The film captures the mood of sorrow and pain, and the quest for freedom, that has always marked the plight of the refugee, and which surely marks the tragic plight of the 65 million people who recently have been forced to leave their homes around the world. It is well worth five minutes of your emotional time.
Read MoreThe double bill at the Film Forum will take you 90 minutes. It’s a must-see 90-minutes. The documentaries on Elizabeth Murray, (“Everybody Knows…Elizabeth Murray” by Kristi Zea) and Carmen Herrera (“The 100 Year Show” by Alison Klayman) immerse you in the biographies and studio practices of two great artists who had spark and ideas, worked hard, never gave up, and are examples to us all.
Read MoreWhether it was intended or not, “The Battle of Algiers” provides a visual blueprint for urban warfare. Its sympathetic portrayal of the guerrillas celebrates the freedom fighters but does not show a path beyond urban warfare and into peaceful resolution. I can only hope that new viewers of the film will understand the lessons it has to offer and not just absorb the blueprint.
Read MoreHoning in on the small body of work left to us by Hieronymus Bosch (some 25 paintings in museums across the world), the film opens with a series of luscious details of paint. Although cracking with age, the surface of the paintings still bears witness to the agile brush and even more agile mind of the artist. Lovingly detailed brushwork brings an almost jewel-like precision to the perverse devils and monsters that populate Bosch’s paintings, their forms dissolving into abstractions of color, line, and shape through the magnifying lens of the camera. The film is a paean to close looking, the sort of slow and deep observation that so few people seem to engage in–after all, recent studies have suggested that the average museum visitor spends about 15–30 seconds looking at a work of art.
Read MoreJulie Dash’s The Great Migration observes the closing of one chapter of history for many African Americans–life in the unforgiving South–and the beginning of another–an arduous journey North towards an uncertain future. The opening scene of the film, a beach at first light shot in soft muted color, is a fitting metaphor for this transition. A solitary suitcase sits on the sand, a totem for countless histories both individual and communal. At this point of departure where land ends and sea begins, the memories of these emigrants bridge all physical borders, and as the sole remaining traveler, the suitcase is our window into a narrative whose roots run deep and whose branches continue to grow.
Read More“Maggie’s Plan” is a pleasant, intriguing film. Greta Gerwig stars as the Greta Gerwig we met in “Frances Ha.” But the other two actors, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore, play abstruse academics as successful writers. The film postulates that their characters are more intelligent than the Gerwig character. Moore with her Danish accent might be based on writer/director Rebecca Miller’s mother Inge Morath. Hawke might be said to resemble her father Arthur Miller. Who, ergo, is Greta Gerwig but–Marilyn Monroe? She’s no Greta Garbo. The film’s a screwball comedy that makes me speculate. And of course Miller is married to–Daniel Day-Lewis.
Read More“I did it because I could,” says Rocky 184, the one woman graffiti writer who gets a deep look in the movie. The self-proclaimed tomboy from Washington Heights is not alone in her unfocused motivation. “I was bored,” says Snake 1. It was not political, say a number of the others. The best, nuanced comment is from Cool Earl, who says “It was a sign of the times, a sign of our youth, our lack of funds and perhaps our lack of paternal guidance.”
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