IFC Films
MOVIE REVIEW
Happening (2022)
Something at which French cinema excels is the feeling of living inside a body. It’s the slow accretion of details: people putting coins into a phone box, ordering beers at the bar of a sweaty student dance, or frowning over their books in the park as their friends chatter around them. Audrey Diwan’s “Happening” is about only the physical experience of being pregnant when you don’t want to be, and somehow is a tactile experience. It won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, Ms. Diwan herself has been nominated for a BAFTA, and all these awards are incredibly well deserved. A young woman trying to regain control of her body from an indifferent world is proven here to be something extraordinary.
Continue reading “Pregnant Pause” »
Andrew Catlin/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Nothing Compares (2022)
In January 2022 Sinead O’Connor’s 17-year-old son, Shane, committed suicide. This hideous fact will no doubt color the reception of Kathryn Ferguson’s fine documentary “Nothing Compares.” Any praise seems callow in the face of her grief and any criticism feels like twisting the knife. This is especially due to the upsetting public display of Ms. O’Connor’s private grief, part of her tendency to live her every thought out loud, which has been at the heart of her public persona since she began gigging in Dublin as a teenager. This blurring of the personal and the professional is different when a musician does it. A similarly confessional artist like Tracey Emin does can blur the lines because her fame is limited and therefore the reaction more controllable. But Ms. O’Connor’s fame and her notoriety are global, and she ripped up her global career when she ripped up a photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. “Nothing Compares” limits its focus to the years of her global rise and sudden fall, from 1987 to 1993. If you think of this documentary as a package of the greatest hits, that makes sense. But as with any compilation album, a lot of nuances are lost.
Continue reading “Losing Her Religion” »
Emily Knecht/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Am I OK? (2022)
It’s a Hollywood adage that putting a question mark in a movie title is bad luck. For a movie that centers on anxiety, the question mark in “Am I OK?” is a surprising choice. But that’s the only old adage codirectors Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne, directing Lauren Pomerantz’s script, have ignored. This is a glossy movie, in the tradition of Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends” and Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha,” about how underemployed female best friends maintain their closeness as adulthood pulls them in separate directions. It looks modern, but it’s nothing new. Not even its exploration of coming out as portrayed by the most sexually bold actress of her generation contains anything like a surprise.
Continue reading “Growing Apart” »
Isabel Castro/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Mija (2022)
There are two documentaries in “Mija” fighting for dominance. One is about a young woman’s attempts to make it as the manager of various up-and-coming musical acts in the Southern California scene. The other shows how the only documented members of undocumented immigrant families face incredible personal pressure in their professional lives, as well-paid jobs mean money for immigration lawyers and the chance to regulate everyone’s status. Both of these separate stories have one center: Doris Muñoz, the self-made music talent manager who opened her home and family secrets to director Isabel Castro. Doris is so endearing you are pretty much automatically on her side; as a subject she was a real find (“Mija” is the name of her company). The trouble is Ms. Castro doesn’t quite know how to manage the multitude of stories Ms. Muñoz’s life contains.
Continue reading “Family Obligation” »
Chris Witt/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Breaking (2022)
John Boyega channels both the defiance of Denzel Washington and the pathos of Michael B. Jordan as the beating heart of “Breaking,” an upsetting dramatization of the true story of an Atlanta bank hold-up in 2017. It is a silent protest at the militarization of the American police and a howl of injustice at the way American veterans are treated by the system they served. It takes care to show just how a good and decent man can be pushed too far. And it takes even more care in showing how the American systems which were meant to serve and protect are now bulldozers, crushing everything in their path. Make no mistake, this is a horror movie. It’s about the horror of existing inside a society where violence is the only answer, no matter what the question. The people within the society are trying their best to be kind and empathetic, but when there’s a gun to your head or a bomb in a bag it’s impossible to relax. Safety is an illusion, and if you start the downward slide – whether or not it’s your fault – no one will do the right thing.
Continue reading “Captive Audience” »
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” »