Céline Nieszawer
MOVIE REVIEW
Arthur Rambo (2021)
It’s really, really annoying to see a movie try to make a sociological point when it doesn’t understand the meaning of its own plot in the first place. This is a trap a lot of people fall into when they are talking about social media that they don’t use themselves. Reading about Twitter is not the same thing as being on Twitter. Lurking on the site is not the same thing as being an active user. And there is a colossal difference in being torn to pieces over a misunderstanding, or after deliberately poking the bear. But you’d think you’d get all that cleared up before going to the trouble of making a movie about it.
Continue reading “Youthful Offender” »
MOVIE REVIEW
7 Days in Havana (2012)
Rezo Films
Portmanteau anthology films — not exactly fashionable, but never quite extinct either — enjoy a shot in the arm every few years from producer Emmanuel Benbihy's Cities of Love franchise, the cycle that has so far produced "Paris, je t'aime" and "New York, I Love You." But Mr. Benbihy's all-star bite-size format feels like a shallower option than the approach tried in "7 Days in Havana," which lets seven diverse directors get their teeth into longer-form stories all penned by the same Cuban screenwriter, Leonardo Padura. The aim is to get under the skin of a city with enough juice in its veins to power any seven stories and another 70 to boot.
Continue reading “Viva la vida” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Class (2008)
Pierre Milon/Sony Pictures Classics
“Palme d’or” winner at the Cannes Film Festival and opener of the New York Film Festival, Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” is indeed powerful stuff. The film chronicles one year in a junior high school in an ethnically diverse arrondissement of Paris. François Bégaudeau, whose autobiographical book “Entre les murs” serves as the basis of the film, leads a cast of non-professional actors who play students and teachers. Here’s a real inspirational story without the kind of predictable “Dead Poets Society”-esque life-changing conclusion, about one French teacher attempting to instill something meaningful into a classroom full of overgrown infants who are rowdy, rebellious and combative. What most critics probably aren’t telling you about in their expectedly lavish praises of the film is its stereotypical and downright patronizing portrayal of race and ethnicity.
Continue reading “Mad Hot Classroom” »
