“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…
Philosophers throughout history have wrestled with the question of ends and means, right and wrong, and good or bad. Socrates said, “It is never right to do wrong.” Others maintain that it is right to act in such a way that it produces the most desirable consequences whether or not it follows society’s rules. For…
While The Unknown Girl, the latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (“Two Days, One Night”), is suggestive of social and political issues such as immigration, unemployment, and economic imbalance, its main concern is with moral character, accountability, and spiritual redemption. Like many other films of the Dardenne Brothers, it is simple, natural, and direct,…
It’s pitch dark. We see nothing. Only hear hollow voices as routine questions are asked and forms are filled. No context whatsoever. Yet we slowly and silently find ourselves rooting for the individual answering the increasingly absurd questionnaire. That’s when we find ourselves rooted in the character that will be leading the whole film. That’s…
Weiner, a documentary about the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign of Anthony Weiner, is very funny and very painful. It’s also one of the most engaging and insightful political movies I’ve seen. Co-directors Elyse Steinberg and former Weiner chief of staff Josh Kriegman were given extraordinary access to Anthony Weiner as he attempted to…
Jacques Audiard has previously explored his primary cinematic interests by telling a tale of crime as a way of life and a tale of an unlikely family as a means of redemption. Now he’s combined the two in his latest movie, where he examines the intersection of these dramatically rich topics with carefully complex attention….
William Shakespeare wrote (Sonnet 116), “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Though Shakespeare would not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, Kate and Geoff Mercer in Andrew…
