“Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved” — Victor Hugo Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, Audrey Diwan’s (“Losing It”) harrowing abortion drama Happening takes place in rural France during the 1960s, a decade before abortion was legalized in France. Based on the memoir by Annie…
“I wanna be just like a melody, just like a simple sound, like in harmony” — Glide from “All About Lily Chou-Chou” Projections of the future in cinema have mainly foreseen a world where war, disease, and pervasive alienation are the norm. Korean-born writer/director Kogonada’s vision of the future, however, is not a dystopian world…
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” — Henri Bergson Some people experience maturity at an early age when they are thrust by circumstances into a position of responsibility before they are ready. Some do not experience it until their twenties, thirties, or…
“And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning” — Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” The lives of World War I English poets Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson, “Making Noise Quietly”)…
Early in Emerald Fennell’s biting and insightful Promising Young Woman, protagonist Cassie (Carey Mulligan, “Suffragette”) is catcalled by a group of workmen. It is a depressingly common scenario — a woman subjected to sexual objectification, for little reason other than men want to and can. But writer-director Fennell and star Mulligan strike a pose in…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
William Shatner, who in real life recently turned 90, should be commended for playing the lead in any feature film. That said, Senior Moment, a bit of cinematic fluff directed by Giorgio Serafini, is not the best vehicle for him to show off his acting chops. The script is not developed sufficiently for him or…
