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” »
Edu Grau/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Passing (2021)
The four main actors are some of the best-looking currently working, more importantly with the acting skill to render dialogue basically unnecessary, and yet “Passing” is a bore. It should have been a tense domestic horror, since the plot revolves around a life-threatening, decades-long lie. On a sweltering day in Irene (Tessa Thompson) escapes the New York City heat in a cool hotel lobby where she spots Claire (Ruth Negga), whom she hasn’t seen since high school. Claire brings her up to her room, where they order a teapot of whiskey – this is during Prohibition – and start chatting, until Claire’s husband John (Alexander Skarsgård) interrupts. Three things become immediately clear: Claire is living as a white woman, the proudly racist John has no idea that his wife is black, and while Irene doesn’t normally pass for white herself, she can should she so choose.
Continue reading “Under the Skin” »
David Bornfriend/A24
MOVIE REVIEW
Moonlight (2016)
"Moonlight" depicts the coming-of-age of a gay black man in three chapters, each taking its heading from the moniker he goes by during that distinct phase in his life and representing a corresponding metamorphosis.
Continue reading “Forlorn This Way” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Sugar (2009)
Fernando Calzada/Sony Pictures Classics
Some might find baseball the most boring of American sports to watch on television (it could have been the most boring of any, but British television airs both snooker and darts), so any movie about baseball automatically has an uphill climb. Previous successes such as "Field of Dreams," "Bull Durham" and others which don't star Kevin Costner have raked the sport over pretty thoroughly. But Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who co-wrote and co-directed "Sugar" and so refreshed the teacher-student genre with "Half Nelson," found an equally interesting new angle in this film. The eponymous hero (Algenis Perez Soto, making his movie debut) is a Dominican on contract to a training camp for the Kansas City Royals. Since Sammy Sosa made his name, we've all been dimly aware of the baseball fever which exists in Latin America, so it's interesting to learn what life in like for these young men. What makes "Sugar" really special is its focus on a young man who gets what he wants, only to realize it's not what he wanted after all.
Continue reading “Field of American Dreams” »