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Entries in Reviews (1292)

Friday
Dec162022

Best International Film Reviews: China, India, and Japan

by Cláudio Alves

For many, this year's Best International Film race will forever be remembered with an added asterisk, a reminder that the outcome would have been different had India submitted RRR instead of Last Film Show. This is not a commentary on artistic quality, merely award prognostication. The action blockbuster keeps racking up honors, while the country's official submission remains under-discussed. If neither succeeds, it will continue a sad Oscar trend. As one of the world's leading film industries, it's notable how little India has factored in these awards' history, indicating AMPAS' biases as well as India's own sometimes surprising submission choices.

While considering India's fate, let's also peruse the titles selected by Asia's other major film-producing nations… 

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Tuesday
Dec132022

Best International Film Reviews: Armenia, Canada and Paraguay

by Cláudio Alves

Submitting a documentary is a risky strategy in the Best International Film race. Since Waltz with Bashir in 2008, only four other non-fiction features have been able to score nominations in the category – Cambodia's The Missing Picture, North Macedonia's Honeyland, Romania's Collective, and Denmark's Flee. None of them won. Still, hope is everlasting, and one often finds that some of the year's most fascinating submissions happen to be documentaries. The same is true for our current season, with two titles going as far as incorporating animation, like Waltz with Bashir and Flee. Mayhap they can repeat their antecessors' success at getting nominated. It's unlikely but not impossible…

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Sunday
Dec112022

Review: "One Fine Morning" is the gentlest of gut punches

by Cláudio Alves

Autofiction isn't a new phenomenon, whether in film or other arts. Nevertheless, more and more directors are dipping their toes into pools of navel-gazing introspection. For some auteurs, however, there has never been another way of making art. Take Mia Hasen-Løve as an example. Her cinema has always manifested as a reflection of lived experience, pulling from personal details in gradations of openness, extrapolating narrative honesty as a conduit for building humanistic pieces. Empathy is the tenet of her cinema, not just between audience and characters but between the filmmaker and her creation. At least, that's the feeling that persists after one leaves the theater, still dazed by the director's work. 

Within this context, it means a great deal to state that One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve's latest, might be her most personal project to date…

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Tuesday
Nov292022

Review: "The Fabelmans" is a 'love letter to cinema' done right

by Cláudio Alves

Around the holiday season of 1952, a Jewish couple takes their son to the movies in New Jersey. It's his first time watching a picture on the big screen, and the experience will change him forever. As Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth unravels at 24 frames per second, the kid's eyes watch everything in starry awe, growing fearful as a massive train crash marks the narrative's climactic set piece. In the coming days, he'll ask for a trainset as his Hanukah present, growing obsessed with restaging the calamity he saw projected big on that magical place, the movie screen. So he doesn't ruin the expensive toy with multiple crashes, his mom suggests the boy films the crash with the dad's 8mm camera. And thus begins a love story bigger than life itself.

In reality, the boy's name was Steven Spielberg. In this latest memory play turned film fantasy, or private secret elevated to public spectacle, he's Sammy Fabelman…

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Sunday
Nov272022

The glorious Danielle Deadwyler in "Till"

by Nathaniel R

Danielle Deadwyler in "Till"

Often times Oscar buzz arrives before a performance seen on the basis that the role will be a) meaty b) important-feeling and c) feature typically awards-friendly elements. There's a reason this happens frequently. Voters of all awards bodies, not just the Academy, are sometimes guilty of awarding the role in question rather than thinking about what the actor actually did with their big opportunity. The unfortunate byproduct of this is that sometimes, no matter how much an actor elevates it, people might assume "well, it was the role". In these scenarios even the enthusiasm around the performance can feel a little rote because it's expected. It arguably happens with most biopic roles now. The role of Mamie Till-Mobely, the mother of Emmett Till who channeled her grief at her son's murder into Civil Rights activism, meets all those pre-release requirements for buzz and a likely nomination even if Danielle Deadwyler hadn't been incredible. The very good news is that she most definitely is...

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