Betsy Sherman
This piquantly enjoyable docufiction emphasizes how movie spectatorship encourages empathy and understanding.
Film scholars, programmers, and the many filmmakers influenced by Naruse Miko value him as having crafted well-rounded portraits of women and their lives across decades of Japanese cultural changes.
The Independent Film Festival Boston has been a major showcase for short films from New England and beyond. Here’s a roundup of one of this year’s programs, “Shorts Dartmouth: Narrative” (collections are named after streets in the Back Bay). There’s not a weak one in the five-film bunch.
Planet’s holdings include nearly 20,000 film prints, as well as ephemera such as posters, scripts, and film magazines.
Tracie Laymon’s comic drama about the serendipitous connection between a 25-year-old woman whose sense of self is fraying and a man stymied by loss is both entertaining and profound.
Biographer Robert S. Bader is an engaging writer and meticulous researcher. And handy here, he’s able to be tactful, but not forgiving, when describing lousy human behavior.
If “La Chimera” is a bit harder to penetrate than the director-writer’s previous works, it boasts some captivating passages and raises pertinent questions about art, history, globalism, and national identity.
In the spirit of revisiting this unsung indie classic, here’s an interview the critic did with director Nancy Savoca in 1993, when Household Saints was part of the Boston Film Festival.
Writer-director Sean Durkin’s engrossing biopic goes a far piece toward showing the dark side of this tale of patriarchal authority and its abuse under the cover of an all-American, clean-living, unassailable family of heroes.
Film Review: “Made in New Jersey” — A Fabulous Trip in the Cinematic Way-Back Machine
This journey in the way-back machine contains many delights, some staged and some as part of the photographic record of America from 100-plus years ago.
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