Reviews

This was a delightful film for all its sensitivity, nuance of story development, and how it respects the awareness and intelligence of its audience. Its craft in storytelling starts strong at the get-go with an in medias res delivery. We enter the story in the middle of some specific scenario between three main characters with history between them. Through somewhat exquisite gradations delivered in a plain and straightforward manner, the film reveals increments of who they are with respect to each other, the nature of their inter-connected backgrounds, and what shades of affinity or tension have existed and continue between them. The essential conflicts and struggles are clear, crisp and relatable, made artfully pleasurable by strong and believable performances across the board, including all the minor characters. Sophia Lillis is the emotional anchor of the film, delivering a layered and wholly winsome performance as the sister who needs and fails to get so much.

What a beautiful little film. There is as much silliness here (think fierce teen in hand-to-hand combat with a poshly fashionable matron) as there is genuinely moving storytelling (think teenager anxious about her older sister leaving home). The silliness and the serious storytelling get a special boost and mix from the cast, whose commitments to their characters and to the central drama boldly twist contrasting threads: satire, parody, meta-narrative, adventure, teen angst, kung-fu and genuine human sadness. This is especially true of the central performer, Priya Kansara, who carries the movie as supported by a generous cast. Kansara sparkles with fun. Her timing is impeccable. For the savvy, silly ride that is this film, we're willing to suspend all kinds of belief and play along.

There are things to admire in this film. The cast does a great job. In fact the very fine casting work matches a slate of interesting, differentiated characters developed in the script. However, good horror/suspense films establish some ground that gives us a greater understanding of the source of terror. There's a point to the horror. Here, there's no effort to establish anything like this. At best we have a picture of unsettled spirits from beyond wanting to inflict maximum pain and suffering on living people. That's at best. Even this leaves much to be desired. Why are they unsettled? Why are they motivated to torment people? What is the nature of these spirits from beyond, and what do they really want? The filmmakers don't appear interested to offer any point behind their slick production of stomach-churning gruesomeness. That can work for some films, maybe, but other qualities - camp, humor, smart ironies, a sense of adventure and so forth - usually come into play for something elevating and positively entertaining to occur. This film, on the other hand, is half-baked in this respect. And with so much serious gruesomeness it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But it's worse than that. It plays on themes of suicide, grief, and serious mental illness like schizophrenia. It does so without a sense of responsibility. In a world where terror happens for no reason, serious issues like these are left dangling. The result is like someone poking grotesquely at a wound because nothing else interests them. Unfortunately this film is more diminishing and gross than positively entertaining.

This is a very good film. I haven't looked up the background of the filmmaker but i really do hope she makes more movies. There is a lot of depth and sweetness here, edged gently by the grittiness of tough living and struggles in our world today. But mainly there are many delicate touches of an idiosyncratic, personal vision that reaches your heart and goes about playfully but also doesn't lie about hard things.

This is an excellent movie. I have yet to look up Kitty Green and see what else she has done. But I'm deeply impressed by her artistry with the script, direction and editing of this film. It's a quietly devastating story, told with quietly devastating restraint. Every little detail is pitch perfect. The greater conceit captivates for its unique angle on story craft - a tale of power and abuse from the intimate-yet-marginal perspective of a young assistant to an invisible yet all-intimidating boss with dark patterns of abuse. Her de-valued point of view and his invisibility, with the self-interested complicity of every other employee in the production company, hits you like a body blow. It's a story about everyday human degradations. No one comes out clean. Perhaps that's why this has a relatively low rating on par with Batman vs. Superman, though this film surely has far greater artistry, thoughtfulness and meaning. It's unsettling partly because it's so well crafted, and partly because the dark reality behind this film is all too recognizable.

There must have been an online campaign against this film that herded a large number of people to tear it down based on superficial, misleading, or virtue-signaling talking points. For those who are uncomfortable with the sexualized behavior of the young characters in this film, how many of you watched the whole thing? And for the smaller percentage of those who did watch it all, how many engaged it with a mind to understand? Clearly this movie - made by and about women of color - is a critique of and warning against the ways by which youth are influenced by a hyper-sexualizing, Western mass media culture. The protagonist is on the cusp of adolescence and struggles to find her way through a confusing and confused world of pre-teens who flaunt and style themselves after any number of music videos that glamorize the sexualization and objectification of women. This happens. And yes, it's problematic. And - spoiler alert! - the film is all about that problem. Young girls are influenced by glamorous emblems of sex from mass media. And this film - in very sympathetically human ways - brings a critical lens to the issue, going so far as to point out how social institutions themselves (ie, the producers of the dance competition) actively encourage and reward the programming of sexualized behavior.

If anything is 'uncomfortable' here, it's the fact that the hysterics who have risen against this movie don't perceive (what we might imagine is) their alignment with the clear message of the film: that there are serious issues with young girls in our society feeling pressured to act older and more sexual than they can understand. Amy, the young immigrant from Senegal, suffers from these pressures. Fortunately she learns to rise above them to reach her own graceful transformation. The movie communicates its moral clearly with pathos, sympathy and artful sensitivity.

This film isn't controversial. The uncomprehending campaign against it is the real controversy.

Sand Storm may not be a masterpiece of world cinema. Perhaps more distinctive art films claim their place on that stage. This movie takes a naturalistic approach to its story, depicting development in a straightforward way without auteur splashes. It offers a big dose of realism about a tough subject and tough circumstances. Perhaps that doesn't appeal to a more casual audience.

