Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut is an emotionally intense adaptation of a memoir by writer Lidia Yuknavitch. As the narrator states at the beginning, it’s a disjointed account as it adheres not to orderly chronology but to the emotional lows of a woman’s formative years. The result is highly impressionistic yet vivid with a powerful mastery of imagery. It’s astounding work for a first-time director and one of the best book adaptations I’ve seen in a while, capturing unspeakable trauma and pain that can hardly be articulated in words.
A film about Palestinian refugees in Greece made by a Danish director of Palestinian origins Mahdi Fleifel can be expected to be sympathetic to their plight. Making your characters flawed is fine and even adds credibility. But I was very shocked that whether intentionally or not, he has delivered a film that effectively warns Europeans that these refugees have been reduced to such desperate straits that they are capable of anything. The premise and the characters are fine but the plot goes so far off the deep end that I wondered if Fleifel knows what he wants to say here.
Dora the Explorer is way past my childhood so I have no familiarity with the franchise and I wouldn’t ordinarily choose to watch a kid’s film like this. What convinced me is online word-of-mouth and the fact that this film’s reputation seems to have improved over time. The fourth wall breaking jokes I remember seeing in the trailer helped too. In the event. this is exactly as advertised a kid’s adventure film that embraces the fact that it was adapted from an animated show. It’s unashamedly positive, pointedly runs on cartoon logic and I love how it has the storyline of a children’s show, yet never considers the audience to be stupid.
Digging deeper into the history of cinema and especially the works of not-so-well-known directors can be hit and miss. But every so often it pays off in spades. Tampopo seems to be Juzo Itami’s best known and it is so delightful that it immediately made me want to check out the rest of his filmography. It’s already pretty rare that a Japanese comedy can work for international audiences and what’s more fun is that this is food-themed. I didn’t find all of the jokes funny as some seem rather dark. But it’s wonderfully creative, irreverent and has a heart of gold without being sentimental.
Dancer in the Dark is one of my major omissions from the filmography of Lars von Trier. My wife had already watched it by herself a while back plus it was surprisingly poorly reviewed despite being quite a famous film. It’s not a very good looking due to being shot using a handheld digital camera and the main story of a mother doing everything she can to save her son is crude emotional manipulation. Yet the character played by Björk is so fascinating and framing it as a musical is darkly imaginative of Trier. It’s definitely a lesser work but still one worth watching.
I first heard about this film from the news about it being a surprise sleeper hit in China and decided to watch it as it is about the history of Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia. Arriving in the cinema, I saw that plenty of other Malaysian Chinese had the same idea and this is a huge hit in Singapore as well. It’s overly long, heavy-handed in its sentimentality and glosses over the reasons for so many migrants leaving China. But it’s well-made enough to be a tear-jerker, its predominant use of Teochew lends it authencity and to us Southeast Asians, it feels like acknowledgement.
It continues to astound me how perfectly Chloé Zhao grasps the tenets of Western culture despite being Chinese. What could be more central to the canon of Western culture than William Shakespeare? Adapted from a recent novel, this film further takes the bold step of not placing the playwright nor his plays at its center but instead Shakespeare’s wife and children. The result is a stupendously creative reimagining of what the plays might mean and one of the most emotionally affecting film I’ve seen in a while.
