Of the many neat twists in ANTEBELLUM, the most disturbing of all is the one that concerns the state of race relations in the modern day, and how slavery still informs it. By contrasting the subtle, and not so subtle, micro-aggressions forced upon people of color in the present with the brutality of slavery as… Read More »
RESISTANCE AT TULE LAKE — Konrad Aderer Interview
An interviewee in Konrad Aderer’s RESISTANCE AT TULE LAKE compares that militarized internment camp to Guantanamo. It’s a connection that I had not made before, but which is just one of the many enlightening moments in the documentary. When I spoke with Aderer on March 11, 2017, it was just before RESISTANCE’s world premiere at… Read More »
CRIES FROM SYRIA — Evgeny Afineevsky Interiview
CRIES FROM SYRIA had already made its HBO debut when I spoke with Evgeny Afineevsky on March 16, 2017. He was in San Francisco, though, to do a Q&A after a screening here. Afineevsky is a garrulous, upbeat man, quick with a smile and a hug, but when he talks about the dangers of American… Read More »
GOAT
GOAT is not a subtle film, though the performances by its young cast are wonderfully nuanced. Based on the eponymous memoir by Ben Land, it opens with a mob of naked frat boys caught up in slow-motion frenzy of testosterone-driven, gleeful aggression. We do not see what it is that they are kicking, but we… Read More »
ANTHROPOID
ANTHROPOID is divided into two episodes, one more gut-wrenching than the last as it tells the fact-based story of Czech partisans on what is essentially a suicide mission to assassinate SS General Reinhardt Heydrich, Butcher of Prague, co-planner of the Final Solution, and third in line in the Nazi hierarchy. While the first part is… Read More »
AUDITION (ODITION)
Sometimes you see a film and you just have to wonder about the person who made it. Such is the case of AUDITION, a Japanese film that must be the result of a bad break-up of a particularly insidious form. I mean, any film that has as its villain a woman scarier than Freddie, Jason… Read More »
CATCH A FIRE
CATCH A FIRE is a timely consideration of what drives human beings to extremes. Based on a true story of South Africa’s time under apartheid, it shows one man radicalized from passivity to activism to armed resistance with the same dizzy speed that his illusion of security is shattered. The time is 1980 and the… Read More »