Cinema has the ability to document, dramatize, inspire and educate. Suffragette succeeds in doing all of these things, while also being hugely engaging and entertaining. Writer Abi Morgan and director Sarah Gavron, along with a committed cast including Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and (very briefly) Meryl Streep, deliver…
A poignant love story, Arnaud Desplechin’s (“Jimmy P.”) My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse) is filled with warmth and humor and delivered with a lively and playful touch in the Desplechin style: The use of voice-overs, split screens, the iris-effect, and characters looking and speaking directly into the camera. Challenging us with numerous…
Babbling in a bubble. Like babbling in a bubble. No wise words. No intelligible ideas. Only an interminable babble of three carton-cut characters living in the little bubble that this film provides. Watching Wasp is like listening to an irrelevant insect buzzing around without it becoming anything but a mild nuisance in the background. The…
Heartstrings are tugged quite relentlessly in Lee Whittaker’s hyperbolically dark and dingy drama Catching Fireflies, but perhaps to touching effect. Whittaker has some very slick tools in his filmmaking arsenal and so he successfully crams a lot of style and technically ambitious tricks into the compact 19 minute running time, while convincingly depicting the hellishly…
Un Certain Regard prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Rams (Hrútar) is a comedy/drama where communication is a luxury until it becomes a matter of survival. Directed by Grímur Hákonarson (“Summerland”) and set in a remote village in Iceland, it is the story of two unmarried brothers, Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson, “Brave Men’s Blood”) and…
On the third day of the Spooky Movie International Film Festival, showing at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, I caught the home-invasion thriller Crush the Skull, directed (and cowritten) by Viet Nguyen. It’s a reasonably solid movie, with agreeable performances and some slick dialog, but it begins to fall apart about halfway…
Clumsy action thriller Momentum may as well be retitled “Further Proof That Morgan Freeman Will Star in Anything.” The towering talent who has played everyone from Robin Hood’s sidekick to God is cinematically ubiquitous and yet has long since remained respectable while slipping deeper into embarrassing paycheck territory. One has to think that the reason…
