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Bacalaureat (2016): Defying Compromise
Films rarely put forward leading characters that they then choose to vehemently punish throughout. But this is Mungiu, who has already proved more than adept at creating authentic and ruthless portrayals of society and in Bacalaureat (English title: Graduation) he scrapes at the edges of our souls. His tale of generational change is predicated on… Read more
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The Family Fang (2015): Sibling Togetherness
After ‘Bad Words’, Bateman the director appears to be heading in the right direction and takes on a more ambitious, layered project. This film deals not only with a dysfunctional family, a concept that has fascinated American cinema ever since American Beauty (1999), but also with the relation between art and life. Thematically, the family… Read more
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Cinema Pathé Tuschinski, Amsterdam
The naive film lover in me proved, as it so frequently does, an ignoramus. Having stayed away from French speaking countries in the last decade and remembering so little of previous visits, I knew nothing of Pathé’s vertical integration. Hell, that’s an ugly word – Pathé’s heritage. Sure, it took me a trip to a non-French… Read more
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Freakonomics (2010): Lukewarm at Best
I’ll admit from the off that I was skeptical regarding this documentary ever since I first heard it was in production. Having read the book, I felt that what made it enjoyable could not really be transposed onto film. Economics, being such a science of numbers, even in its freakonomic form, does not really lend… Read more
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Chuck Norris vs. Communism (2015): A Nostalgia Soufflé
In spite of being born towards the end of the 80s, I recall several “Margareta Nistor movies”, her trademark dubbing scarring my youth alongside the zombies of Return of the Living Dead. It’s funny, particularly because her often inflection-less voice made the humor of the movie much harder to understand at the time. Then again,… Read more
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An Honest Liar (2014): The Skeptic Inside
There truly is something mystical about An Honest Liar, that allows it to transcend its flawed structure and be relevant in spite of it. At its core, the ambition of the film is to establish and walk the line between what constitutes an illusion and what rises to the rank of deception. To achieve this,… Read more
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Messi (2014): Mediocre Documentary About a Legendary Player
With Barcelona on the brink, achieving the seemingly impossible feat of losing four of their last five matches, after what had been an almost perfect season since their defeat against Sevilla in October 2015, I took time out to rehash some of that Lionel Messi magic. The documentary about the player seemed like a healthy place… Read more
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Der Mann, der über Autos sprang (2010): A Soulful Escape
As the movie (English title: The Man Who Jumped Over Cars) was drawing to a close, the question of whether one could really jump over an oncoming car was nagging me. Some brief research highlighted an increase of the average car height throughout recent decades to about 1.5 meters, but one could certainly go for… Read more
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Fúsi (2015): On Solitude and Defiance
It was fitting that on watching this film, I was almost alone in the cinema, because isolation and solitude are powerful themes throughout Fúsi (English title: Virgin Mountain). So when you’re out by yourself, in the middle of the day, to watch an obscure Icelandic movie showing at an archaic cinema that now uses a… Read more
Movie micro-reviews and other stuff. A tributary to the big screen.
Because watching movies is cheaper than therapy.
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