“Yet if hope has flown away, in a night, or in a day, in a vision, or in none, is it therefore the less gone?” — Edgar Allen Poe Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, I Lost My Body is an animated film about the attempt to recover…
The bold debut, We (Wij), from Dutch director Rene Eller uses various unreliable narrators and a fractured chronology to create an intricate and arresting new spin on coming-of-age tropes. The ostensible setup is a typical teen movie: A group of friends find a shack in the woods and use it as a base for their…
Kate Mandell (Mackenzie Davis, “Terminator: Dark Fate”) leaves her teaching job and the coziness of a shared apartment with her friend Rose (Kim Adis, “Krypton” TV series) to take on the role of “personal tutor” to a young girl, Flora (Brooklyn Prince, “The Florida Project”). Her role is emphasized as that of “tutor” as opposed…
Waiting for Anya, directed by Ben Cookson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Toby Torlesse, is a film that falls within a popular World War II sub-genre that focuses on a local conflict between German occupiers and French non-combatants, typically set away from the civilian centers that suffered crushing horror, destruction, and death. Based on a…
Edward Norton is an odd duck. When he burst onto the scene with 1996’s “Primal Fear,” he matched beats with more seasoned stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney and Francis McDormand, and earned an Oscar nomination for his trouble. Subsequent roles in “American History X,” “Fight Club” and “25th Hour” led to him being hailed as…
Once upon a time (in 2017), a movie was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. Filled to the brim with stars like Richard Gere and Peter Dinklage, it promised to spin a cinematic tale based upon a famous psychiatric case study (The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach) that involved complex elements of…
Writer/director Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”) puts a contemporary spin on Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth century classic novel in Little Women, now in its eight film version. Alcott’s semi-autobiographical story about four sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts during and after the Civil War stands out for its warmth and celebration of family, its exquisite period…
