This is a delightful coming-of-age film that is lighthearted and enjoyable. Nothing too political or heavy here.
I'm a Riklis fan and have to recommend The Syrian Bride.
3.5/5
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The Campbell Review |
Dancing Arabs is the newest film by Eran Ricklis. This is a coming-of-age dramedy about a Palestinian Israeli boy who is given the opportunity to attend Jerusalem's most prestigious boarding school and has trouble fitting in but befriends a classmate with muscular dystrophy and who, over the course of three years, develops a secret relationship with a Jewish girl, Naomi. This is a delightful coming-of-age film that is lighthearted and enjoyable. Nothing too political or heavy here. I'm a Riklis fan and have to recommend The Syrian Bride. 3.5/5
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Two Days, One Night is a film that I ended up liking more than I anticipated because when I left the theatre after the screening I thought, Meh. This is a very simple little French film starring Marion Cotillard. It follows a woman who is on the verge of a breakdown as she faces unemployment. She spends her weekend visiting all of her co-workers to beg them to vote to keep her even though it would mean no one would get their $1000 bonus. Cotillard starts off with the stakes so high it's hard for her to take it anywhere else. In this way the film felt a bit forced and flat. That said, the film stuck with me and I kept coming back to it in the months after watching it in Telluride. I felt every minute of that film and I think that was a project of the film. I am a fan of the Dardennes and recommend all of their films, particularly Le Fils, Rosetta, and L'Enfant. 4/5 La Strada (Frederico Fellini, Italy, 1954) All my favorite Fellini's are the ones starring his wife Julietta Masina (check out Nights of Cabiria and Variety Lights). Subsequently these are his films that lean more heavily on the tradition of Italian Neo-Realism than his more Surreal films such as Satyricon and 8 1/2. Here, Masina is brilliant as Gelsomina--a young woman sold by her mother to a travelling sideshow strong-man, Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn. Gelsomina is forced to leave her life and follow Zampano on the road. He treats her absolutely horribly, but finally breaks away, goes out on her own, and finds her own path. This film is utterly beautiful and tragic. 5/5 3-Iron (South Korea, 2004) is a South Korean romantic drama directed by Kim Ki-Duk. Ki-Duk makes a variety of films, some beautiful, quiet, and somber such as 3-Iron and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, others gruesome, violent, and shocking such a The Isle and Bad Guy. 3-Iron is about a silent drifter who breaks into people's homes in order to fix broken appliances and to clean. When he breaks into a house he thinks is empty, it turns out he's being watched by a similarly quiet, young abused wife. The two begin a silent romance. This is an astonishingly beautiful film. I like quiet films and this is certainly quiet. This film is worth every precious minute. 5/5 Well now, this is something! This is a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempt to adapt the Frank Hebert book Dune into a film, in the 1970s. The film has never been made, but nonetheless maintains legendary status in Hollywood and the World of Cinema. Jodorowsky envisioned an epic masterpiece that would star David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Orson Welles, and count HR Giger and Jean Giraud amongst its impressive creative team. One can't help to get swept up in Jodorowsky's passion. This is a hugely enjoyable especially for cinephiles, fans of Lynch's Dune, or the book. 5/5 This is a German coming-of-age comedy about a teenage girl obsessed with poor hygiene. This movie is not for the faint of heart. In many ways, Wetlands verges on horror. Particularly with its central preoccupation with the monstrous, becoming, adolescent female body. I could write a whole paper about the movie in terms of the monstrous feminine and the grotesque.. This movie obliterates any traces of the romanticized adolescent female body and forces you to confront her becoming body in all it's leaky glory. I loved this movie, and while it wasn't quite as gross as I was expecting, it was effectively shocking. I had to look away many times...I'm squeamish. Yes, it was gross. Yes, some parts were downright foul. At times, it was nasty, nasty, nasty... This is an entirely different kind of gross-out comedy than anything Hollywood could ever come up with... This is 100% R-rated and NSFW. Scandalous! 4/5 Gloria is a Chilean film about an older divorcee who has a brief but complicated relationship with a former Naval officer. Aesthetically, this film has a lot of close ups and as such feels constricted and maybe even a bit claustrophobic. There are moments of space also, but the shifts are far more subtle than say, Xavier Dolan's stellar Mommy (2014). I loved this movie. It's a pretty quiet little film, and I like that. 4.5/5 |
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