Movie Magazine International Blog

By Moira Jean Sullivan I have seen many Roy Andersson films through the years. His latest About Endlessness (2019) which won the best director award in Venice that year, is a good term to describe all of his previous films of the last years. Though they are different in themes, they are always the same, a still mise en scene - composition of the frame. There is no camera action but one long take and Andersson has been working this way since 2000. You are forced to concentrate on what is within the scene, and because of the stillness, the endlessness, you have the opportunity to focus on every detail. This is different from nearly all films, and there is probably only one filmmaker in the world that does this: Roy Andersson. He perfected this style by making commercials for years, which were usually one take scenes, and he took this style to feature film. The first one he made won the Palme d’Or in 2000 – Songs from the Second Floor. The colors in his films are drab, the dec...

By Moira Jean Sullivan Best Summer Ever is a spirited high school musical directed by Michael Parks Randa and Lauren Smitelli. It is filmed in Vermont and produced by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Amy Brenneman and Jamie Lee Curtis. Only Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard have speaking roles in the film and play a TV producer and a cameraman. Also in the film is Benjamin Bratt as the father of one of the high school girls. Many of the actors are mentally or physically challenged and the way the film is edited and shot is that they are incorporated in the film with equal or correspondingly equal abilities with everyone. Everyone has amazing talent whether they are in wheel chairs, or have artificial limbs, or speech impediments or are able bodied. The story is about Sage (Shannon DeVido), a young woman in a wheelchair that falls in love at a summer camp with a dancer , Tony (Rickey Alexander Wilson Jr). The ambitious and scheming Madeline Rhodes (MuM...

By Moira Jean Sullivan French Exit is an Irish/Canadian/US coproduction from 2020 playing at the Landmark Theaters. It is directed by Azazel Jacobs and based on a novel by Patrick deWitt. The fact that Michelle Pfieffer is in the film is the real pull and appeal of this independent production and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Frances Price, a Manhattan upper class widow whose husband has left her without any financial security. She has to discretely sell off the furniture and valuables in the apartment to survive and move with her 24-year-old son Malcolm (Lukas Hedges). Pieces do fall into place in her early 60’s and she is lent Joan’s empty apartment in Paris for a getaway. The assorted characters in the film that back up the story accompany the largess of Pfeiffer and are admirable co-players together with Hedges as her deadpan son Malcolm. After passage by ocean liner, Frances and Malcolm arrive and for a moment the relationship with a young ...

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...

By Moira Sullivan The French drama Deux or Two of Us in English features two exceptional and world class veteran actresses, Barbara Sukowa as Nina and Martine Chevallier as Madeleine in a story about a long term relationship that they keep hidden from friends and family. Directed and written by FILIPPO MENEGHETTI they are next door neighbors but they have been together for over 20 years. At Madeline’s birthday party, Nina is conspicuously absent but at that dinner Madeline is going to tell her daughter Anne LÉA DRUCKER , her son and grandson that she is going to sell her apartment and move to Italy with Nina. Madeline is a widower and her son is upset that she didn’t love him and moved on so quickly. But she was in love with another woman who was the love of her life. As she starts to speak at the birthday party she becomes inhibited for after two decades of silence it is hard to form words. She had promised Nina she would tell her family a...

   By Moira Sullivan There were several excellent documentaries at the  Frameline44  film festival that ended in September that are about LGBT culture. The importance of this festival for profiling new films that concern the lives of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders was certainly felt this year with these excellent films.   Cured (see clip above) is a new film directed by Patrick Sammon and Bennet Singer about    the American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. There was so much involved in this decision and the filmmakers take us on a journey to the beginnings of this important recall. The film is brilliantly edited to make this historical period come to life. Ahead of the Curve This documentary concerns the history of  Curve magazine, a thriving, first glossy magazine about lesbians. The    film chronicles founder Franco Stevens and how her persistence kep...

By Monica Sullivan Ask Dr. Ruth is a strange hybrid of a movie, rather like Dr. Ruth herself.  It has an intriguing introduction: an animated sequence that suggested what young Ruth’s life was like as a child and an adolescent.  There is also footage of the town where she grew up before the Nazis took over and decimated her family.  Ruth was among a group of children who escaped the fate of their families.  The rest of the movie shows how Ruth eventually found true love, plus fame and fortune and all the rest of that stuff as a sex therapist.  Dr. Ruth fans will love it, others will be indifferent to it.  Anne Frank fans will dig in for their umpteenth reading of “The Diary of a Young Girl”.  One of the members of Movie Magazine met Dr. Ruth and thought she was weird.  That comes through in this documentary.  You can see it in the reactions of talk show hosts and their guests. © 2016 - Monica Sullivan - Air Date: 05/01/19 Movie Magazine ...

By Moira Sullivan The 44th Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco went virtual this year from September 17–27, 2020. It was a record breaking event with 75 films screened online. During the pandemic I am interested in seeing high quality features that are thought provoking and visionary. Two films were exceptional at this year’s Frameline: The Goddess of Fortune from Italy directed by Ferzan Özpetek and Forgotten Roads from Chile directed by Nicol Ruiz Benavides. The Goddess of Fortune is a multi character well crafted film with a wonderful ensemble of vocalists for the soundtrack. Two gay men Arturo, (Stefano Accorsi) and Alesandro (Edoardo Leo) on the verge of a breakup, receive a visit from a mutual friend. She is going to the hospital for tests and wants to leave her two children with them. It turns out the relationship is complicated since they all three were sexually involved in the past and one of her children may have been fathered byAlesandro. The film set design an...

By Monica Sullivan “Mike Wallace is Here” tells the story of the “60 minutes” star who spent most of his career commenting on and analyzing the news.  News was his life, as it would be for his son Chris, 71.  Mike Wallace began his television career in 1949 with the police drama “Stand By For Crime” as Lieutenant Anthony Kidd.  That same year he was master of ceremonies on “Majority Rules” a quiz show which lasted two years.  In 1951 he was a moderator on “Guess Again” another quiz show and that same year he was a co host on “All About the Town” which lasted until 1952.  He was also a panelist in “What’s in a Word” in 1952.  Then he became the emcee on “Who’s the Boss” as well as being the emcee on “The Big Surprise.”  “The Mike Wallace” interviews followed in 1957 and 1958, then he moved on to “Who Pays” in 1959, “Biography from 1961-1964 and then many years of “60 Minutes”.   My problem with the career of Mike Wallace is that most of these ...