— by RON WILKINSON — After watching Volker Schlöndorff’s (Oscar-winning German director of “The Tin Drum”) touching, scary and occasionally funny rendition of an imaginary meeting that decided the fate of Paris, you may never watch “My Dinner With Andre” in the same way again.[...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Review: Before I Go To Sleep
— by RON WILKINSON — Nicole Kidman gives it her best shot but there is simply not enough going on in Rowan Joffe’s psychological drama to make it work. The lack of plot is aggravated by the bizarre use of jarring loud noises and the guessing games the audience goes through trying to un[...]
Review: Interstellar
— by RON WILKINSON — Christopher Nolan’s $165 million IMAX space lollapalooza is all the better for starting in the most modest of environments. It is some time in the future, some place in the American Midwest. Things are not going well, according to the elderly respondents. Blights a[...]
Review: The Heart Machine
— by RON WILKINSON — Writer/director Zachary Wigon’s essay on the vicissitudes of internet love starts innocently enough. A quiet, intimate conversation in the privacy of Cody’s (John Gallagher Jr. of “The Newsroom” and “Short Term 12”) East Village apartment with a possible [...]
Review: Seeds of Hope
— by BEV QUESTAD — This is the story of Masika Katsuva, a Congolese woman of extraordinary resolve and resiliency. Though she has wanted to kill herself many times, and though she sometimes prays to God to take her life just so she can get some rest, Masika is a transformer of spirits an[...]
Review: Return to Homs
— by BEV QUESTAD — The new Homs sidewalk is a passage through the crashed out walls of uninhabited apartments inside bombed-out buildings. If you want to get somewhere, just take a mallet and make holes in a series of walls. Eventually you will make it to the end of the block where you c[...]
Review: Reaching for the Stars (aka Sepidah)
— by BEV QUESTAD — So we finally have it in an innocent documentary about a young girl interested in astronomy. “If you do something wrong I’ll kill you. I swear to God. Whether it’s my own daughter or my sister’s. I mean it.” Dialogues like this are just one reason for the imp[...]
Review: The Canal
— by RON WILKINSON — Film archivist David (Rupert Evans) smells a rat. Maybe it is that his wife, Alice (Hannah, Hoekstra) seems distracted by her business associate, Alex (Carl Shaaban), and seems to be pulling away from David. That could be because she is having an affair with Alex. Th[...]
Review: The Decent One (Der Anständige)
— by RON WILKINSON — “The Decent One,” Vanessa Lapa’s riveting documentary (co-written with Ori Weisbrod) reveling the life of SS-leader Heinrich Himmler is, if nothing else, a remarkable collection of archival footage. Although some (most?) of this footage has been seen be[...]
Review: Citizenfour
— by RON WILKINSON — Almost a year and a half after filmmaker Laura Poitras’ and journalist Glenn Greenwald first met with whistle-blower Edward Snowden, his name has become a household word. Snowden contacted Poitras and asked her to be a part of that historic meeting from the fir[...]
Review: The Blue Room (aka La chambre bleue)
— by RON WILKINSON — Directed and written by Mathieu Amalric (co-written by leading lady Stéphanie Cléau), “The Blue Room” is superficially a cautionary tale about marital infidelity and, on a deeper level, a psychological study in promises made, and implied. Based on Georges Simen[...]
Review: Private Violence
— by BEV QUESTAD — The most quizzical thing about women who are being abused is their reticence to get out of their situation. Some people think it’s because they are poor and dependent upon the man. “Where else can they go to support their children?” we wonder. But in this film, t[...]
Review: Big Men
— by BEV QUESTAD — “Is there some society that you know that doesn’t run on greed?” Executive produced by Brad Pitt, “Big Men” opens with this question. It also tells the true story, with impressive access and documentation, about a little Texas company that finds oil in Ghana.[...]
Review: Purgatorio
— by RON WILKINSON — “Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border” — Rodrigo Reyes’ simmering treatise on the human condition in the worst of all worlds — starts from the beginning. Children laugh and play, full of good intentions and dreams of the fu[...]