necessary. But despite the extraordinary amount of mayhem, the overall message is one of disgust for violence and the unjust systems which make violence inescapable.
Continue reading “Eye for an Eye, Captain” »
A24
MOVIE REVIEW
A Different Man (2024)
“A Different Man” reunites filmmaker Aaron Schimberg with his “Chained for Life” leading man, Adam Pearson. If you think deeply about it, the new film, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, is actually incredibly sweet in its attempt to normalize the actor’s deformity caused by neurofibromatosis type 1. For the uninitiated, though, it’s more like some mashup of “Face/Off,” “The Elephant Man” and “Beauty and the Beast.” It may look like body horror, but it’s a comedy . . . maybe?
Continue reading “About Face” »
Anna Kooris/A24
MOVIE REVIEW
Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
“Saint Maud” auteur Rose Glass returns with something more deliberately A24-y, a gonzo pulp fully in the mode of ’70s grindhouse and its ’90s Quentin Tarantino-led renaissance. Ms. Glass disclosed at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Love Lies Bleeding” that she originally set it in Scotland, but the story just makes much more sense in the States. She ain’t wrong. This toxic mix of unhinged bloodlust and sleazy softcore is basically cinematic apple pie.
Continue reading “Attack of the Killer Lesbians” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Presence (2024)
Perhaps the only filmmaker who has successfully bounced between commercial and indie careers, Steven Soderbergh returns to Sundance Film Festival, where his breakout arrived via 1989’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” with another lean and mean production perfectly appropriate for the annual Park City event. You can almost venture to guess that principal photography for “Presence” took something like 11 days; and I don’t mean this in a bad way.
Continue reading “A Haunted House” »
Tobin Yelland/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024)
Spotlighted by Spike Lee in the early aughts, Magical Negro is a well-worn narrative trope involving Black supporting characters whose entire raison d’être is to selflessly serve the white protagonists. We’ve been told this story time and again, in popular movies such as “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and “Green Book,” to name a few. While now well-known and widely accepted in cinema studies, the academic jargon still makes many a white editor uncomfortable and prone to excise it almost instinctively as if it’s unfit for polite conversation. Unfortunately, this time they won’t be able to cop out and strike it from the title of “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”
Continue reading “The Help” »