Foreign

Documentarian Luke Holland (1948-2020) spent his life bringing to the fore man’s errors, injustices, crimes against mankind: campaigning on behalf of threatened tribal people; highlighting Ruby Kennedy’s campaign to compensate slave labourers under Hitler’s demonic regime; it is “Final Account” that will stabilize, confirm his legacy of intuitive brilliance; as a grandson of Holocaust victims; commencing in 2008 he interviewed …

“NEW ORDER” (PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED, THEATRES) SPANISH (ENGLISH SUBTITLES) A highlight of the 2020 Chicago International Film Festival. Excellent FIVE STAR study of civility versus savagery; enfranchised versus disenfranchised; brutal but brilliant analysis of wealth, spurring anarchy. Still resonating after almost a year. And still… FIVE STARS!!!!! “DREAM HORSE” (THEATRES) If you viewed 2015’s “DARK HORSE” and heartily enjoyed an unlikely …

“Revenge is best served cold”; two prime protagonists, serving vigilante reparation after the death of loved ones; Mads Mikkelsen stars as “Markus” a frigid, calculating Afghani soldier, returning to Denmark to avenge the death of his wife, killed in a horrific train accident; Mikkelsen’s deliciously terrifying performance anchors this sublimely well-written (writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen) scintillating scenario; beautifully balanced, “Riders …

“Limbo” in Catholicism, is a bubble where souls of the unbaptized, hibernate until permission is granted to enter the celestial realm; in this scenario, it is a young Syrian refugee longing for permanent asylum on a sparsely populated Scottish island, where he, amongst other exiled, is waiting for the metaphorical gates to open. Director Ben Sharrock with irony and humor …

Artists are perpetually striving to portray the innovative within their own discipline: paint, marble, bronze have been substituted, traded for contemporary mediums: digitalization, interactive technology ignites unprecedented techniques; parameters of “what is art” are swelling; “The Man Who Sold His Skin” with remarkable depth focuses on Syrian refugee “Sam Ali” (spunky Yahya Mahayni) escaping to Beirut and selling his back …

There was a strange spirituality, almost a reckoning, comparable to exiting a bomb shelter and checking the remains, revealing the hereafter; a ghostly specter of another era permeated the evening; a staged, glitzy Gotham, populated by ideal mannequins, a purified zone of equality and perfection.  Gone were the “hosts” with their self-deprecating, stale schtick, guffaws and unintended slights; winners, given …

With a plethora of options I have become cavalier when investing time in front of my mini movie screen; if it doesn’t look good or kidnap my attention within the first ten minutes, I make a speedy exit, with no regrets. Here are a few that kept me binging well into the wee hours: “Shtisel” (Hebrew: English Subtitles) (Netflix). The …

During the Pandemic Plague filmic buffs have had to improvise in their investment and outlook as to viewing options: gone is the sanctity of the silenced, darkened, behemoth movie house, programed timing between features, bathroom and refueling stations; most missed, is the intimacy of the experience: “date nights”, secretive squeezes, muffled comments, irritated shushes; welcome laceration, cauterization, from monotonous minutiae of daily regimens, in other words the prestige, eminence, partnership with the theatre is erased. No longer lusting, anticipating Friday …

Unless it’s a classic, movies made before 2000, rarely tweak my interest, or a revisit; “The Ice House” directed by Tim Fywell, starring a youthful, heavily-accented Daniel Craig, was a worthy exception; Craig, as “Detective McLoughlin”, cynically sour, cagily perceptive, tries to solve a marvelous mystery of a withered corpse (found in a dilapidated, long disregarded ice house) a missing, …

There are characters that harbor, rent free in fatty corners of one’s brain; they are friends, making their presence known serendipitously, surprisingly when least expected. Over the years I have embraced numerous subjects for a myriad of inscrutable reasons: “House” (a Doctor of cantankerous genius), “Foyle” (WWII British detective), “Morse” (Renaissance man, solving crimes), “Nikki Alexander”, forensic pathologist (“Silent Witness”) …