According to AARP, 53 million Americans are caregivers for family members dealing with health issues of various kinds. Some of us have been through that experience; many more will face such times. Daniel Lui, a news anchor at MSNBC, had to make major adjustments in...
Movies are the interaction of light and shadow. We watch the way the light moves on the screen and perceive it as something real. But are we really seeing what is there? What do we miss seeing? If we don’t notice the details, have we missed the whole picture? In...
“Nobody surfs the first day. Takes a lifetime.” There are lots of things that take a lifetime. But in Gringa, from directors Marny Eng and E. J. Foerster, change in characters’ lives seems to happen almost overnight. That makes for a film that oversimplifies almost...
“Have you ever loved a person?” In Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Passion, love is treated more as a concept than an experience. It is a mostly (but not exclusively) cerebral examination of what love is and how it fits into our lives. When Kaho and Tomoya announce they are...
“Entropy in on the rise.” Jakob Zapf’s A Handful of Water is a story of sanctuary. Sanctuary is often used to define a place of safety, but its root comes from being a place of holiness. In this film, the place of safety has the kind of life changing affect where we...
“Undoubtedly, the tremendous forces of history will cause the leader to fail to change reality as he wanted, but the leader’s primary obligation is to try to act.” Do leaders actually have the ability to change the world? Or are there so many factors involved that...
“What do two crooks know about raising a family?” A Thousand and One, written and directed by A. V. Rockwell, was honored with the Grand Jury Prize for US Drama at Sundance this year. It watches the development of a mother-son relationship through the years—alongside...
Mallory Wanecque as Lily and Timéo Mahaut as Ryan in a scene from THE WORST ONES. Sometimes filmmaking takes on filmmaking, giving us a look at a little bit of what goes into creating what we see on screen. That is the case in The Worst Ones, from directors Lise Akoka...
“What’s worse than being invisible is being seen as disposable.” Raising a child as a single mother is difficult. It is even more difficult when struggling with addiction. All the World Is Sleeping, directed by Ryan Lacen, is the story of such a woman. But the story...