(****) Iconic Italian writer/director Marco Bellocchio’s filmography spans decades and includes an impressive collection of films. For sixty years he’s told hard truths that needed to be heard. From 1976’s anti-military movie Victory March to this new historical drama, which won’t win him any fans at the Vatican. In 1858, a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo (Enea Sala), supposedly baptized by his Catholic maid, is abducted from […]
The Settlers — New York Film Festival Review
(**) Men on horseback is an allure that’s attracted audiences to westerns for decades. Chilean director Felipe Gálvez Haberle, with a misguided script co-written with Antonia Girardi, tries his hand at the genre—to mixed results. The filmmaker has found a worthy premise, examining the genocide of Native Americans in his country. But in the process revictimizes them. This dated, injudicious approach is similar […]
All of Us Strangers – New York Film Festival Review
(***) The new umpteen-story building has just been completed but their relationship is still under construction. That’s the premise of British writer/director Andrew Haigh’s interpretation of Taichi Yamada’s same name novel. Adam (Andrew Scott) a screenwriter and Harry (Paul Mescal, Aftersun) are the only two inhabitants in their apartment house on the outskirts of London. The introvert and […]
Anatomy of a Fall – New York Film Festival Review
(**1/2) Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a successful novelist, stands accused of murder. Past arguments, physical altercations and infidelities—with women—point prosecutors her way. It all happens because her husband (Samuel Theis), a cranky eccentric far-less-successful writer, fell or was pushed from an attic studio to his death. His body lies in a pool of blood on the cold white […]
La Chimera – New York Film Festival Review
(**) If advertised as a tomb raider excursion, audiences will look for a Harrison Ford adventure vehicle. But what they will find is a dull, eccentric comedy that blends reality and fantasy in the most forced ways. A tale so small it’s not worth telling. Arthur (Josh O’Connor, The Crown) is a stylishly dressed Englishman and […]
The Zone of Interest – New York Film Festival Review
(**) There may be a justified reason for making a film about the horrors of the Holocaust and keeping the victims in the background as sound effects. But that reason remains allusive as this depiction of a German Nazi family living next door to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp unfolds. Dad, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and mother, Hedwig […]
The Burial
(***) It’s an unlikely paring. A 75-year-old, southern white boy and a flashy ambulance-chasing Black lawyer. But it works. It’s them against big business. Davids versus Goliath. An ancient tale that never grows old. Screenwriter Doug Wright and screenwriter/director Maggie Betts use a fascinating true-life event as their source material. In Biloxi Mississippi, in the 1990s, […]
Maestro Premieres at the 2023 New York Film Festival
(***1/2) Should Bradley Cooper change his name to Bradley Scorsese? That thought must have crossed the minds of the NYFF filmgoers who attended the premiere of Maestro, Cooper’s homage to Leonard Bernstein. From the moment the film started at the new David Geffen Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center, Cooper’s transformation from actor/director to actor/auteur was […]
Silver Dollar Road — Toronto International Film Festival Review
(***) Swindlers stealing land from Black folks is an age-old scam. One worth exposing. Silver Dollar road is a waterfront property in North Carolina that’s been in the Reels family for generations. Unbeknownst to them, they’ve been conned out of a large portion of their acreage by a deceitful relative and white land developers. That […]
One Life –- Toronto International Film Festival Review
(***) Many films have catalogued the personal and miraculous experiences of those who’ve survived the holocaust. Add this heart-warming movie to that canon of movies that have shed light on the people who escaped from a massive genocide. In the 1980s, Nicholas Winton (Sir Anthony Hopkins), an elderly British man, cleans out a drawer in his home office […]
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