Reviews

This version of the classic story centers on the wife, rather than the husband, and it works very well. You get a real feel for the scariness and loneliness of being the first homesteader in an area. You also get a strong feel for the contradictions of a tight-knit faith community: its enforced conformity versus the sense of belonging.

I was surprised by the many negative reviews of this movie on IMDB. My only criticism was that the actor playing the husband was completely uncharismatic.

Good movie, recommended.

This is a decent movie about the immigrant experience -- this time, Iranian refugees in Finland. This refugee family is awaiting the green card or deportation decision, and meanwhile is successfully making a life for themselves. A lot of the movie is very low key, showing how nice the family is and how well they are fitting in. But the end of the movie was touching and strong, and makes the movie worth considering if the topic is of interest.

This movie is an interesting movie about a kid who goes from Mexico City to the US border to pick up his father's remains. But then the kid spots a man whom the kid is sure is his father, still alive. Soon the kid is sucked into being part of the dark exploitation machine that surrounds the big factories in Mexico bordering the US.

Unfortunately, in its last quarter, the movie loses its focus and becomes much less engaging. Also, while the actors get the job done, they don't provide the value-added depth that fine actors can bring to a movie. Where's Demian Bichir when you need him?

Worth considering if the topic appeals to you.

A decent movie about a 22 year old trying to find his way in the world. He is sweet and upbeat despite his fast-food job and girl friend off to Barcelona and maybe not coming back to him. He meets a somewhat older woman with issues, and there is mutual chemistry. (His attraction to older women is set up in the opening scene of him as a preteen suffering a hopeless crush.)

This showing of the movie was a bit surreal. Apple, a company known for its success at addicting people to their silly devices, hired a uniformed brute squad to make sure no one recorded anything. And indeed, they did remove several of the degenerate phone addicts who cannot live for ten minutes without the fix of a beep to remind them that they are alive. The guards marched around, keys jiggling, opening doors to the bright outside, sometimes talking to each other. Thanks, Apple.

The production values were mixed. In scenes with more than a couple of people, it was very hard to make out the dialog. Visually, everything was bluish with sharp focus close up and fuzziness beyond. I wish they'd spent a little more on production values and a lot less on hiring copyright thugs.

This is a very engaging movie. Plaza is good, and Rossi, as her mentor in crime, is even better. They have a good chemistry together, which makes all the difference.

Her initial state --- student debt, no good job available, shared housing, etc. -- makes her desperation for something else understandable. Her step-by-step descent into crime feels credible, as do the details of the criminal schemes themselves.

Well worth watching.

Two people in their twilight years, both now widowed, meet up to see if their childhood attraction remains strong enough to lead somewhere all these decades later.

The setting is austere, and the few other characters in the film have hinted-at stories of their own.

Very low key, but nicely acted and with a strong sense of place.

This is an entertaining mix of comedy and old-fashioned disaster flick, with some sentiment and mild social commentary added on top as icing.

Credible? No. Fun? Yes.

If your kids like spooky movies that aren't very spooky at all, this might be the movie for them. Our heroine is picked-on outcast at school who likes to draw spooky pictures (which were actually pretty good).

Not of interest to adults.

Based on a true case, this movie follows the dramatic ins and outs of a murder case as it proceeds through a flawed judicial system. It also shows how a person can be convicted and punished in the court of public opinion thanks to social media, regardless of the facts. It inadvertently also points out the limitations even of the movie's heroes, the "responsible" media who figure things out too slowly and in small bits and pieces.

On the downside, the movie has some problems. In a case that covers this much time, it was pointless to have a brief initial scene, then going back two years and plodding through a decade of the case. And it might have been a stronger movie had it focused not on the journalist, but on the character played by the excellent Yorick van Waginengen.

Still, an interesting movie, well worth watching.

This is a good kid's movie, which is not my favorite genre. But this one avoids most of the usual kid-movie pitfalls. And it does cover an important topic, progressive old age dementia and could provide a useful gateway to talking about it with your kid, if relevant.

The child actor was very good, which is always a wild card in a kid's movie.

This is by no means a "must see", but it is much less painful to endure than most kid's movies.

The once-great director Terence Davies fails to pull it together for this overlong, meandering story of gay World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. The story lumbers on and on and on -- and then is further padded out with scenes from a church service and some unneeded songs. There are several poems as well, but, hey, it is a movie about a poet.

Late in the film, we transition to other actors playing old Siegfried. There was absolutely no feeling of character continuity between young and old Siegfried (Peter Capaldi), nor young and old Stephen (Anton Lesser).

The performances all were fine and the production values were high. The problems lay entirely with Davies.

The most interesting stretch is in the shell-shock (PTSD) hospital with fellow gay World War I poet Wilfred Owen. But even this was covered more cohesively in the 1997 movie 'Regeneration' (aka 'Behind the Lines'), also about Sassoon and Owen. (And then there's 'Hedd Wynn' if you want a really fine move about yet another gay World War I poet!)

The final poem was, to my unpoetical ears, by far the best. Ironically, it was one by Owen, not Sassoon. Maybe a movie about Owen might have been more the ticket. At least it could not have been so long as 'Benediction'!

A POW and his comrades return home to defeated and depraved Vienna immediately at the end of World War I. Everything has changed, and for the worse, in his eyes.

Since Expressionism was still big by 1918, the movie's skylines and buildings are deliberately distorted to reflect the feelings of the protagonist. It's ugly and a bit distracting, but for me, it worked. It was one of the more original and interesting things about the movie.

