From Israel and Canada, Garden is a deeply affecting film because of the loving friendship of the two homeless boys, gay male prostitutes in Tel Aviv, that the film documents, the harshness of their circumstance and the courage with which they daily face this, and the extraordinary degree of trust that filmmakers Ruthie Shatz and […]
Monthly Archives: October 2008
An occasion for mystery develops from a private girls’ school Valentine’s Day picnic excursion to Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia, in 1900: three of the girls and one of the chaperoning teachers vanish. “Nobody knows what happened.” Actually, the film opens with a wide-angle shot of a dreamy landscape and the voiceover of one of […]
Jon Voight, brilliant, is A—as in Josef A., which rhymes with Josef K.—in the Kafkaesque The Revolutionary, adapted by Hans Koningsberger from his own novel. The film, though shot in London, is populated by Americans; the exact setting is inexact: “somewhere in the free world.” A is a philosophy student, suspended for politics, whose radical […]
From Thailand, the lovely, brimming Sud sanaeha takes us into the mountains, forest and water at the Thai-Burmese border; but it opens abruptly in Khon Kaen, in a forest-green draped clinic that in fact had been where writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s parents, both medical doctors, practiced. Min, a patient, was there once before; the rash for […]
Eventually both story-lines of Horem pádem, from the Czech Republic, intersect. One is fine; the other, terrible. The film begins with two truck drivers unloading their delivery of illegal Indian immigrants in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. They discover that a baby has been (accidentally) left behind. “Got any formula?” one […]
Seven-year-old Simon’s communion with it, and his attempt to get a tiny grip on it, precede a red balloon’s ascension to the Paris skies. Thereafter, at liberty, it becomes a floating cherry moon possibly safeguarding the child, passing by windows and punctuating his childhood with its gracious presence. Simon does not see it, although his […]
José Padilha’s lacerating Tropa de Elite, which took the top prize at Berlin, studies the mind of BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion) officer Nascimento. We hear his recollective voiceover. Nascimento (meaning, in Portuguese, birth), an officially sanctioned torturer and terrorist, possesses a flat, affectless voice that claims moral purity; superior, Nascimento equates “thugs”—drug lords and […]
