Foreign

For over eleven years and 1000 plus reviews, my sporadic filmic intermissions rejuvenate, not only my spirit, but how I view films; the escapism of movies, relief from reality, a hiatus from daily duties, is healthy, but has to be balanced with the flavor of things as they actually exist; blinders off, focusing on globalization and its effects on the …

So many of you have requested this filmic information. They are listed as I have seen them. For reviews check Peneflix archives, everyone’s taste is infused with different flavors; READ reviews before viewing; consider yourself forewarned. I love the twisted, foreign, horror genres along with soapy, platitudinous, sentimental, saccharine fare. BLACK PANTHER OPERATION RED SEA (CHINESE) LOVE, SIMON FOXTROT (ISRAEL) …

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) the eminent emperor of French film noir (his American counterpart, Alfred Hitchcock) is rising from the morgue, via digitally enhanced classics; “The Murderer Lives at Number 21”, made in 1942, during German occupation of Paris; black and white, as in the archival photographic process, cements viewers concentration on the characters; scintillatingly diverse, wickedly witty, Clouzot’s prodigious …

Director/writer Ramon Salazar’s “Sunday’s Illness” is as good as any film playing in today’s theaters; opening earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival, Netflix’s prescience is a boon to those who crave watching excellence in one’s living room. Unlike any mother/daughter relationship you’ve experienced, nuances subtly revealed, profound performances, make this film a thrilling, psychologically titillating scenario. “Anabel” (Susi …

Springing from Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s (1797-1851) fecund imagination is one of literature’s finest, bleakest, most sorrowful creatures, “Frankenstein”; written by Mary, while still eighteen years old, living with free-spirited, romantic British poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglass Booth), at the request of Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), a rival poet; culling from her own experience, a desire to rearrange fate. Director Haifaa …

British author Ian McEwan’s masterful works are infused with immaculate, poetic prose; his gift of capturing the human condition reigns in league with Dickens, Thackeray, Proust and the recently departed Philip Roth; a single reading is not sufficient in satisfying one’s lust for his written, exquisite prosaic conquests.  Unfortunately, so much of his beautiful verbiage, is lost in the film’s …

“Because inside me is a beast that snarls, and growls and strains toward freedom…. and as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.” (Veronica Roth) “Beast” is a deliciously twisted, slightly diabolical film, that tantalizes and terrorizes simultaneously; the barren, unfriendly landscape of Jersey is home to troubled “Moll” (steaming, seething performance by Jessie Buckley), twenty-seven, living at home …

Juliette Bincohe’s giftedness as an actor is squandered in this trite, supposed romantic journey; director Claire Denis (“White Material”) focus on “Isabelle’s” (Binoche), a talented artist, quest for “Mr. Goodbar”, lacks electricity, intelligence, titillation; Isabelle is divorced with a ten-year-old daughter, looking for love in “all the wrong places”; bed-bouncing from one meaningless relationship to another, losing bits and pieces …

Emotionally flayed from the onset when “Michael and Dafna Feldmann” are informed of their son “Jonathan’s” (Yonaton Shiray) death.  For fifteen minutes viewers are exposed to raw, pulverizing pain; with bleeding souls, and splintered hearts, Lior Ashkenazi (“Footnote”) and Sarah Adler (“The Cakemaker”) hypnotically generate the unspoken magnitude of the insurmountable. Writer/director Samuel Maoz’s complex scenario uses the fluid structure …

Cursed with a hollow, vapid, platitudinous script, bludgeoning narrative “A Wrinkle in Time” is a lackluster, uninspiring attempt at a geometric, morality play. Director Ava DuVernay’s exceedingly ambitious rendition of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 book focuses on “Meg Murry’s” (Storm Reid), her brother, “Charles Wallace Murry” (Deric McCabe), and friend “Calvin O’Keefe” (Levi Miller) quest for her father, scientist “Dr.Alex Murry” …