The main plot line revolves around the hunt for a sadistic serial killer, but this was neither particularly interesting nor credible. It was no worse than in many movies, but no better.

The main actor is big and very charismatic, dominating every scene. I hope we see more of him.

Questions remain. If they were POWs on the Russian front, wouldn't they have been home sooner, after the Bolsheviks made a separate peace with Germany? And why is a movie set entirely in Vienna called 'Hinterland'?

Muybridge was an early photographer whose pioneering work in using multiple still pictures to capture motion too fast for the human eye to see led directly to cinema. He also photographed remote places like Yosemite and Alaska immediately after the US purchased it.

He was neither particularly ethical (murder) nor honest (his name mutated multiple times over his life, evolving from Edward Muggeridge to Eadweard Muybridge).

As actor Gary Oldman, who narrates some of this doc, puts it, Muybridge was also the first director, because he would pose and dress people to get the visual effect that he wanted, and to imply small stories. What is that but directing?

Recommended.

Touching and cute, and surprisingly, didn't feel padded out to stretch it to feature length. Both Jenny Slate and Isabella Rossellini created characters whom you care about.

I did have some trouble understanding some of the words Marcel was saying, not a problem I've ever had with Jenny Slate in her other movies. It might have been the sound system in the theater; other people had the same problem.

If you are at all whimsy-tolerant, this is a move worth seeing.

At the end of World War II, a boatload of women survivors of Nazi concentration camps debarked in Malmo, Sweden, to begin new lives. Someone filmed this, and this is director Magnus Gerten third movie tracking down the stories of the women shown in that bit of film.

This one is an amazing and touching transcontinental Lesbian love story, spanning prewar literary salons, World War II resistance, survival in the concentration camps, separation, reunification, and a new life in South America.

Note to screenwriters: this would make a hell of a good fiction film, when you aren't constrained by what pictures happened to survive....

The lead actress creates a sweet and nuanced character. You'll feel a lot of empathy for this lonely woman despite her frequent poor decisions.

This fine performance is undercut by the director of the film. I looked at her filmography, expecting to see a lot of tacky kid's movies, but she doesn't even have that excuse. Every few minutes, she distracts from her film by throwing in a drone or a cute robot or a trio of gabby crones, or some odd visual, as in the flying fruit on the cover picture for the movie.

See this movie for the lead actress, and just gnash your teeth when the director goes whimsical.

You really need to love seeing light-hearted tragedies and cruelties piled on very, very thick to enjoy this quirky, episodic comedy. Whenever some happiness comes to poor Johan, you can be sure that it will be fleeting and that fate's revenge for that joy will last for years or decades.

Maybe it's a cultural thing....

This is an excellent story of a young woman's desperate and harrowing search for a way to end a pregnancy that threatens to derail her life. It is hard to imagine that only 80 years ago, an advanced Western democracy would so obstruct a woman's right to control her own destiny. Aren't we lucky that those days are gone forever? (Oops, guess what?)

I highly recommend this film.

Another solid addition to the ranks of excellent crime thrillers from Spain, which has produced a good number of them in the last decade.

An energetic young police detective transfers to a sleepy seaside village, hoping the sun and surf will be good for his young daughter's health. But he doesn't fit in well with the lazy, corrupt local police. And whatever really happened to his predecessor, whose death has been hushed up?

This is set in the twilight years of Fascist rule in Spain, so there are election tensions, right wing violence, Basque separatists, drug overdoses, and a closed community of mysterious rich German emigres. Early on, our hero notices and stops a terrorist action, whose story also takes time to unravel.

Highly recommended.

This is a solid portrayal of a village's mass hysteria over a supposed demon that is blamed for any bit of bad luck that happens. This time, a local army sergeant wants to stop this nonsense, and the clash of cultures leads to an inevitable (but very predictable) tragedy.

The three lead actors (the sergeant, the doctor, and the exorcist) were sound, but the rest of the cast were very amateurish.

A girl with an artistic bent tries leaves her home village for the Big City to try to make enough money to get help for her ailing father, who used to run a bicycle-powered rickshaw. She is strong and sassy, but the Big City is not a kind place. (Well, neither was the home village, really.) She tries several ways to make a living, but it is one of those movies where whenever something good happens, you know something worse is always just around the corner. (But it never gets rapy or anything dark like that.)

Most of the movie is in English -- not dubbed. But maybe 15% is in Hindi, and there were strangely no subtitles for the stuff in Hindi. Maybe they'll be added later? (Really, please do that before you sent the movie out to film festivals, people!)

Two people slowly bond as they do a shoestring two person theater tour to grade schools and bookstores across the upper midwest. The slow reveal of their pasts to each other and to the audience works well. A few scenes don't quite convince, but the movie is definitely worth trying if the topic is of interest to you.

Don't be put off by the movies crummy title. (Is it too late to change that?)

We saw this at our local film festival with a bunch of other cranky old geezers who historically never agree on any movie --- but every one of us really liked this movie.

Sweet and funny. Highly recommended.

A very nice slice-of-life movie set in rural 1960s India. It revolves around Shankar, the very competent lead servant in the household of a middle-class Indian family. He is a very important presence in the life of the young girl of the family. Yet he is treated like a brainless idiot by the bossy, unsympathetic mother of the family (played by the director of the movie).

A fun comic side to the movie is provided by a couple of schoolroom scenes with a dictatorial, despairing Hindi language teacher. It rang very true.

The movie might be a bit slow for ADD viewers, but I thought it was lovely.