“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole” — Derek Walcott To French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, the ocean is a “holy temple,” a shimmering presence that reflects the economic and social aspirations of people seeking a better life….
“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…
I don’t even know what to say. Or why to bother. To stare into the void that is Disney’s soul-sucked remake of its cinematic safari The Lion King is to come face to face with a profound and overwhelming sense of meaninglessness. It’s the same movie they released in 1994, only worse in all ways…
The continued effort to update and bring “live-action” realism to their classics (e.g., “Dumbo,” “The Jungle Book,” “Beauty and the Beast,”) continues for Disney with The Lion King. It follows the same premise as the 1994 animated feature (as well as “Kimba the White Lion” from which it was lifted) in which a young lion…
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser (Poet and physicist) Liyana, directed by the Swaziland-born husband and wife team of Aaron and Amanda Kopp, is a genre bending documentary that follows a small group of Swazi children — residents of Likhaya Lemphilo Lensha, a Swaziland orphanage — as they participate…
Since 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) model has introduced ingenious engineers, Norse gods, space raiders and sorcerers. These superpowered figures appear in films that incorporate elements from World War II movies, space opera, heist films, alien invasions and conspiracy thrillers. With varying levels of dramatic success, the framework of a superhero figure in [insert…
One of the highlights of “Captain America: Civil War” is headlining his own adventure, and it looks bonkers. The teaser for Black Panther, a substantially better representation of the project than the poster, features vivid imagery, an intriguing tribal-versus-modern setting plus just enough information about a conflict that can affect more than T’Challa’s (Chadwick Boseman,…
