Movie Review: Mustang

Movie Review: Mustang

Mustang (2015), directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, is a study in the unbridled power of girlhood. Five sisters, strong, powerful, wild, tender, and bonded closely to one another, are caught at the precipice of womanhood. Their grandmother and uncle attempt to shove them into adulthood (or, rather, lock them up and give the key to adulthood away to their future husbands).

The results are sad, inspiring, tragic, endearing, and unexpected.

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Movie Review: Sweet Bean

Movie Review: Sweet Bean

Sweet Bean (2015), directed by Naomi Kawase, is one of the most aesthetically pleasing films I’ve seen in the past few years. It’s a slow stroll through cherry blossom season, with each character and storyline finding their own rhythm and pace.

Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase) opens the movie with a slow, lumbering gait. He practically drags the viewer into work with him. Tokue (Kirin Kirie) hobbles into Sentaro’s pancake shack (more on this later) in a somewhat starstruck manner. She marvels at the trees, the wind, the possibility of working for Sentaro, and the viewer is easily pulled alongside her for the rest of the film. Wakana (Kyara Uchida) is a young teenager who visits the dorayaki shop Sentaro runs and gently brings all of the characters together.

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Movie Review: Thunderheart

Movie Review: Thunderheart

Thunderheart (1992), starring Val Kilmer, Graham Greene (the actor, not the author), and Sam Shepard is an older film which could and should still resonate today. Fred Ward, Sheila Tousey, Ted Thin Elk, and John Trudell also star in the movie, creating an excellent ensemble where allegiances and alliances shift constantly before the viewer’s eyes.

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Movie Review: Albert Nobbs

Movie Review: Albert Nobbs

I hate to write this, but Albert Nobbs was a flop. Every bit of it: plot, characters, acting, you name it.

First and foremost, Glenn Close played Glenn Close in this movie. I didn’t see a character, a man or even a woman masquerading as a man, the entire point of the film. I saw Glenn Close on screen, with faint hints of Sarah Cooper, Close’s character from The Big Chill. The voice was clearly a woman’s/faux-man’s voice and couldn’t fool anybody. Close’s hair was good, in only that the short cut really looked like her own hair, which it wasn’t. But Close’s feminine lips, eyes and smile lines thoroughly overshadowed the Nobbs character.

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Movie Review: Iron Lady

Movie Review: Iron Lady

I’ll really go see anything with Merryl Streep in it these days. She’s her own indomitable iron lady on the silver screen, taking on characters and roles that, once she touches them, I couldn’t imagine anyone else even trying. Her latest film, Iron Lady, has her portraying British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

I read mixed reviews of the film and wasn’t sure what I was in for with this 105 minute movie, but I was not disappointed. The film is set in the supposed present, with a Thatcher that totters, is still speaking to her dead husband and who is flashing back on a lifetime of intense politics juxtaposed, unfortunately, with her current life indoors under close supervision of family, caretakers and doctors.

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Movie Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Movie Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar Shell is a precocious boy who lost his father in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. But to find the lock to a discovered key his father left behind, Oskar must overcome his anxieties about trains, planes, buses, bridges, loud noises, tall buildings and strangers.

Thomas Horn stars as Oskar, the boy compelled to travel all over New York City to salvage some connection to his dead father, played by Tom Hanks, while growing distant from his mother, played by Sandra Bullock, and sometimes in the company of an odd, silent older man, played wonderfully by Max von Sydow.

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