— by BEV QUESTAD — Decaying, dilapidated, dark Havana are the first shots we get from Hubert Sauper, documentary filmmaker extraordinaire. But as the film moves on, with uninhibited scenes of sensuality and crashing surf, he ends up in a children’s ballet class. A little girl heading u[...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Review: The Andorra Hustle
— by BEV QUESTAD — Andorra, the setting for this revealing film, is a miniature picturesque country with ski resorts and duty-free shopping tucked between Spain and France in the Pyrenees Mountains. But the embedded details of banking corruption, money laundering and back-stabbing juxtap[...]
Review: Buoyancy
— by RON WILKINSON — Cambodian Chakra is a slave in his own family. As tradition requires, his family’s farm will go to his older brother and Chakra will be a laborer for the family for the rest of his life. His protests are met with stern rebukes by his father. “Don’t complain, yo[...]
Review: The Speed Cubers
— by SIMMI SEN — At first glance, you may be wondering what a speedcuber is. Like running a mile in six minutes, being a speedcuber is a competitive sport where you solve a Rubik’s Cube in a matter of seconds. Being a speed cuber myself, I was overjoyed when I found the Netflix Doc[...]
Review: Driven to Abstraction
— by RON WILKINSON — Faking works of art is a timeless tradition. Michelangelo is said to have faked a sculpture in the 15th century, making the work himself and then burying it to make it look older and fabricated by a presumably more esteemed artist. The buyer was so impressed with the[...]
Review: The 11th Green
— by BEV QUESTAD — Dwight Eisenhower meets Barack Obama in this ambitious historical fiction “What-if” drama beset with a secret so big the presidents have to ask, “Should we let the public know?” This is a good Republican president talking with a good Democrat president amidst a[...]
Review: Tesla
— by RON WILKINSON — Considering he brought electricity into our homes, invented motors we use every day and established the foundations of radio, we forgive this snippet’s lack of detail. Instead, writer/director Michael Almereyda takes us into the dreamscape of Nikola Tesla. At least[...]
Review: Skin Walker
— by RON WILKINSON — When Udo Kier is part of the cast all you have to do is sharpen the knives, load the rifle, bring out the hand-held sledge and the rest takes care of itself. Small comfort to Regine, a fragile waif who left daddy Claus ten years earlier when the memories of […[...]
Review: Scheme Birds
— by RON WILKINSON — It does not matter where the steel went, England or China. What is left in Motherwell Scotland is a regiment of left-behinds who have no future, and they do not even know it. A documentary almost without hope, the protagonist Gemma, a child growing into a woman, suff[...]
Review: Bacurau
— by RON WILKINSON — In the third world, a water truck on the road means one thing, there are people at the end of the trip who will die without it. They may have had water once, years or decades ago. Due to climate change, resource extraction or corporate manipulation, that water is gon[...]
Review: Earth (aka Erde)
— by BEV QUESTAD — “When a girl at a bar asks you what you do, and you look at her and you can honestly tell her right in the eyes that ‘I move mountains for a living,’ she questions that.” Sometimes a one-minute trailer is simply better than the film. Tightly woven with pithy [&[...]
Review: No Small Matter
— by BEV QUESTAD — There is a national security threat that is more important than all the others, but who’s talking about it? Three retired military leaders speak out about this American crisis that cripples every sector of US development. It is the one thing not only endangering our [...]