Sara Larrota
MOVIE REVIEW
Petit Mal (2022)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a group of people living in a so-called alternative arrangement, must never shut up about it. Most of them don’t make movies screened as part of the Tribeca Festival about themselves set in their own home, which is generally a big loss; there’s little more enjoyable than being nosy and/or judgmental about how other people live. The bourgeois bohemians of “Petit Mal” are a trio of Colombian lesbians who live in a huge rural house and are pretty pleased with themselves. This is not necessarily a complaint. Laia (Ruth Caudeli, the writer-director) is a movie director; Martina (Silvia Varón) is a film editor who works at home; Anto (Ana María Otálora) does the dishes. They all sleep in a big bed in a big bedroom in matching teddy-bear onesies. When all three of them are together the rest of the world vanishes into nothing. But right from the start there’s a burbling concern that paradise was only built for two.
Continue reading “And Then There Were Two” »
Jerry Bauer
MOVIE REVIEW
My Name Is Andrea (2022)
Andrea Dworkin has always been a divisive figure, within feminism and without. She’s best known for spearheading, alongside Catharine MacKinnon, legal attempts to ban pornography in the 1980s, seeing that as the first step to ensure equality between the sexes. That goal has been comprehensively lost, but her wider point – the threat of sexual violence is a cultural whip used to keep women in line from girlhood, and women should unite to fight back against that by any means necessary – was often lost in the fuss. Pratibha Parmar’s biographical story of Dworkin, as shown at the Tribeca Festival, isn’t quite either a biopic or a documentary. Unfortunately its message is lost in the fuss.
Continue reading “Reappraisal of a Radical” »
Zelma Cutout
MOVIE REVIEW
My Love Affair With Marriage (2022)
For a movie that was never officially distributed, “Sita Sings the Blues” has had an incredible influence. “Sita Sings the Blues” combined uncombinable things into a work of beauty: director Nina Paley’s lousy marriage which fell apart between San Francisco and Trivandrum, a Hindu myth about the mistreated wife of a prince, and the jazz-era songs of Annette Hanshaw (the cost of the rights to which meant the movie was released under a creative commons license, instead of regular copyright). There is no way that movie should have worked and yet all the pieces somehow melded together perfectly. Did I mention it was animated? “My Love Affair with Marriage,” a Latvian-Luxembourgish coproduction shown at the Tribeca Festival, uses the same template to tell a similar story. A woman’s romantic relationships in a strange and alienating society with a heavy mythic past are explored through animation and commented on with voiceover and song, but it’s unfortunate the overall effect is less powerful, possibly because the songs were composed for the film instead of a serendipitous back-catalog discovery. They are sung by a Greek chorus of winged bird-women (the band Trio Lemonade: Iluta Alsberga, Ieva Katkovska and Kristine Pastare) who hammer home the life lessons Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) learns growing up in the U.S.S.R. Writer-director Signe Bauman also added a highly original twist – Zelma’s story is narrated by Biology (Michelle Pawk), as in the literal and differing neurons in her body which are fired up every time she experiences an emotion. But this unusual combination of narrative choices unfortunately depersonalize a very personal story.
Continue reading “Marriage Minded” »
Oren Soffer
MOVIE REVIEW
Allswell (2022)
“Allswell” is an old-fashioned movie in the best possible sense: a slice of ordinary daily lives driven entirely by the characters without a single special effect. As shown by the Tribeca Festival, the heroines are three Nuyorican women in their late 40s who have quite a lot of life left in them – something incredibly offensive to say in real life, but deeply necessary in cinema, which prefers to center the young. Their choices and their attempts to find happiness are all the more valuable for being flavored with past disappointments and the already-learned knowledge that not everything works out the way you want. It’s a rare treat.
Continue reading “Family Skeletons” »
Robert Vroom
MOVIE REVIEW
You Can Live Forever (2022)
Teenage romance is tricky. Either it’s a couple of kids messing around, practicing at love, or it’s unexpectedly real and overwhelming, with serious long-term consequences. How those consequences are handled depends on the kids. Some are mature enough to understand what’s happening and prepared to gamble their life on this early throw of the dice, and others are naïve, both about themselves as well as the wider world. And what most kids don’t realize is there are always adults observing, especially in a small town in Quebec in the early 1990s. It’s even more fraught when a large part of the town are Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian sect most notable for proselytizing to strangers and not celebrating holidays, including birthdays. “You Can Live Forever,” shown as part of the Tribeca Festival, is interested in figuring out whether it’s possible for a believer and a nonbeliever ever to be happy together. The fact that the teenage romantics are both 17-year-old girls is almost beside the point.
