Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne specialize in humanist fables, small-scale social realist portraits of working-class people caught in difficult moral situations. At their best — the Palme D’or-winning L’Enfant, The Kid With A Bike, Two Days, One Night — the brothers conjure believably fraught circumstances and ethically conflicted characters on journeys of different kinds.
The three-part Netflix documentary Five Came Back, scripted by Mark Harris (on whose book it is based) and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, is a substantial achievement of narrative compression and historical context.
Focused on the wartime cinematic contributions of five acclaimed directors — Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler — Harris and Bouzereau examine the nature of filmic propaganda through the lens of individual personalities and creative pressures, seeking to balance a huge amount of information with the needs of the documentary form.
As explained at the start of actual March Madness last month, we have embarked on our 2nd Annual Sports Movie competition for the crown, timed to coincide with the basketball extravaganza that wraps up tonight. And as expected, we are running behind.
More than 10 years separate Lucile Hadzihalilovic‘s Innocence and her 2015 Evolution, but the decade in between didn’t diminish the director’s poetic vision, resolute emphasis on slowness and children, and tone of generally creeping dread. If anything, Evolution ups the ante, swapping in an uncanny group of young boys at an unsettling seasside resort for Innocence‘s female ballerinas and mixing in a huge dose of body horror to boot.
Sophie Savides’ transcendent short The Funeral is an open question. Or really, a set of open questions. Is cinema about distance or closeness? The fictive or the real? Adhering to a rigorous three-part formalism, The Funeral isn’t about to provide any answers, which is an entirely appropriate approach to an achingly poetic depiction of a eulogy.
Train To Busan begins with the routine frustrations of a hapless truck driver: a dodgy checkpoint, impassive security forces, a collision with a deer that he registers as just one more irritation on a frustrating route.
When he drives off, still huffing and puffing about how nothing’s going right, we watch the deer twitchily reassemble itself, stand upright, and stare off into the distance with clouded eyes.
Welcome to the Second Inaugural Showdown of Sports Movies!
As faithful readers will surely remember, last year my girlfriend Carrie and I set out to watch a bunch of sports movies to coincide with March Madness. The idea was at once simple and, because we are kind of dorky, needlessly complicated.
My nominee for the most inexplicably overlooked film of 2016, or at least one of the more under-discussed, Pete’s Dragon is that rarest of things: a movie that captures the very feeling of childhood without pandering or talking down to its audience.
A woman approaches a witch in her lair, hoping to score a potion to seduce a cleric. She imagines how this will play, and we watch her reverie: he puts down his knife and meat long enough to check her out.
For some of us, the very words “Keven Spacey stars as a real estate mogul reincarnated as a talking cat named Mr. Fuzzypants” inspire a kind of maniac glee. Bad-movie aficionados live for such moments, so the release of Nine Lives, now streaming on Amazon Prime, was like a gift from the gods.