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).
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.
For a first film, Djukić has made a strikingly professional one. The film was a big prize winner at the Berlin and Tribeca film festivals and is Slovenia’s official Oscar entry for Best International Feature.
Mamdani may be young and an idealist, but he is also a skilled, charismatic politician who ran a brilliant campaign and has presented himself as a new type of leftist.
The film unfolds in a striking rural mountain setting in Colorado, where a wildfire has burned and disfigured a large portion of the landscape and destroyed the ranch of the film’s central character.
Johanne feels that her life lacks solidity and she is merely drifting. The arrival of the teacher gives her someone to obsess about—in her mind, the intimate connection she is seeking.
I began at Rusk Rehab barely able to move more than a step or two and ended after a week by walking four city blocks, though my feet gave in at the end of my walk.
As buyers and renters look for places to live, many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs that were once working- and lower-middle-class become more expensive and gentrified.
Lojkine’s film follows a Guinean food-delivery driver (Abou Sangare, striking and subtle in his first screen role) through his harried and exhausting job, racing long distances in bike lanes past heavy Paris traffic to deliver meals and then struggling to catch the last bus to the refugee shelter where he sleeps.
The London parks I have wandered about offer a vaster openness to a green world, many more places to find tranquility, a relatively crime-free environment, and a greater feeling of being cut off from the city’s activity.
The film is skillfully directed, capturing the volatility and violence that surrounded the Dreyfus affair and the deeply divided political world of late-19th-century Paris, especially the antisemitism that seemed to permeate most of the French from top to bottom.
A few days ago, as I entered the café, I ran into the two conscientious, caring managers (who have always been concerned about my welfare) pushing out an aggressive homeless man who has been threatening them for a long time while stealing petty cash.
Winterbottom is always a competent director, no matter what subject he pursues, so while he doesn’t quite illuminate the politics of the tragic situation he depicts, there is nothing crude about the rendering.
