[Guest reviewer Barbara Artson, author of the novel Odessa, Odessa ]
Director Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) opens in total darkness. We see nothing but hear only the elderly voice of a narrator:
“I don’t know if the story that I want to tell you is entirely true. Some of it I only know by hearsay, and after so many years it remains obscure today, and I must leave it in darkness.”
And
so the schoolteacher narrator, now an
old man, begins his rendering in a series of flashbacks, depicting the
mystifying and horrific happenings that...
“For Sama”—A Letter to My Daughter
For Sama is the most searing documentary about war that I have ever seen. Nominated this year for an Academy Award for Best International Film, For Sama presents some of the most unflinching war coverage and remarkable and courageous footage. A love letter to her infant daughter Sama, born in Aleppo, For Sama is a Syrian mother’s first-person account of the bombing of her beloved homeland over a period of five years. Aleppo, at the time, was one of the last strongholds resisting the Assad dictatorship.
Waad Al-Khateab is the Syrian
producer, cinematographer and hero of
this...
“Clemency”–No Mercy or Absolution
What’s the psychological and moral cost to a
society that administers the death penalty? That’s the question raised in Clemency, the winner of the Sundance drama award last year.
So much more than a “death-row drama” ,
Clemency shifts the lens to the
impact of bureaucratized
human cruelty: a scathing
portrait of the toll the process of administering an execution has on prison
staff. We see how they are not executioners but bureaucratic cogs in a horrible
machine of death.
Sixty-something Bernadine (the remarkable African American actor Alfre...
The Report—An Exposé for Us All
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT)—is the focus of The Report, a provocative Amazon political thriller. A Senate staff researcher, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) is assigned by Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening) to investigate detainees held by the CIA in “black sites”. A shameful chapter of American history unfolds , where torture was re-introduced as a legitimate tool in pursuit of national security.
The Report employs flashbacks of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that are frightening and harrowing. Flashing back to 2001 immediately after 9/11, the anxiety...
1917—This Great War Is Not So Great
The multiple award-winning 1917 is inspired by “American Beauty” writer-director Sam Mendes’s great grandfather’s experience during World War I. Almost everything you’ve ever seen in a war film is here in 1917. There are several homages to the classic Stanley Kubrick film, “Paths of Glory” (1957), including the technique of tracking a long take, seemingly a continuous single-shot with no cuts, of the brutal trench warfare that cost 9-12 million soldiers’ lives. (The calculus for civilian deaths would double the total.) It is as if we’re in...
“Parasite” –Living Off Your Host
Parasite
This Korean multiple award-nominated, SAG Globe winning movie, Parasite, has captured the critics’ minds as it delves into the income gap, greed and class discrimination between the “one-percenter” wealthy Park family and the destitute, marginally employed Kim clan. The theme of the competitive, desperate search for wealth at one end of the income spectrum versus the content, oblivious upper-class entitlement at the other end permeates South Korean director, Bong Joon-ho’s films (“Snowpiercer” and “Mother” in particular.) This difficult theme...