Leonard Quart is Professor Emeritus of Cinema — CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; Columnist for Berkshire Eagle; and co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 —4th Edition (Praeger).
The delicate, quiet, unaffected "Days and Nights in the Forest" follows four worldly, middle-class men from Calcutta on holiday together in the countryside, where the unfamiliar environment reveals uneasy truths about each of them.
It is the last days of World War II, with Berlin about to fall. We see the world through the eyes of a sensitive, thoughtful 12-year-old boy, Nanning, whose mother and father are committed Nazis and who still wears his Hitler Youth uniform.
The film focuses completely on Floria (Leonie Benesch), a single-mom nurse who works under intense pressure to handle an overload of patients. She is compassionate and conscientious but also capable of making mistakes and losing control with one patient.
Despite its flaws, Carmen Maura as the central figure is able to carry the film and make it much more than a sentimental, heartwarming work about a feisty old woman.
I feel it imperative to write something so I can become more than a passive observer railing impotently at my television, watching government-propagated lawlessness savage a city and its population.
The film reinterprets a real act of protest by Sasha Skochilenko, a young Russian artist who tried to call attention to Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine.
It is not quite a happy ending, but it feels slightly schematic. The whole film is more schematic than most of the Dardennes’ oeuvre, and given that it has four major characters, we learn about their situations but not enough about who they are.
A new film, "SHTTL," (the missing “e” is meant to represent the absence brought about by the Holocaust) offers a fresh take on the Holocaust, depicting the Jewish Eastern European world on the day it began to be destroyed.
It is a paper that cannot be skimmed, and it usually takes me more than an hour to read it, and that is with my skipping sections I have little interest in.
