Foreign
Film Review – Child’s Pose
Many movies ask how far a parent is willing to go to protect their child. In most of these movies, the parent and child are forces of good torn apart by malevolent agents and their drama is a cathartic struggle. In Child’s Pose, a Romanian…
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Film Review – Blue Is The Warmest Color
Blue Is The Warmest Color is finally releasing in the U.S., after winning the top prize in May at the Cannes Film Festival: the Palme d’Or. Director/co-screenwriter Abdellatif Kechiche puts Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos into a film about finding your soulmate, yourself, love, and…
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Film Review – You Will Be My Son
A man fidgets in a crematorium next to a funeral director and wonders aloud if the ashes of the oak casket will mix with the ashes of the dead body inside, and the director obviously answers that they will. “He never did like oak. It…
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Film Review – Drug War
Some of my favorite movies are the ones that start with the story already in progress. Michael Mann’s 2006 thriller Miami Vice is one of the first that comes to mind. The movie opens as agents Crockett and Tubbs are already deep in the middle…
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Film Review – The Attack
In Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack, trying to use a personal story to get at the larger issues of the Israeli and Palestinian fighting creates an unsatisfying result. Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) is a Palestinian doctor whose great life in Israel is shattered when his wife,…
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Film Review – Fill The Void
So, it turns out there is a whole industry of privately financed films in Israel created by and for ultra-Orthodox Jewish women. They tend to run about 2 ½ hours long and follow strict conventions regarding subject matter and behavior. I think it’s pretty cool,…
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Film Review – The Prey (La Proie)
Inside almost every French action film is a standard set of genre parameters that helps define these movies as distinctly being French Action Films. There is of course always a set of parameters, or conventions, that make up a genre. The action film alone has…
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SIFF Film Review – Fuck Up
Childhood bonds can be among the strongest in a person’s life. And the four characters in the new darkly comic crime caper Fuck Up started a lifelong friendship very early on. Flipping back and forth between when they were in grade school with often comedic…
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