“Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back, No more, no more, no more, no more. Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back no more” — Percy Mayfield A road trip that builds on Abbas Kiarostami’s “A Taste of Cherry” and Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi,” Jafar’s son Panah has built on his father’s…
“Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved” — Victor Hugo Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, Audrey Diwan’s (“Losing It”) harrowing abortion drama Happening takes place in rural France during the 1960s, a decade before abortion was legalized in France. Based on the memoir by Annie…
There was a popular book written in the late 1980s by Robert Fulghum named “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” It is filled with tried and true lessons about growing up: “Hold hands and stick together,” “play fair,” “look at yourself,” and other snippets of suggestions we learn about early in…
“Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration – how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?” – Rebecca Solnit British Poet Percy Bysse Shelley said, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar…
Son of Monarchs, a feature film written and directed by Alexis Gambis, a microbiologist and film director/screenwriter, is not the type of work likely to be appreciated — or perhaps even tolerated — by moviegoers that prefer tightly constructed, thematically succinct cinema. It is multi-layered in its storyline with a mélange of styles that range…
Even before I really knew who she was, I remember my mom talking about Princess Diana nearly all the time. There were stacks of magazines at home with her face plastered on the cover, with many attempting to replicate her style. The royal wedding between Diana and Prince Charles was all that anyone could talk…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
