Foreign

Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,  Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat…..Amy Winehouse (1983-2011), all died at the age of 27; supernovas extinguished by their own manufactured flames. Asif Kapadia’s stunning, brutally honest documentary about the doomed talent resonates to the core with the unadulterated pain of an unprotected, over-exposed ego; Amy was a one-dimensional individual, supremely gifted with a voice to …

There’s a plethora of books written about World War 1, stunning, devastating descriptions of war’s inimitable power to slay youth’s illusions: “All Quite on the Western Front” Erich Maria Remarque, “Guns of August”, Barbara Tuchman; my personal favorite, Mark Helprin’s “A Soldier of the Great War”; “Testament of Youth” is a profound portrait of war’s iconic ability to alter completely …

What a difference seven days creates; last week’s pathetic “Piku” is beautifully overshadowed by director Anurag Kashyap’s slick, luminous “Bombay Velvet”, set in 1969; Bombay is experiencing a burgeoning building tsunami; gritty graft, gangsters galore, sepia-toned cinematography; a homage to Hollywood gangster flicks of the 30’s and 40’s and actor James Cagney; the film commences with Cagney’s death scene in …

Enough. That is what spurred “Allan Karlsson’s” (archival performance by Robert Gustafsson) rebellious act on his century birthday; fleeing the nursing home as they prepare his celebratory feast; he is spry, weary of the quasi-prison he is  comfortably cloistered in, the ubiquitous monotony; he escapes, and viewers are treated to one of the most idiosyncratic odysseys in film history. It …

Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel is lusciously endowed with sweeping, undulating landscapes, “Turneresque” sunsets and actors, imbuing their characters with all the scintillating romance and passionate drama Hardy intended; Carey Mulligan as “Bathsheba Everdene” is as tempestuous, and as alluring as her biblical namesake (Bathsheba, married King David, after he eliminated her husband, Uriah;  impregnated her with the future King of …

There is something powerfully enigmatic, hypnotic about the deftness of Tom Hardy’s artistry; he is a chameleon, from demon to divine his every role is a revelation:  beleaguered soldier in “Band of Brothers”; evil incarnate as “Bane” in “The Dark Knight Rises”; smoldering, darkly romantic  “Heathcliff” in Wuthering Heights”; skewered savant in “The Drop”; he soared in the minutely seen …

This award-winning film focuses on the civil war in Abkhazia (Georgia, 1992-93); a war that drove most Estonians, who had settled in the area, commencing in the mid-nineteenth century, back to their roots; they had overcome language, economic, political, religious barriers; slaughtered on the altar of Chechen/Georgian inbred animosity. Two farmers elected to stay and harvest their crop of tangerines; …

How’s does one define the fascination of documentaries/films focusing on the fashion industry?  Hidden, silently simmering from one to the next: “Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston”, “Valentino: The Last Emperor”, “The September Issue”, “The Devil Wears Prada” , “Coco Before Chanel”, is a lustful fantasy for the extravagantly magisterial wardrobe; created for the favored few; the “Cinderella Syndrome” , a …

Writer/director Olivier Assayas, aided by gifted actors depicts and ode to “ageing”, a commentary on contemporary interpretations of past and present “characterizations”; how time changes one’s outlook;  it is a play within a play and as much as I yearned to like it found the protagonists tiring, familiar and uninteresting. “Maria” (flawless Juliette Binoche) is asked to star in a …

What could have been a magnificent story of fortitude, besting the most stringent, violent, suppression of light, spirit, evaporates, uncomfortably, into the meandering and melodramatic; loosely based on the true narrative of “Afshin Ghaffarian” (poignantly portrayed by Reece Ritchie), an Iranian dancer forced to camouflage his formation of a dance troupe, hiding from Iran’s “morality police”; it is 2009 and …