“Wild Tales,” June 11, 2016 (2014), DVD, Spanish with subtitles. Written and directed by Damian Szifron, this Argentinian film features a set of short stories that are macabre, funny, frightening and very intense. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 2015. The pieces chronicle vengeance in many forms, usually quite over the top, for…
Trumbo
“Trumbo,” June 4, 2016 (2015), DVD. The Cold War blacklist is the subject of this historical drama that follows screenwriter/novelist and active Communist Party member, Dalton Trumbo, from the top of Hollywood, to prison for contempt of Congress, and a decade of working through fronts. It’s a traditional Hollywood narrative of principle, betrayal, love, and…
The Wind Journeys
“The Wind Journeys,” May 22, 2016 (2009), DVD, ColumbianSpanish/dialects/indigenous language subtitles. This thoughtful, beautiful and harsh Columbian film written and directed by Ciro Guerra, chronicles the journey of Octavio. Corrillo (Marciano Martinez, a renowned singer) a former troubadour and singer of vallenato, the lyric ballads of love, life and death in rural northeastern Columbia….
The Look of Silence
“The Look of Silence,” May 8, 2016 (2014), documentary, DVD The second part of Joshua Oppenheimer’s look at the 19654 genocidal massacres of one million Communists and troublemakers of any sort that irritated the military or local thugs,. and Chinese Indonesians, this film brings Adi Rukun, the brother of one victim, Ramli Rukun, face…
Meet the Patels
“Meet the Patels,” April 30, 2016 (2014), documentary, DVD. Roy Perlstein is 30, single, and a comic actor struggling to break into the big time. He lives with his sister, Gail, a filmmaker, since breaking up with his non-Jewish girlfriend after two years because, …, well, she just wasn’t Jewish, and he couldn’t handle it….
Tangerines
“Tangerines,” February 14, 2016 (2013), DVD. The legacy of imperial policy, in this case settling Estonians in Georgia over a century ago, helps set up this antiwar story of enemies and neutrals coming together to understand one another. Ivo is a rural carpenter/farmer in an Estonian village in Georgia. Estonians had been settled there…
Learning to Drive
“Learning to Drive,” February 6, 2016 (2014), DVD. We both enjoyed this small, serious, very funny film about Wendy (well played by Patricia Clarkson), a well-known literary critic in NYC, as she tries to put her life together after her husband leaves for another woman after 21 years. Rage, denial, acceptance follow, and with…
Fences
“Fences,” January 29, 2017 (2016), theater. We loved this Denzel Washington produced, directed, star vehicle filming August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning 1983 play of the same name. Washington and Davis recreate their Tony-winning performances (for the 2010 Broadway revival) as Troy and Rose Maxson for him and Viola Davis. The acting is superb…
Inside Out
“Inside Out,” January 24, 2016 (2015), DVD. This Pixar/Disney look at childhood, its normal but real traumas, memory, and the functioning of the mind is often funny, kind, and astoundingly top 10%- if not 5%-income oriented. It brings us Riley’s attempt to cope with a new and ‘challenging’ setting that disrupts her perfect Minnesota…
Steagall but you can only do so much in a film
“The Big Short,” January 17, 2016 (2015), theater. Based on Michael Lewis’s book, this creative, funny, terrifying, and infuriating movie chronicles the meltdown of 2007/8 and the housing bubble, financial skullduggery, and almost universal corruption among the banks, Wall Street high flyers, the political establishment, and the financial media that led us lemmings over…
Deadpool
“Deadpool,” January 17 2017 (2016), DVD. Sci-fi super-anti-hero fantasy comedy stuff with lots of violence and action, this is about the birth of “Deadpool” as immortal grotesquely mutated superhero killer with a sense of dry humor and sharp swords. Leslie Uggams (yes, that Leslie Uggams) as his blind, coke-head, wackjob roommate stole my heart in…
Walk the Line
“Walk the Line,” 14 January 2006 (2005), theater. Bronwen liked this biopic about Johnny Cash (Juaquin Phoenix) and June Carter Cash (Reese Witherspoon) that takes the tale from his youth to her finally agreeing to marry him. It’s a good film about the music (lots of music and that’s fun!), the drugs, the…
The Night Porter
