Most of Emanuela Rossi’s Darkness (Buio) takes place within a house with all the doors and windows boarded up. But the title refers to a much more malevolent darkness. It is not the absence of light that makes this picture so dark, but the ever-growing realization...
We are accustomed to stories of love and marriage. We almost always think about those two things in that order: first love, then marriage. Return to Dust, from writer/director Li Ruijun, gives us an alternative to the relationship of those two concepts. In rural...
The title card that opens Rodrigo Cortés’s Love Gets a Room, gives us the setting of the story (Warsaw in January 1942) and the context of the Warsaw ghetto filled with 400,000 Jews with suffering and inevitable death everywhere. The title card ends with the...
Scarlet (L’envol) is something of an international mash-up. Italian director Pietro Marcello has very loosely adapted a novel (Scarlet Sails) by Soviet writer Alexander Grin into a story of French village life in the interbellum years. As the film opens, Raphaël is...
In the Dusk, from director Sharunas Baras, takes us back to a nearly forgotten point in history, post-war Lithuania. Lithuania, which became a nation briefly in 1918, was occupied and controlled by the Soviet Union and Nazis through most of the twentieth century. Now,...
AT&T’s Untold Stories program is a partnership between AT&T and Tribeca Film Festival and Tribeca Film Institute to develop underrepresented content providers. The wnner of the AT&T Untold Stories Grand Prize at the 2021 Tribeca festival was Nardeep...
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...