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From Israel, “One Week and a Day” Offers a Stellar Tragicomic Odyssey of Grief
Grief does strange things to people, thrusting them into fugue-like states where anger, resentment, and to-hell-with-it-all despair can lead to bizarre behavior. Writer-director Asaph Polonsky’s One Week and a Day adeptly captures that mindset via the story of an Israeli couple, Eyal (Shai Avivi) and Vicky (Evgenia Dodina), on the day after they’ve finished sitting […]
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Katell Quillévéré’s Mesmeric Melodrama “Heal the Living” Illuminates Our Strength and Fragility
A catastrophic accident leaves one family in ruins and bestows another with precious hope in Heal the Living, a melodrama immeasurably enhanced by the piercing, poetic direction of Katell Quillévéré (Suzanne). On his way home from a dawn surfing trip, carefree teen Simon (Gabin Verdet) is involved in a car crash, leaving him physically intact […]
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Cold War Thriller ‘Despite the Falling Snow’ Manages to Bore in Two Separate Historical Eras
So tasteful it’s torturous, Despite the Falling Snow is a Cold War espionage thriller for those who like their period-piece action airless and derivative. In 1961 Moscow, government official Alexander (Sam Reid) defects to the U.S., in the process unwillingly leaving behind his wife Katya (Rebecca Ferguson), who was a secret agent working against the […]
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Messy and Honest, “All This Panic” Digs Deep to Reveal the Rawness of High School
Teendom’s tumultuousness may lend itself to big-screen clichés, but All This Panic — a documentary that follows a group of NYC high-school girlfriends over the course of three years — digs deeper to reveal the rawness, confusion, fear, aimlessness, and euphoria of that most turbulent of times. Eschewing narration or even title cards to indicate […]
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Comedians Consider Jokes About the Holocaust in the Insightful Doc ‘The Last Laugh’
The Holocaust is not funny. But does that mean it’s off-limits for comedy? Such is the topic of The Last Laugh, Ferne Pearlstein’s insightfully open-ended inquiry into the role of humor as it relates to unspeakable tragedy. Mel Brooks, Gilbert Gottfried, Carl Reiner, Sarah Silverman, Rob Reiner and more weigh in on their own attempts […]
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Get Lost in the Grave Shadows of Boo Junfeng’s Death Row Drama, ‘Apprentice’
The past is a noose around the neck of both death row inmates and those who pull the hangman’s lever in Apprentice, Boo Junfeng’s mysterious and nuanced prison drama. In a Singapore prison where capital punishment is carried out at the end of a long rope, former soldier turned correctional officer Aiman (compelling newcomer Firdaus […]
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Patricidal Thriller ‘My Father Die’ Is as Artless as Its Title
My Father Die may boast a bizarrely graceless title, but that’s the least of this revenge saga’s shortcomings, which number in the dozens and conspire to make it an early contender for worst of 2017. Written and directed by Sean Brosnan (son of Pierce), this pointless, affected and rancid piece of Southern-fried bayou pulp concerns […]
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‘Go North’ Proves Not All Y.A. Apocalypses Demand Your Attention
The proliferation (and popularity) of dystopian Y.A. sci-fi movies suggests that today’s youth are fascinated by the potential for apocalypse. Movies like Go North, however, suggest that filmmakers have already run out of inventive ways to dramatize such doomsday scenarios. In Matt Ogens’s snoozy indie, an unidentified calamity has left the world a gone-to-seed junkyard […]
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It’s Aaron Paul’s Turn to Chase After a Mysterious Gone Girl in the Poky Thriller ‘Come and Find Me’
Most like-minded films spend approximately twenty minutes on the same material covered by the entirety of Come and Find Me — a fact that leaves this mystery from writer/director Zack Whedon (brother of Joss) feeling insufferably drawn out. Photographer Claire (Annabelle Wallis) has vanished, and her boyfriend David (Aaron Paul) becomes consumed with tracking her […]
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This Fictionalized Hunt for J.D. Salinger Is Only an Okayish Day for Bananafish
Life and art collide in obvious ways throughout Coming Through the Rye, a sort-of-based-on-a-true-story account of a 1969 boarding-school outcast named Jamie (Alex Wolff) whose love for The Catcher in the Rye compels him to adapt J.D. Salinger’s novel into a play — and then to seek out the author to receive permission to stage […]