But this is absolutely a perfect movie. How is it perfect? First of all, every moment, every scene, every line of dialogue propels the story forward in a meaningful, forceful, convincing, and deeply human way. Deeply human? Yes. The characters are thoroughly human and complex, fully imagined and developed, both in the writing and the excellent performances. The story itself is constructed in a highly economical, brilliant way. For example, the reversal in dynamism between 'stern mother' and 'indulgent father' is not only interesting in terms of development; those shifts are utterly convincing as they arise organically from dynamics internal to the story and to the (highly difficult) circumstances each character finds her or himself in. It's impressive to witness the artistry of these shifts, how well though out, convincing, and how inspired it all is. The major characters are all in deep conflict with each other, and enough is given to us to understand and sympathize with each of their positions. That's uncommon in stories, in any story, whether novels or movies. This is an admirable achievement.

The climactic moment, the moment of momentous decision for the daughter Layla, this is fantastic: she drives the family truck as her means of breaking away from her father's demands, but it is precisely in driving this truck where we first saw how her father fostered her independence and self-sufficiency in ways unseemly for a young woman in their village society. The 'vehicle' by which he helped give her independence of spirit is the very vehicle by which she flees his (or his society's) oppression. Wow.

While it's not showy, it's a deeply inspired film, full of artistry and moving, human meaning.

The greatest asset this film has recommending it is a wonderfully dated synth score that seems to distill into one bubbling drink all the Casio-bred silliness of the 1980s. Thank you, Francis Monkman. The hair and clothes of all characters are nearly as deserving of praise. Beyond that, this film is replete with ludicrous editing and directorial choices. The script itself isn't so objectionable. On the other hand, the director John McKenzie and/or the editor Mike Taylor shaped the film with enough clumsiness or plain nincompooperie to make it all, well, rather entertaining. But a film I was laughing at more than anything else won't garner many points with me.

This is a rather ambitious project for Hou to have taken on. The exact nature or intent of that project might be debatable. But it certainly takes love and history as its subjects. In seeing love portrayed between characters in three different time periods, we are given uniquely colored views of those respective periods. These views are perhaps a bit ready-made for each year: a nostalgic sense of innocence for 1966; a suggestive, ironic critique of brothel life in 1911; cool urban malaise in 2005. The treatments of these periods, however, are simply made eloquent and commanding by Hou's close attention to his characters and their laconic yearnings. As often happens with tripartite films, this one suffers from unevenness. The delightfully straightforward and simple tale of the first story makes the third segment seem slightly muddled and encumbered by comparison. But the overall conceit of the film, and the poetry that often arises from it, makes this latest offering of Hou's well worth the time.

In short, it's a drug movie. For over half of the film, there's little interest beyond the overcharged rants and paranoid banter of Downey Jr.'s and Harrelson's drugged out characters. With too little direction toward any real story development for the bulk of the movie, even these comic episodes, the greatest asset here, begin to feel something like a formless goo. It's like hanging around junkies without getting high yourself. A little amusing, a little tedious.

As a matter of physical and mental relief, you're quite happy to get the twists near the end (ah, so this is the story!), but at the same time you feel cheated for having had to wait so long to get there.

It's hard to feel gratified by a story the only ambition of which is to show how hard an impoverished family suffers. And suffers. And suffers. For some reason, the characters aren't allowed to learn and grow. From the perspective of basic storytelling, it seems a terrible mistake, narrowly conceived. The "story" here might only make sense if it's a kind of prelude or first chapter to what will unfold in the succeeding parts of the trilogy. But after the drudgery of this first one, I'm not inclined to look further.

But for all that, the cinematography and other filmic qualities are of good quality. Too bad Ray couldn't have put his skills to a more fully developed and insightful script.

The only thing verging on "extraordinary" in the first season of this TV drama is the degree to which it stretches our patience with the cliché of a mentally retarded character gifted with an inexplicable omniscience about every goings on in the hospital, supernatural or otherwise. His sometimes aphoristic narrative guidance is as gratuitous as it is unavoidable in this show. This was only the most trying of the devices that crop up. Fortunately, there are some well-crafted bits of dialogue and character development. Ernst-Hugo Jaregard in particular shines in the role of Helmer, a pompous, curmudgeonly surgeon from Sweden with an almost superhuman disdain for the Danes in his midst.

However, the series is too heavily marred by a simplistic notion of character (or caricature), plot developments that are often too overblown to be taken at all seriously, and finally a miserly attitude in storytelling evident through a too-incremental disclosure of details that form the mystery of the central ghost story. The show is most surprising in how little, ultimately, it delivers.

There's just a lot of hot air blowing around, and one can't help but suspect this is to conceal the skimpiness that truly rests in the heart of The Kingdom. I did laugh at several well-keyed moments, but I was never in suspense, and all too often I simply sat yawning.

I followed the line of good reviews and a high IMDb rating to this flick and feel I've been misled by the readership here. This story about one alcoholic's weekend binge merits a few props as it touches on the psychology of an ambitious would-be writer who never was. However, the core of this character study is marred fatally by overwrought dialogue, half-baked character development, a bland story arc, and a melodramatic Theramin-saturated score that would have fit more comfortably in a sci-fi shocker about nuclear swamp mutants than a closely studied psychological drama. The film shines most as the protagonist's brother, played subtly and richly by Phillip Terry, appears alternately as a care-taker either fed up and through with it all or empathetic enough to lie valiantly in order to cover up his brother's shame. Unfortunately, this performance gets little screen time. For the most part we are forced to trudge through a miserable weekend with our protagonist as if it were a rote lesson in "Alcoholism and its Downward Spiral 101." To cap it all off, we get in the end a reversal as facile, unconvincing, and dissatisfying as Tofurkey for a Thanksgiving dinner.