Year: 2021

“The Life Ahead” –And Then the End

Written by Diana Paul on March 7, 2021. Posted in movie reviews. 2 Comments on “The Life Ahead” –And Then the End

This 2020 Italian drama stars Sophia Loren in an adaptation of the Romain Gary novel, The Life Before Us. Directed by Sophia Loren’s son, Edoardo Ponti, The Life Ahead is the third film based on Gary’s novel. The Life Ahead has two main characters: Madame Rosa, an octogenarian ex-prostitute and former Holocaust survivor, and a 12-year old Somalian child. To support herself Madame Rosa cares for the children of local sex workers in her apartment. Consequently, Rosa is the glue in her neighborhood and the lifeline for women desperate...

“The Accident”–Unexpected Trauma

Written by Diana Paul on February 28, 2021. Posted in Television reviews. 1 Comment on “The Accident”–Unexpected Trauma

The Accident , a four-part British series, plunges into a Welsh community’s fight for justice after an explosion on a construction site kills several local teenagers. The town of Glyngolau, Wales is comparable to many Appalachian coal mine and steel mill towns. Most have lost their main employers, leaving everyone in financial ruin. To the rescue is a large real estate developer, Kallbridge Developments. It swoops in, promising a thousand local jobs, and the residents breath a sigh of relief. Iwan Bevan, head of the town...

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Written by Diana Paul on February 22, 2021. Posted in Film Festivals, movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Toni Morrison (1931-2019), the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was a complex artist who did not hold back from confronting the worst of human history. The documentary, Toni Morrison: Pieces I Am, is a historical panorama of a slice of history dating from the 1930’s until the conclusion of the film in 2019. Morrison emerges as a powerful, iconic, and formidable moral and intellectual force. The film gives us a retrospective of her groundbreaking novels which challenged the literary status quo, rewarding the reader with imagining black lives...

Ragnarok–Thor on Steroids

Written by Diana Paul on February 14, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 1 Comment on Ragnarok–Thor on Steroids

Ragnarok, a Norwegian fantasy series, takes place in the fictional town of Edda, in Hordaland, the home of the mythological Norse god of thunder, Thor. This modern day Ragnarök follows the story of the Norse mythology of the god Thor. Ragnarok stands for the end of the world and the twilight of the gods, with natural disasters leading to a battle between the gods (Thor) and giants (Jutuls). In this reimagining of the myth, Ragnarok is environmental disaster due to climate change from corporate giants. Edda is owned and controlled by the Jutul...

The Spanish Princess–An Imperial Royal Highness

Written by Diana Paul on February 8, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. No Comments on The Spanish Princess–An Imperial Royal Highness

The Spanish Princess is a ShowTime limited series based on the novels The Constant Princess (2005) and The King’s Curse (2014) by Philippa Gregory. This is a drama about the teenage Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope who played Ramsay Boulton’s lover Myranda in “Game of Thrones”). She becomes the first queen of England betrothed to King Henry VIII (Ruairi O’Connor). Teenage princess Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the Spanish Queen Isabella and King...

“News of the World”–A Gift for the Heart

Written by Diana Paul on February 1, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound. 5 Comments on “News of the World”–A Gift for the Heart

News of the World is based on the Paulette Jiles’s bestseller by the same name. The story follows a sixty-something curmudgeonly widower, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a traveling newspaper reader. Captain Kidd entertains and informs townspeople–some of whom are illiterate– in small communities all over Texas: for the price of a silver dime. The year is 1870, five years after Reconstruction, and Texans still are disgruntled by their defeat after the end of the Civil War. In the opening scene a Black man has been lynched and a ten-year-old...