REVIEW: Period. End of Sentence. [2018]

This is something only God knows. The patriarchy in India is real. I went there a few years ago for a week with a friend of mine—a trip she organized and therefore had all our local reservations under her name. Regardless of whether they knew hers was a woman’s name or not, you can’t diminish the fact that almost every single person we met from tour guides to drivers to hotel employees made the assumption to come to me and call me by her name. It didn’t matter when we…

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REVIEW: Black Sheep [2018]

That could have been one of you guys. You hear it often: “Just fit in.” Parents say it to their children while friends wield peer pressure for similar goals. But those sentiments move beyond words when it comes to a world so ingrained with racism that some are deluded enough to believe it doesn’t exist. Actions begin portraying this mantra as a byproduct of those who deem to call others inferior. Racism at its core is a philosophy wherein a people demean “others” via violent, political, and/or psychological actions simply…

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REVIEW: Fauve [2018]

First one to laugh is dead. Youthful thoughts of immortality have a way of getting children into trouble as well as teaching them lessons able to scar them for life. For Tyler (Félix Grenier) and Benjamin (Alexandre Perreault) it’s a seemingly innocent game of one-upmanship wherein an indefinable state of superiority earns each a point on their way to a winning total of six. So if one feigns an injury and the other is gullible (read compassionate) enough to help, the trickster adds to his total. If one is in…

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REVIEW: End Game [2018]

I feel better more than I feel bad. Two-time Oscar winner Rob Epstein and directing partner Jeffrey Friedman‘s short End Game bills itself as an intimate document of medical practitioners on the cutting edge of palliative care. Despite my believing the doctors onscreen are exactly that via trust, the film as presented doesn’t do this thesis justice. Rather than focus upon these men and women (the head of the Zen Hospice Project is allowed a brief interview to share his own brush with death) or the new wave treatments they’re…

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REVIEW: A Night at the Garden [2017]

You all have heard of me. On February 20, 1939, Fritz Kuhn—a naturalized American citizen of German heritage who would later be deported—held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden under the auspices of “pro-America” sentiments for Gentile-Americans looking to escape the Jewish-led media and Jewish Moscow-directed domination of labor unions. Twenty thousand white men and women attended with arms raised in Adolf Hitler’s salute towards this German American Bund leader against a backdrop of George Washington next to swastikas, stars, and stripes. Children cheered as twenty-plus police officers accosted…

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REVIEW: Marguerite [2017]

I won’t live forever, you know. Stereotyping is proven real when an elderly Marguerite (Béatrice Picard) asks her nurse Rachel (Sandrine Bisson) if the person she was talking to on the phone was her boyfriend only to hear, “My girlfriend” instead. The woman’s face drops in surprise with an, “Oh” before finding a smile and the kindness to ask her name. We wonder if things will now change between them, assuming a senior citizen wearing a crucifix might not “approve” of such behavior. How will Marguerite react the next time…

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REVIEW: Detainment [2018]

Do you know what truth is? Two ten-year old boys were placed into police custody in 1993 on suspicion of kidnapping and murdering the not-yet three-year old James Bulger in Merseyside, England. They were interrogated separately with parents present about their whereabouts on that fateful day and whether or not they were guilty of the crime. It’s unfathomable to believe children so young could have done what they did, but it’s even harder to comprehend them lying about it when the truth starts to spill out. These interviews were recorded…

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REVIEW: Lifeboat [2018]

The heart is where your real thinking comes. Director Skye Fitzgerald‘s Lifeboat is the latest “human face” documentary to get an Oscar nomination. What might set it apart from others—for better or worse—is that it seeks to highlight the face of the man doing the saving as a beacon of hope more than the victims as byproducts of our collective failure as a species. His name is Jon Castle and he’s without a doubt a true hero. He also died this past year (the film’s rescues occurred in 2016) and…

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REVIEW: Madre [Mother] [2017]

Why hasn’t he come back? A woman (Marta Nieto‘s Marta) and her mother (Blanca Apilánez) arrive at the former’s apartment talking about men. Marta speaks about friends, her mother leans into romanticism when the subject of a handsome gentleman comes up, and some jealousy arrives when it’s explained that he’s already attached to someone else. The stakes are thus very low at the start of Rodrigo Sorogoyen‘s short film Madre [Mother]—innocuous, every day fodder to create conflict where none exists as a means for intrigue. We are thus allowed to…

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REVIEW: Lost + Found [2018]

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Why shouldn’t Satan (Jennifer Plotzke) be given a starring role in the telling of Paradise? God allowed her to wreak havoc on mankind by seducing Eve (Pia Haddad) with an apple of knowledge. He left us behind as silly creatures lost in the throes of love without a conscious desire for more. With evil came understanding. With pain came meaning to joy. We wouldn’t be what we are for worse or better without Satan’s hand and thus maybe we should give…

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REVIEW: ’63 Boycott [2018]

Because today is Freedom Day. One of Kartemquin Films founders (a Chicago-based production studio of documentary films that’s found itself in the Oscar conversation once again with the feature Minding the Gap and this short) was at the school boycott coined “Freedom Day” in 1963 filming the march as a twenty one year old, three years before joining Jerry Temaner and Stan Karter to build the company. It’s only right then that Gordon Quinn would witness the continuation of those injustices fought against by Black citizens still creating a chokehold…

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