“The Night Porter,” (1973) January 7, 2016, DVD. Part two of our “45 Years” Charlotte Rampling anticipatory mini-series, and certainly an odd one. Actually, it’s one I’d consciously avoided for many years, but Bronwen wanted to see it. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is a former SS officer, concentration camp torturer living as a hotel night porter…
Spotlight
“Spotlight,” December 27, 2015, in theater. This is a well-meaning and very traditional newspaper film that makes more than a few structural and cinematic bows to its Ur text, “All The President’s Men”. Excellent work from Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachael McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, and Stanley Tucci as the ‘real life’…
42
“42,” August 28, 2015 (2013), DVD. Chadwick Boseman’s young, strong, incredibly talented Jackie Robinson enters the all-white bastion of major league baseball in 1946 at the behest of Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford in a fatsuit and prosthetic nose, and I’ve been told by some who saw him at the time, really like Rickey, but to…
Still Alice
“Still Alice,” August 22, 2015 (2014), DVD. Oscar for Best Actress for Julianne Moore for this terribly sad story of a woman slipping into early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Who amongst us over 60 hasn’t lost a word or two and become scared?. For me it was “anchovies”and “eugenics”. I’m not sure why but I just couldn’t…
Mr. Turner
“Mr. Turner,” July 25-26, 2015 (2014), DVD. Rarely have I so disagreed with many of the reviewers on IMDB. Most seem to have found this latest release from Mike Leigh boring and flat. I found it gripping and moving as we follow the life and struggles of J M W Turner, Britain’s greatest artist. Years…
Imitation Game
“The Imitation Game,” July 18, 2015 (2014), DVD. We both enjoyed this tribute to Alan Turing staring Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role. With his assistant co-workers, Turing built one of, if not the very first computer, Christopher, and used it to break the German Enigma Code during WWII, shortening the war and…
Whiplash
“Whiplash,” July 15, 2015 (2014), DVD. Written and directed by former music student Damien Chazelle. Three Oscars and many other awards. This is the powerful if contradictory story of Andrew (Miles Teller), a precocious drum student at an elite NYC music school, who manages to gain entry to the world of Fletcher (JK Simmons) an…
St Vincent
June 16, 2015 (2014), airplane on way to United States. I’d hoped for more but still liked watching Bill Murray in this small film (a 12 inch screen?) about a damaged Viet Nam vet who becomes a friend/caretaker/role model (and what a model) to Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), the son of a frazzled, divorcing single…
The Drop
“The Drop,” May 21, 2015 (2014), airplane on way to New Zealand. Tom Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, a bartender and small-time criminal working for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini, wonderful to the end and greatly missed) in the latter’s bar in Brooklyn. Looking for a big score, Marv struggles against his own decline as…
Fury
“Fury,” May 21, 2015 (2014), airplane on way to New Zealand. This is a well-made yet formulaic war movie with some pretty standard plotting and dialogue. It stars Brad Pitt as tank commander Sgt. Don“Wardaddy” Collier as he and his crew including “Bible” (Shia LaBeuf), “Gordo” (Michael Pen~a), and “Coon Ass” (Jon Bernthal) are…
Top of the Lake
“Top of the Lake,” May 17, 2015 (2013), DVD. Six-part, Jane Campion mini-series set in and around Queenstown, New Zealand. This is a look at the darker side of New Zealand culture, one of meth and wild, gun-toting, homicidal, compound-dwelling families coexisting with civil society It paints a picture of New Zealand that might be…
Wolf Hall
“Wolf Hall,” May 17 2015, TV/DVD. Six-part presentation of Hillary Mantel’s brilliant two-novel series (when is the third coming?) that tells an old story with a twist This retelling of the Tudor England of Henry the 8th (Damien Lewis) is seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, brilliantly played by Mark Rylance who can do…
My Old Lady
“My Old Lady,” April 15 2015 (2014), DVD. We enjoyed this very well acted stage play-become film written by Israel Horowitz about an American man (Kevin Kline) who inherits an apartment in Paris with an entailed viager or former owner (Maggie Smith) and her daughter (Kristen Scott Thomas). First rate acting from this trio…