There’s a scene in Chad Hartigan’s Morris from America where its title character Morris (Markees Christmas) asks his German tutor (Carla Juri) if she can teach him to be charming. That’s an ironic moment for the audience who fully understands just how damn charming the film is.
Dinesh D’Souza could’ve been a decent documentarian, but that potential has been critically harmed by Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. Judging by this drastic misfire, I’m thinking that maybe the filmmaker’s next project should be a popcorn political thriller loosely inspired by his own far-right, abrasive political opinions.
The Violin Teacher is a conflicting feature. The music is beautiful and the message is inspiring, but the story’s pace constantly swings back and forth from tight captivation to a sluggish crawl. Sérgio Machado’s film is both the most uplifting film I’ve seen lately, and the most boring.
The People vs. Fritz Bauer is a good film driven by a stellar central performance by Burghart Klaussner (Good Bye Lenin!).
The David Dance is a stage-to-film adaptation from actor/screenwriter Don Scimé. I haven’t seen his original stage play, but I can figure out a couple of things from the movie: Scimé is a passionate artist who cares very deeply about the themes acknowledged in his work, but not enough compromises have been made by director Aprill Winney to make his original material fill feature film britches.
Christine Chubbuck was a woman who managed to do what no one else could – shock America. In 1974, in the midst of countless political assassinations, mass murders and serial killings, it would take a truly jarring event to shake the American public, which turned out to be a suicide on live television; “the latest in blood and guts, in living colour”. Chubbuck’s suicide has been an object of morbid curiosity since and it has…
Sometimes, it becomes difficult to separate an artist’s work from their personality; sometimes, this is because the artist has done something horrible and unforgivable. Director, writer and leading actor Nate Parker is one of those people: this is not the space to get into his actions, but I would recommend all uninformed readers to do their research before deciding if they wish to give him their money. With that out of the way, it became…
Sometimes all talk and no action can be for the best. Such is the case with Denial, the star-studded British/American drama based on historian Deborah E. Lipstadt’s memoir History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005) that recounts her experiences with the British legal system following a libel suit that was raised against her and the publishers of her first book, Denying the Holocaust (1993), by David Irving.
Though magic realism isn’t anything new in cinema, there are few original scripts that get the genre right as deftly as Two Lovers and a Bear, the indie romance/drama that premiered earlier this year at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Nicolas Winding Refn makes something out of nothing with his subversive satire The Neon Demon. Most movies do the same, but Refn’s latest grabs ahold of seemingly vacuous source material and manages to build a world within it where decisions are outrageously vain and scary but oddly comprehensible.