Bits of this are boring or turgid. and Volker Bertelmann’s lugubrious score is overkill, but it acquires both thematic/moral and dramatic/storytelling force as it goes along. No bad performances, but the one I’d have nominated for an Oscar is the one by Lucian Msamati (the scene in which his character weeps is astonishing), and I also liked those by Sergio Castellitto and Carlos Diehz, but none of the three of them recieved any attention of that kind, alas. Entertaining and…
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig 2024
Frequently wondered whether this would turn out to be less than the sum of its parts, and it’s true that certain moments are laboured, but on the other hand, my heart was consistently leaping into my throat for something like 180 minutes, and that is not something to be gainsaid lightly. I was reminded of The Godfather a little bit in terms of the transition undergone by the leading male character, which I found mostly but not entirely psychologically credible.…
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Go 1999
I’d heard for many years that this one was very good, and also been obliged to see it anyway because it has always been my sublime happiness to worship the ground upon which my eternal lifelong crush Sarah Polley walks (look, bucko, if you had seen The Sweet Hereafter for the first and only time at the age of 15 and had your ass kicked by that unearthly, impossibly perfect movie, you’d have the relevant empirically correct lifetime obsession with…
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Rabbit-Proof Fence 2002
Maybe a little bit didactic, but remarkably spare and atmospheric for all that, and Theo Panayides’ contemporaneous remarks to the effect that the film attempts a greater level of moral complexity than most audiences might’ve been expecting or hoping for strike me as roughly true. Everlyn Sampi’s engaging and arresting in the lead, but the single thing that has stayed with me the most about this intermittently staid but ultimately rather understated and occasionally moving film is the ultra-compelling, mesmerizing,…
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