The Goods: Film Reviews
Valerie Taylor is an Australian marine conservationist, and her story is a pretty compelling one. First a competitive spearfisher, then a Hollywood consultant (including on Jaws!), then a public advocate for shark protection, she is the subject of TONS of archival footage of swimming and interacting with sharks, and now’s our chance to enjoy it all.
The Departed is simultaneously ridiculous and exciting — a potent combination for a watchable movie, but not necessarily a great one.
Chalk at least some of my affection to low expectations and hater spite.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s debut film is a peculiar hybrid of drama and documentary. Haroun, playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself, returns from France to his homeland Chad upon hearing of his mother’s passing. While there, he bemoans a crumbling local cinema and ponders creating a film to capture the spirit of his home nation.
Mercifully short and non-exploitative, Lucile Hadžihalilović‘s debut is claustrophobic and tense and well-crafted. The film’s sense of dread never boils over into outright terror, but it’s nonetheless a fairly haunting little piece.
Scene 1: Three scoundrels wait at a train station at the end of the world.
Lemon starts as an investigation of how actors use performance to filter out their horrible lives before pivoting to a satire about how pitiful it is to live in LA, I guess?
A slice of life drama about poverty in New Orleans, Below Dreams balances naturalist storytelling and audacious visuals to a nearly impressionistic effect.
Chris Columbus’s approach to adapting the generationally important book series is certainly a bit broken as a film qua film.
Esther Kahn is an unusual concoction of genres: both a backstage theater drama and a coming of age tale. And much of the film’s charm comes from the thematic richness blending and juxtaposing those genres and their usual outcomes: