Film

Sundance Film Festival Review: “Beyond Utopia” — Escape (for Some) from North Korea 

February 3, 2023
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Beyond Utopia is a grim reminder that, against growing odds, people keep leaving North Korea, or try to. It may be a while before another family agrees to film the journey out.

Sundance Film Festival 2023 Dispatch #2: Retreating

January 31, 2023
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My second crop of Sundance screenings features three films that are all about women who, on some level, retreat from certain aspects of their lives: their pasts, their trauma, their public persona.

Sundance Film Festival Review: “Kim’s Video” — Lost and Found?

January 30, 2023
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Kim’s Video is quixotic in a nutty way — in an old Indie style — that is more refreshing than it is nostalgic.

Film Review: “Infinity Pool” — Consumers Consuming Themselves

January 28, 2023
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In Infinity Pool, people who are dead inside essentially play with their own corpses as shiny, new toys. The savagery of that idea is, simply, delicious.

Sundance Film Festival 2023 Dispatch #1 — Girls Just Wanna

January 28, 2023
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The three films I selected to start my 2023 Sundance journey were very different from one another, but they shared one common theme: girlhood.

The Boston Festival of Films from Iran returns to the MFA — Beneath The Veil

January 25, 2023
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These films provide a glimpse into the workings of a culture and society increasingly cut off from the rest of the world as well as a taste of a cinema that had once been among the world’s greatest and which may one day be again.

Film Review: “Alice, Darling” — Toxic Romance

January 20, 2023
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Alice, Darling is a potent reminder to women that they should trust their instincts — and rely on their friends.

Doc Talk: Making Reparations, Restoring a Reputation, Redrawing Identities

January 19, 2023
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Reviews of the cogent and well-crafted The Big Payback, the comprehensive if conventional Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space, and No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, which expertly balances whimsy and gravity, though the version of the film shown by PBS has been heavily censored.

Book Review: “Run Towards the Danger” — Grappling With Memories of Trauma

January 18, 2023
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Sarah Polley’s essay on sexual assault by itself is worth the price of the book, essential reading for anyone interested in the physical and psychological after-effects of violence against women.

Film Review: “M3GAN” — Child’s Slay

January 14, 2023
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M3GAN is a movie algorithmically generated to spawn as many memes about itself as possible before undiscerning viewers realize what they’re watching is a reworked Black Mirror draft.

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