— by RON WILKINSON — Screened at the 40th Seattle International Film Festival, Madeleine Sackler’s awesome, thrilling and beautiful biopic of the underground theatrical group “Unstable Elements of Belarus” is part nail-biting spy story and part inspirational political performance a[...]
Author Archive
Review: Dormant Beauty
— by RON WILKINSON — Some Italian films err on the lighthearted side, some on the heavy. Marco Bellocchio’s angst-fest “Dormant Beauty” is so laden with emotion soaked evocation the average American viewer may want a divorce after the first 15 minutes. The story, written by[...]
Review: The Signal
— by RON WILKINSON — Screened at the 40th Seattle International Film Festival, “The Signal” features computer hackers Brenton Thwaites (playing Nic Eastman) and Beau Knapp (playing Jonah Breck), who receive a very mysterious message. A couple of quick replies indicate they ar[...]
Review: 40 Days of Silence
— by RON WILKINSON — Screened at the 40th Seattle International Film Festival, Saodat Ismailova’s “Chilla” came as a surprise to an audience expecting the Indian crime thriller “Monsoon Shootout.” As the SIFF staff pointed out, “this is no Monsoon Shootout.” Indeed, Ismailo[...]
Review: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
— by RON WILKINSON — Emerging director Sam Fleischner is able to put his dozen-plus lenser creds to good use in this surrealistic yet grounded narrative of a boy lost in the New York subways. Winner of a Special Jury Mention for Best Narrative Feature at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, t[...]
Review: The Double
— by RON WILKINSON — Writer/director Richard Ayoade follows up his well-received “Submarine” with a gutsy adaptation of Dostoevsky’s redoubtable novel. Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, “The Double” trots out a remarkable cast of famous actors, even more rema[...]
Review: Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
— by RON WILKINSON — The buzz about Lars von Trier’s sex lollapalooza “Nymphomaniac” has preceded the film like a tidal wave. As might be expected, von Trier had bigger things in mind when he decided to invite viewers inside the head of a very disturbed person. If you want porn, bu[...]
Review: Particle Fever
— by RON WILKINSON — The greatest experiment taking place today is the proton smashing in the Large Hadron Collider buried deep underground at the Swiss-French border outside of Geneva. This collider is an order of magnitude more powerful than any collider that has gone before it. This m[...]
Review: Afternoon of a Faun
— by RON WILKINSON — Known as “Tanny” to several generations of American ballet insiders, Tanaquille le Clercq lived the perfect life of the ballerina in pre-war America. Married to one of the legends of ballet, George Balanchine, and pursued by another, Jerome Robbins, she dominated[...]
Review: The Last of the Unjust
— by RON WILKINSON — Director Claude Lanzmann’s sweeping documentary of the Holocaust screened at the 2013 New York Film Festival to mixed reviews. The rambling 220-minute saga centered on interviews with, and information provided by, Benjamin Murmelstein. Murmelstein was the last Jewi[...]
Review: American Hustle
— by RON WILKINSON — “The Fighter” mega-stars Christian Bale and Amy Adams reunite with director David O. Russell in a pot-boiling romp through political and law enforcement corruption in the morally adrift 1980s. Bale plays con man Irving Rosenfeld who, after founding a string of[...]
Review: Nuclear Nation
— by RON WILKINSON — After a sequence of electrical and mechanical failures stemming from the March 11, 2011, earthquake and subsequent tsunami that smashed into the Fukushima prefecture on Japan’s East coast, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reactor containment vessels explod[...]
Review: Inside Llewyn Davis
— by RON WILKINSON — Strange and whacky, yes, but the Coen Brother’s latest movie falls short of the mark set by their previous pieces, especially the similar “O Brother Where Art Thou.” Attempting to create the strange, offbeat and wonderful aura of the mythological search of “O[...]