“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing… Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore” — Naomi Shihab Nye Though it is a genre that often flounders on an excess of sentimentality, first-time writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’ The Peanut Butter Falcon…
Life is difficult and complicated in Dekel Berenson’s intimate short Anna, about a titular single mother (Svetlana Barandich) who longs to provide a better life for herself and her teenage daughter Alina (Anastasia Vyazovskaya). In their little Ukrainian village, Anna works at a meat-processing plant, wiling away the hours and returning home to find her…
“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.” — Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings While his reporting sometimes comes across as performance art, journalist Mads Brügger (“The Saint Bernard Syndicate”) has gone beyond satire in his searing documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld. Winner of the best directing award at…
Mike Gan’s Burn joins all those movies that exist solely in one location, movies like “Panic Room,” “Phone Booth” and “Grand Piano.” The greatest challenge with movies like this is that much of its success depends on the main protagonist. They need to carry the movie and compel our attention, since cinematography doesn’t play much…
In his play, “The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams alludes to one of the characters as the “Gentleman Caller.” He is the character in the play that is supposed to be realistically rendered to complement the rest of the cast who comprise a group of dreamers. Williams describes him as “a symbol . . . the…
The horror genre allows many opportunities to explore opposition. The opposition may involve faith in “The Exorcist,” gender in “Rosemary’s Baby,” class in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and sometimes all these and more, such as in “Drag Me To Hell.” With folk horror, the opposition is often between tradition and modernity, insiders and outsiders, new…
The first of two John DeLorean-focused films to be released in 2019 (the other being a documentary/re-enactment hybrid “Framing John DeLorean”), Driven does not adopt the typical biopic template. Rather, it positions itself almost as an eyewitness perspective to the entire scandal from the point of view of the FBI informer who ratted John DeLorean…
