Something of a prelude to David Lynch’s explorations into the dark side of tinsel town (and in particular, the intersecting alternate realities of his sprawling metafilm Inland Empire), Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays is a stark, fragmented, and disjointed, but instinctually cohesive, occasionally luminous (and humorous), and inevitably heartbreaking adaptation of Joan Didion’s […]
The Last Stop (Terminus), 1987 (Serik Aprimov) In an early episode in The Last Stop, a young man, newly discharged from the Soviet army visits his relatives and inquires about what has happened in the bucolic town during his absence, to which his extended family responds “Nothing happens here. We live.” Considered to be the […]
My Terrorist, 2002 (Yulie Cohen Gerstel) Provocative, insightful, passionate, and courageous, My Terrorist chronicles Ms. Cohen Gerstel’s controversial campaign to win the parole release of a convicted PLO (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) terrorist Fahad Mihyi who, in 1978, had boarded and opened fire on a London bus occupied by Ms. Cohen Gerstel […]
Life on the Tracks (Riles), 2002 (Ditsi Carolino) Life on the Tracks is a charming, graceful, compassionate, and staggeringly intimate portrait of the everyday struggles of a poor, but devoted (and playfully bickering) married couple named Eddie and Pen Renomeron as they eke out a meager existence for their two daughters and three adopted children […]
Another pleasant surprise from the Slovenian cinema series was Metod Pevec’s lovely, slow brewing Beneath Her Window, a film vaguely reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinema (especially A Short Film About Love) in its interconnecting themes of obsession, missed connection, voyeurism, and chance, but played with the muted, idiosyncratic humor of a French romantic comedy. As […]
In an unnamed section of 1970s Johannesburg, a cheerful, inquisitive schoolboy named Sharky stares transfixedly at a billboard poster promoting the screening of the Burt Lancaster film, Valdez is Coming at a local theater. Living under the custody and supervision of his grandmother after his parents were forcibly uprooted and relocated to distant parts of […]