You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep Asteroid City ★★★1/2 (out of four stars) It goes without saying that film is an emotional medium, replete with fear, jealousy, hatred, love, rejection, loneliness, triumph, failure, revenge, pain and suffering, and every other emotion or emotional experience one can imagine. It goes without saying, that is, unless you’re inside Wes Anderson’s head, a place where emotion, while acknowledged, is held at arm’s length. Anderson’s perspective on emotion is apparent from the first scenes of “Asteroid City,” when Augie Steinbeck’s family of 5 pulls into the (too) brightly colored desert town…
Author: 2 Film Critics
Taking on the Sacred Text Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ★★★ (Out of 4 stars) Judy Blume’s 1970 best-selling young adult novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is treated as the sacred text it has become in director and writer Kelly Fremon Craig’s 2023 cinema adaptation. In the main faithful to the book, Craig (whose other credit is another teen film) offers nostalgia for a simpler time, before social media and perhaps even before 1970, that is, before second wave feminism (Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963). The cultural milieu may reflect Blume’s…
Master Gardener ★★ (out of 4 stars) Grey Gardens Paul Schrader has been a major presence in American cinema for a half century, directing 24 films and, as a scriptwriter, giving us “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “Raging Bull” (1980) and earning a Best Screenplay nomination from the Academy for “First Reformed” (2017). “Master Gardener” isn’t on that level, or even close, and the script—Schrader’s forte, though he’s both writer and director here—is at fault. It’s riddled with improbabilities, inconsistencies, disconnects, and more than one absurdity. “Master Gardener” is two films, clumsily linked by a misunderstanding. The first, nicely slow-paced, methodical,…
When there is no truth Saint Omer ★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) An ambitious young woman, who has interrupted her university studies in Paris and found lodging with her much older boyfriend, murders her 15-month-old daughter. The crime cries out for explanation. The most obvious story line is the attempt, carried out through the legal system, to learn why the highly-literate, Senegalese immigrant Laurence has killed her child. Director Alice Diop, a Parisian of Senegalese descent whose prior films have been documentaries, recounts Laurence’s life through the woman’s mostly impassive testimony at her murder trial. Reversing the mantra of “show,…
Searching for Focus Hannah Ha Ha ★★1/2 Finding one’s way in the world has never been easy or straight-forward and, as directors and writers Joshua Pikovsky and Jordan Tetewsky’s “ultra indie” film suggests, it’s more difficult than ever for young people to imagine and construct a satisfying life. Like many of her generation, Hannah, who turns 26 in the course of the film, is unmarried (and has no partner and no apparent sex life) and lives with a parent, her father. She’s gainfully employed, but barely, working part-time on a small farm and giving guitar lessons to one pupil (at…
Saving the Whale The Whale ★★★ (out of four stars) “The Whale” requires the viewer to be a voyeur to morbid obesity and a witness to a scathing critique of end-of-days religion. At the same time, it surprisingly embraces not only religious experience, but the person inside the fat suit. You’ll want to cover your eyes as 600-pound Charlie tries to rise from his sofa, sweat marks spreading on his grey shirt as he struggles painfully (for him and for us), in vain. Much has been written about the prosthetics that made possible this “disgusting” creature, and those who orchestrated…
“Get Lost” Ghost Tropic ★★★ (out of four stars) What if? What if a chance event interrupted the sameness, the repetition, of one’s daily round of life? That’s the central question posed by “Ghost Tropic,” a thoughtful, enigmatic, carefully constructed film, set in Brussels, from award-winning Belgian director and writer Bas Devos. The chance event happens to Khadija (veteran actress Saadia Bentaïeb), a 58-year-old, diminutive Maghrebi woman, her hair covered by a head scarf, who has cleaned office buildings on the night shift for 20 years. She doesn’t resent the job, and she shares moments of humor and laughter with her…
More Drama than Docu Argentina, 1985 ★★★ (out of four stars) A mother’s gripping account of being kidnapped as she is about to go into labor, giving birth in the back seat of the taxi speeding her away while handcuffed and blindfolded, the umbilical cord dragging on the floor of the cab. A young lawyer crying as she sees in photographic evidence the legs and sneakers, much like her own, of a dead woman. The mother is one of many witnesses (out of the 800 accounts collected by that young lawyer and others) who testified in the trial of Argentina’s…
It’s Not that Simple Linoleum ★★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) You know you’re in another world—the world of low-budget cinema or of “willing suspension of disbelief,” or both—when a wacky, middle-aged scientist whose only job is as host of a TV science program for children, “Above and Beyond,” that airs at midnight, and his teenage new neighbor bypass the yellow tape of the authorities to examine the site in the scientist’s suburban back yard where the debris from the Apollo 10 rocket (launched with a crew of 3 in 1969) has landed. The hole it makes in the earth is small…
Del Toro as Pinocchio Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio ★★★ (out of 4 stars) Father-son dilemmas, individualism, Fascism, meditations on death and the human condition. Maybe not your childhood recollection of Carlo Collodi’s morality tale. It is, however, Oscar-winning fantasy director Guillermo del Toro’s take on the 140 year-old Italian story of the wooden puppet who wanted to be a real boy. The first 30 minutes of del Toro’s stop-motion animation (with co-director and master animator Mark Gustafson) revels in its own creations: Father (old enough to be a grandfather) Geppetto; first son Carlo (in this version, Geppetto has lost a…