Author Archive
Film Review – Stories We Tell
Sarah Polley‘s documentary Stories We Tell, exploring her own family’s secrets, is beautiful in the refreshingly honest way it goes about showing its results. Polley builds the reveals and tensions in a natural way that gives the movie a chance to make an impact with…
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STIFF Short Film Reviews – A Certain Kind of Monster/Making an Impact/Wild Rice Without a Rat
The Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF) runs from May 3rd to the 11th this year. With every festival, there are always scores of short films that premiere along with the full features. Here are a few from this year.
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Film Review – Eden
Eden is a look at a girl surviving under sexual enslavement. This is a hard issue to look at under any circumstances, and the uncomfortable nature of what happens never leaves the film. It shows what this life could be like with realism, though with…
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Film Review – The Gatekeepers (Second Take)
The Gatekeepers is an insightful and blunt look at the security situation in Israel and how it has gotten so terrible. Director Dror Moreh’s accomplishment in getting the six former living heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, to talk about their work dealing…
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Film Review – Barbara
Barbara wants to be an insight into making decisions under extreme circumstances, but doesn’t give real weight to those decisions. The title character (Nina Hoss) is a doctor in East Germany who has to work in the countryside due to some trouble with the secret…
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Film Review – Ginger & Rosa
In Ginger & Rosa, director Sally Potter captures the emotional turmoil of two teenage girls in London during the Cuban missile crisis. Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) are best friends. Ginger is the smarter one; she wants to be a poet, and is…
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An Analysis – Reflections on 30 Rock
30 Rock ending hit me harder than I ever imagined. It took until the second-to-last episode to really have it sink in that we were near the end of one of the most improbable shows to air on TV for seven seasons. Its ratings were…
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Film Review – No
In director Pablo Larraín’s No, we see the advertising campaign that toppled a dictator. The short version is this: in 1988, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was forced to create a referendum in which, if the people voted yes, he would be given eight more…
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