Foreign
Film Review – Graceland
Ron Morales’s Graceland (2012) is a mostly effective thriller hailing from the Philippines. Being Filipino myself, I’m glad to see films from there making their way to the States, because at this point (at least in the mainstream) they are still few and far between.…
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Film Review – In The House
Connecting to one another through writing, stirring passions with words, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, uncovering sad personal truths buried in a typical family dynamic…that is a lot of the subtext running throughout the compelling new French film In The House. Directed by…
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An Appreciation – The Three Colors Trilogy
One of the most fascinating examinations involving the mystery of human connection comes from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy (1993-94). The three films (Blue, White, and Red) signify the tenets of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But that doesn’t begin to describe what…
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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 – 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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Film Review – Lore
In Lore, a German child’s innocence is broken when struggling to survive during World War II. Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is the eldest daughter of a prominent SS member and a mother who is a true believer in Hitler. Lore’s mother and father leave her and…
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Blu-ray Review – The Kid with a Bike
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike (2011/Criterion spine #646) tells the story of a young boy in search of himself. His upbringing is not what you would call “ideal.” The people he thought he could trust have turned on him, and as…
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Film Review – Rust and Bone
Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone is frustrating, with half-backed ideas and unrealized concepts. As with many of Audiard’s films, we start with someone who is on the outs from society: former fighter Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts). He is poor, and, for unexplained reasons, stuck with his…
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