The two main characters of writer-director Sally Potter’s rapturous, humane, powerful Yes take their names from the interracial, extramarital couple in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). She (Joan Allen, wonderful, desireable, Potter-vulnerable) is a scientist, Belfast-born, a resettled U.S. citizen and now a Londoner married unhappily to a politician. He, a Muslim, was a surgeon in […]
Daily Archives: July 7, 2007
In Grbavica, a district of Sarajevo that had been a site of torture during the Balkan War, and near where mass graves are still being unearthed, single mother Esma has been raising Sara, now 12, to believe that her father was a Slaheed, a Muslim “war martyr.” In truth, Sara is the result of Esma’s […]
I have seen many a bad musical film, but the absolute worst is a slop of corn mush titled The Five Heartbeats, a sudsy saga tracking through the years a harmonizing group of African-American youngsters with a Motown sound and delirious ambitions. The group, of course, has its squabbles, including ones involving sexual competitiveness and […]
One of my favorite German filmmakers is Margarethe von Trotta, whose art is fresh, lucid, graceful, incisive, politically probing. Sheer Madness (1982) and Rosa Luxemburg (1985) are great, complex works, and Sisters; or the Balance of Happiness (1979) and Marianne and Julianne (1981) aren’t far behind. (Since the mid-1990s, von Trotta’s work, done for German […]
Dennis Grunes 