Category: Sara Merican
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Film Review: The Fabelmans
★★☆☆☆ Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans had all the ingredients to ascend as cinema’s new darling. Yet, as this semi-autobiographical film plods on, there is an unshakeable sense that in reaching for the stars, The Fabelmans instead lands somewhere more mediocre and disappointing.
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Film Review: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
★★★★☆ Premiering at SXSW back in March, Jed Rothstein‘s documentary narrates WeWork’s and its co-founder Adam Neumann’s complex journeys through the worlds of real estate, co-working and technology. Capturing Neumann’s fall from grace, this film illuminates some of the most hard-hitting professional and social anxieties of our age. Founded in 2010, the company’s name, made…
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Film Review: Monsoon
★★★★☆ Monsoon is the elegant, delicately-paced second feature from director Hong Khaou, starring Henry Golding as Kit, a British Vietnamese man returning to Ho Chi Minh for the first time in more than 30 years to scatter his parents’ ashes. Tracing ambivalent pasts and ambiguous futures, Monsoon grows into a brooding portrait of immigrant displacement…
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Interview: Hong Khaou, dir. Monsoon
This sophomore effort from Hong Khaou stars Henry Golding as Kit, a British Vietnamese man returning to his birth-land for the first time to scatter his parents’ ashes. Monsoon sketches the geographical and emotional contours of such a journey, steering between the cacophonous traffic of Ho Chi Minh and the restless, internal tides of memory…
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Film Review: Proxima
★★★★☆ Alice Winocour’s Proxima follows French astronaut Sarah Loreau as she trains for a year-long space mission, with young daughter Stella in tow. It’s a fiery mix of ambition, mother-daughter love, female empowerment and childhood dreams – the gravities of each masterfully held together in the film, like planets in the canvas of space, revolving…
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Film Review: Freedom Fields
★★★★☆ Freedom Fields is both a love letter to the sport and a sharp critique of post-revolution Libya – penned with hope, but also inked with frustration. In spite of dreams deferred and hopes postponed, a football team lives out their love for the game, even as the field becomes a battleground where the religious,…
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Film Review: Amazing Grace
★★★★☆ Based on the 1972 Grammy award-winning album of the same name, Amazing Grace is a moving, long-awaited celebration of the late Aretha Franklin. There are no grand gestures of narrative here, but just a simple, delightful montage of Franklin’s music and the community that gathers to sing and rejoice with her. Using never-before-seen raw…
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Berlin 2019: Varda by Agnès review
★★★★☆ Varda by Agnès contains the best parts of Agnès Varda: work, wit and wisdom. Though it does not reach the heights of her gloriously charming last film, Faces Places, it is still a cathartic, bittersweet swansong from one of cinema’s most endearing and adored auteurs. The film begins most unusually. The title appears, and…
