Movie Magazine International Blog

By Moira Sullivan Anthony Hopkins has been seen in just about every kind of role but now at 82 comes a part for him which has garnished him another well-deserved academy award nomination for best actor this year. Opposite him is Olivia Coleman as his loyal and devoted daughter also with many acting awards, who must ultimately decide on the quality of her life and his. The film is directed and written by French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller. The Father screened at Sundance , Telluride and Toronto last year and will be released on VOD on March 26. Many of us have experienced caretaking for elderly parents but probably some of the most difficult encounters is when one or both parents begin to lose their memory. The Father succeeds in showing what that looks like on film not as a linear narrative but a fragmented ensemble of merged occurrences just as memory is. Anthony Hopkins is Anthony who we first encounter living with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) in his...

By Moira Sullivan Stray is a documentary made in Istanbul about three dogs who roam the streets and who eventually are taken care of by young Syrian refugee boys. The film is made by the award winning short film documentarian Elizabeth Lo from Hong Kong. She went to Tisch in NYC and received an MFA from Stanford This is her debut feature. Stray is a metaphor that not only fits the dogs but their caretakers as they all live in the streets scrimping for food and shelter. The areas where the dogs roam and the boys live are run down places such as abandoned apartment buildings, streets, beaches, open fields and shops. The film is made with a mobile camera and there are a lot of tracking shots of the dogs angled low to the ground for their heights, It is not a scripted film and there are non-actors so it seems, making it a compelling neorealist film. People in the streets are aware they are being filmed but don’t seem to mind or even to notice or care. The shots of Istanbul are not pret...