Continue reading “Spiritually Weak” »
Fredrik Wenzel
MOVIE REVIEW
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
“Triangle of Sadness” continues writer-director Ruben Östlund’s preoccupation with the upending of hierarchical social constructs – gender, race, wealth, class, chain of command etc. – in the face of disasters natural or manmade. It’s certainly the kind of stuff that plays well at festivals, as evidenced by Cannes twice bestowing on him the Palme d’or. But does anyone honestly remember what happens in “The Square,” which won him his first in 2017, without looking up the plot? “Triangle,” Mr. Ostlund’s second Palme d’or winner, has a wild ending that feeds right into the rush of the festival setting; the problem lies in the uneven two and a half hours it takes to get there.
Continue reading “Ship of Fools” »
Alex Takats, left; and Carl Juste
MOVIE REVIEW
Endangered (2022)
“Endangered” follows four journalists of the liberal press going about their trade in four geographically separate but equally unsettled parts of the world, running into all the dangers that the trade has always encountered plus the ones brewed up in our current tense period. Dire as these are, sometimes they don’t seem so novel. Governments have always threatened reporters and the cops have always fired tear gas at them and people who mark their ballots in a different place have always been angry. When the film arrives at its natural destination with the Jan. 6, 2021, Washington riot and the abuse of journalists there, it seems one item on a continuum rather than a rogue data point. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s HBO film puts its journalists on another continuum, the honorable one leading back to The Washington Post and Watergate, and further back to clips from a 1960s U.S. TV program about the strength of a free press and the roaring print lines churning it out. Whether this is a road map to rescue or a last lament is less clear.
Continue reading “News of the World” »
Tribeca Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Sophia (2022)
Documentaries about tech entrepreneurs take off when the visionary spins a convincing vision, or bump along the runway when the vision is more myopic than they realize. “Sophia,” by Jon Kasbe and Crystal Moselle, finds a not entirely comfortable third path by following David Hanson and the humanoid female robot he and Hanson Robotics are developing, which lends its name to the film. When Mr. Hanson speaks of his creation as a marker on the path to true artificial intelligence his earnestness speaks for itself; but the film doesn’t put Sophia into any context as a point on the arc from here to there, not least since a lot of the running time is taken up by Sophia not actually working very well. The android’s body is not much more than functional anyway, but what its brain is capable of and the seismic impact that its creator predicts can’t really cohere while the company pit crew are under the hood with the jump leads.
Continue reading “Mr. Robot” »
Søren Kirkegaard
MOVIE REVIEW
Attachment (2022)
Incongruous openings win immediate bonus points, and “Attachment” starts with a chance encounter between an elf princess and a mysterious commoner who perhaps has a curse on her while an uptempo synth beat bounces on the soundtrack, as if the film was about to be the hit meet-cute queer comedy of 1985. Since the setting is clearly a library in present-day Denmark and the elf princess is an actor in costume recreating her TV character for some kids who are bored horizontal, the hidden layers of the set-up are left for you to register later, while “Attachment” skips deftly on into a serious supernatural drama about religion and tradition, lesbian love and culture clash.
Continue reading “About a Goy” »
Carole Bethuel/Curzon Film
MOVIE REVIEW
Everything Went Fine (2022)
Broadly speaking, François Ozon directs two kinds of movies. The first are about young gay men getting themselves into a situation that ends with somebody dying. The second kind are about women in some sort of family-themed trap, to which they learn they must submit. The traps vary (a crappy marriage in “5×2,” a slutty houseguest in “Swimming Pool,” a parasitic twin in “Double Lover”) but they cannot be escaped, and writhing in the net only draws the knots tighter. The daughters in “Everything Went Fine” learned their lessons about their gilded cage in childhood, and tell anyone who asks that it’s impossible to deny their father anything. Mr Ozon must have been thrilled to option the memoir by Emmanuèle Bernheim, the late screenwriter of “5×2” and “Swimming Pool,” on which this movie is based. This is a family in which the ties do significantly more than bind.
Continue reading “Death Wish” »