Asterlight/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Searchers (2021)
It’s such a good idea that you can’t believe no one thought of it before. People face the camera, looking at dating profiles on the app of their choice, and discuss them with the film crew who controls the scroll, a friend over their shoulder, or both. If messages are dictated, the crew type them and up and send them; if messages are received, they are analyzed together. The pandemic is apparent – “Searchers” was shot last summer in New York City, and the interviews are intercut with street scenes of P.D.A. by people wearing masks – but also not the point, since dating is impossible no matter where or when you are.
Continue reading “Social Distancing” »
Vlad Cioplea/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
The World to Come (2021)
Why are so many movies about lesbians historical dramas? For the same reason there are so few movies about writers: Modern lesbianism isn’t cinematic. Nowadays, if a woman is unhappily married, she can just get divorced; she won't starve to death. If someone wants to experiment with their sexuality, it’s no big deal. And if a woman is unsure whether or not she is attracted to the new neighbor lady, she can look up the language she needs to articulate it online. That kind of drama is almost entirely internal, and emotional, which on film is about as interesting as watching a critic write a review.
But back in the day real life had no such easy assists. In 1856, in upstate New York, farmwives were hemmed in by their daily round of chores and responsibilities. The loneliness and isolation is baked into the daily bread. For the marriage of Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck), there is the added complication of grief. As the opening sequence establishes, their only daughter recently died of diphtheria, and they are both staggering in circles of pain and misery, capable of daily survival but little more. But then the large farm down the lane is rented out to a new couple, Finney (Christopher Abbott) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). The women notice each other, and the men notice them noticing.
Continue reading “Desperate Housewives” »
Glen Wilson/Warner Brothers
MOVIE REVIEW
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)
“Judas and the Black Messiah” – which retells F.B.I. informant Bill O’Neal’s (LaKeith Stanfield) ascension within the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 leading up to the bureau’s assassination of chapter chairman, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the following year – often feels like a companion piece to Spike Lee’s 2018 “BlacKkKlansman.”
Continue reading “People to the Power” »
Daniel Power/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
Land (2021)
In her directorial debut/Oscar showcase, “Land,” Robin Wright plays Edee, a woman grieving the losses of her husband and son. She leaves everything and civilization behind to rough it out in the Wyoming Rockies in a ramshackle wood cabin without electricity or plumbing. While Edee is in the outhouse, an ursine visitor stops by and ransacks the cabin and months’ worth of canned goods therein. She is in bad shape when Miguel (Demián Bichir) and Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge) find her after becoming alarmed by smoke no longer rising from her chimney in the dead of winter. Edee refuses to go to a hospital, so Miguel volunteers to care for her and eventually imparts some essential survival skills along with an ’80s hit song.
Continue reading “The Pioneer Widow” »
The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
One Man and His Shoes (2020)
Neither Nike nor Michael Jordan participated in the making of this film, which is surprising, until you realize the ending director Yemi Barimo is building toward. The point of this documentary, which examines how Air Jordans became and remain the ne plus ultra of shoes and the backbone of a billion-dollar industry, is to accuse the marketing of these shoes as the cause of death within the Black American community and hold Michael Jordan responsible for at least one murder.
Continue reading “It’s Gotta Be the Shoes” »
The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes (2020)
It must be quite a millstone, to be so famous for only one thing. And the millstone must be even heavier when you weren’t publicly credited for the one thing you were famous for until 12 years after your death. The Britain is revisiting the history of Delia Derbyshire, the composer of the unmistakable theme song to the juggernaut TV show “Doctor Who.” This documentary has been billed as a “phantom collaboration” between some newly discovered works of Derbyshire’s and that of legendary performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti (one of the founders of Throbbing Gristle). It is that, but it is more about the limits of exploring a largely undocumented life, and where imagination can, or cannot, fill the gaps.
Continue reading “Radio Head” »
The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Zanka Contact (2020)
It’s Moroccan slang for street fighting, the title. And right from the beginning, the movie pulls no punches. We first meet Rajae (Khansa Batma), in a red dress with a pentagram-chain collar, as she steals a taxi from a man in religious dress (while a cover of “A Man of Constant Sorrow” plays, no less) and then cheerfully tells the driver an obscene joke until the taxi crashes. In the other crashed car, a limo actually, is Larsen Snake (Ahmed Hammoud), a former rockstar of global renown and current hardcore junkie on the run from two baddies – and writer-director Ismaël El Iraki makes a very funny point here, by having the baddies be the broadest stereotypes of Englishness imaginable. But they are not the point. The point is what happens after that crash, when Rajae wipes some broken glass out of her hair, necks a small bottle swiped from Larsen’s minibar and collapses into his arms.
Continue reading “It’s Still the Same Old Story” »
The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Cicada (2020)
A cicada is an insect that remains buried for 17 years, but then explodes out of the ground singing its very loud song. Ben (Matt Fifer, who also wrote and co-directed) has a fair few secrets, made obvious from the start as he pansexually shags his way around Manhattan in the aftermath of a break-up. But eventually he has a meet-cute with Sam (Sheldon D. Brown) at the carts outside The Strand bookstore. The relationship that unfolds between the men means that not a lot will remain buried for long.
Continue reading “Another Weekend” »
Aidan Monaghan/The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Wildfire (2020)
Kelly (the late Nika McGuigan) is obviously trouble. She is a foot passenger on the ferry into Belfast, so visibly rough-looking that her bags are searched. The border patrol come back with her passport and the news that she was reporting missing over a year ago. Kelly squares her shoulders and says that they can’t keep her, and hitchhikes her way across the country to a front door. It’s opened by Sean (Martin McCann), her brother-in-law, who is not perfectly thrilled to see her. But he welcomes her in, and goes to pick up Lauren (Nora Jane Noone) from work with the news, even though she begins shaking with fear when she sees him. He reassures her that all is well and brings her home. Well, of course, being a relative term.
Continue reading “We Are Family” »
Parisa Taghizadeh/The BFI London Film Festival; right, The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Lovers Rock/If It Were Love (2020)
The power of the body to express emotion is something we normally take a little for granted. In these upsetting lockdown days, it’s becoming ever more valuable. Groups of people dancing together? It’s so unthinkable at the moment as to be pornographic. “Lovers Rock,” one of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” ensemble, is the fictional story of a house party in 1980s West London. “If It Were Love” is a documentary by Patric Chiha about a Swiss modern dance ensemble creating a piece, under the choreography of Gisele Vienne, about a 1990s rave. The two are not quite halves of the same coin, but they are interested more in music and movement than stereotypical plot, and as a film festival double bill they work extremely well together.
Continue reading “Strictly Come Dancing” »