I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
If, as the famous line from “Love Story” says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” then Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg), a young couple engaged to be married in a few months, are on the right track. Summer vacationing in the Caucasus Mountains in the Republic of Georgia, Julia Loktev’s…
If you want to avoid romantic films filled with all the clichés you can possibly think of and more, you should think twice about seeing Manny Palo’s A Moment in Time. On the other hand, if you choose to skip it, you’ll be missing one of the sweetest, warmest, and most genuine movies of the…
Martin Luther King said, “The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” Justice has been a long-time coming for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, three marginalized teenagers wrongfully convicted of the 1993 murders of three eight-year-olds: Steven Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers, found dead in a creek in West…
In the Buddhist tradition, breathing grounds us in the present moment. According to Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, “Breathing opens the door to stopping and looking deeply in order to enter the domain of concentration and insight.” For Roman Kogler (Thomas Schubert) in Karl Markovics remarkable debut film Breathing, it is simply the means to…
In a film within a film, director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and producer Costa (Luis Tosar) are shooting in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the year 2000. The film they are working on proposes to depict Christopher Columbus’ exploitation of the indigenous native population in his voyage to the Americas and the effort of two priests to…
In Michael Haneke’s Amour, Palme d’Or winner at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) watches over his loved one, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), as she gradually loses control of the precious attributes of body and mind after a series of strokes. In his usual austere style, Haneke avoids sentimentality and even outward displays of…
Though director Yaron Zilberman’s first feature A Late Quartet often looks like another episode of “As the World Turns,” or perhaps more apropos, “The Young and the Restless,” its nuanced performances are always dignified and deeply affecting and its look at the discipline it takes to become a successful music group, classical or otherwise, is…
