Debra Granik’s new film, “Leave No Trace,” adapted from the 2009 novel, My Abandonment by Peter Rock, combines elements of “Winter’s Bone” and “Stray Dog,” the young girl off the grid, the troubled veteran living with PTSD. “Leave No Trace” is, at times, heartbreaking, but it’s also filled with glimpses of almost casual human kindness,…Continue readingLeave No Trace
Category: Drama
Sebastián Lelio’s Oscar-nominated film A Fantastic Woman is a sublime study in the exalted ordeal of grief. It is also as gripping as any procedural crime thriller, and cops and police doctors do play a role. I went into a kind of alert trance watching this – in tandem with the heroine’s own weightless alienation…Continue readingA Fantastic Woman
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI is a darkly comic drama from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh (IN BRUGES). After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William…Continue readingThree Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Deep in the heart of New York’s ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community, Menashe–a kind, hapless grocery store clerk–struggles to make ends meet and responsibly parent his young son, Rieven, following his wife Leah’s death. Tradition prohibits Menashe from raising his son alone, so Rieven’s strict uncle adopts him, leaving Menashe heartbroken. Meanwhile, though Menashe seems to…Continue readingMenashe
In LOVELESS, Zhenya and Boris are going through a vicious divorce marked by resentment, frustration and recriminations. Already embarking on new lives, each with a new partner, they are impatient to start again, to turn the page – even if it means threatening to abandon their 12-year-old son Alyosha. Until, after witnessing one of their…Continue readingLoveless
Franco-Senegalese film-maker Alain Gomis has created a film portrait in an ambient social-realist style, showing us a woman called Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu): a single mum of a tearaway teen boy Samo (Gaetan Claudia), for whom she must stay strong. She is scratching a living with her music, evidently bruised and humbled by the…Continue readingFélicité
This sounds like a fab film, I hope everyone can make it this month! “The firecracker story of a six-year-old girl, her friends and single mother in a scuffed motel outside Walt Disney World in Orlando.” – Danny Leigh, The Guardian. June 29th, 7.30 at the Hallhill Sports centre in Dunbar, show starts promptly at…Continue readingThe Florida Project
Forced to leave their apartment due to a dangerous construction project in a neighboring building, a young Iranian couple moves to the center of Tehran where they become embroiled in a life-altering situation involving the previous tenant. The director Asghar Farhadi won his second Oscar in a row for this film ( the first was…Continue readingThe Salesman
“In these uncertain times, we need storytellers who can turn a tale of conflict and hardship into a symphony of love and friendship that endures through all the pain. I doubt that I will see a better film than ‘Moonlight’ this year.” Our first film of 2018 is Moonlight “A coming-of-age story about…Continue readingMoonlight
This painful, complex, beautifully acted and inexpressibly sad drama from Ira Sachs is about something that looms large in real life, but never usually gets acknowledged in the movies in any but the vaguest way – banal, undignified embarrassment over money, and the deadly serious damage this causes. This film is very different from the general run…Continue readingLittle Men