The great Japanese director Hiorkazu Koreeda (“The Third Murderer”) continues his exploration of the true meaning of family In Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku), a quest he began in his award-winning 2013 film, “Like Father, Like Son.” Winner of the Palme d’Or award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and the first Japanese film to win the…
Baronesa is the ironic title of Brazilian director Juliana Antunes’ documentary or docu-drama, a film that presents life in the Brazilian favelas through a number of scenes that primarily focus on the daily lives of two of its residents, Andreia (Andreia Pereira de Sousa), a manicurist/beautician, and her friend, Leidiane (Leid Ferreira). The title’s irony…
“The slipping grip of what once was that will never be again, slowly turning faded and acid washed until its nothing but a feeling you can’t put a name to.” — September Rose, Nostalgia Boxes are stacked in the living room of six-year-old Frida’s (Laia Artigas) house as she prepares to go and live with…
Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir, director and screenwriter of The Swan (“Svanurinn”), a low-key Icelandic film (adapted from the 1992 novel by Guðbergur Bergsson) was asked in an interview how she tackled the job of transforming a novel written with a preponderance of interiority into a movie. The question can be answered by examining its cinematography, which…
“How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” — Bob Dylan For many, playing a game of soccer on a Sunday afternoon is a pleasant way to spend time with friends before the next work week begins. For a group of undocumented workers living in the Sunset Park neighborhood…
“You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from” — Werner Erhard Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, “Ghost in the Shell”), a divorced fiftyish artist, is attractive, urbane, and highly intelligent but her relationships seem to have a built-in mechanism for self destruction. The men in Isabelle’s life offer her little except…
“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”)” — Wilfred Owen In his film “Of Gods and Men,” director Xavier Beauvois tells the story of seven Roman Catholic French Trappist monks kidnapped from their monastery in a village in Algeria by radical Islamists…
