Films 3/10 – 3/13/22
by Gary Palmucci | 11th March 2022 | Gary's Corner
As West End Theatre patrons know, we’ve mostly been focused on the various Oscar nominees in our first three weeks of programming. There’s more of that to come — including, next weekend, Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers with Penelope Cruz — but in this letter we’re highlighting a quartet of recent outstanding work from a diverse group of nations.
Three of them were featured in last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, the other a triple award winner at Sundance. From Iran, A Hero by multi-Oscar winning director Asghar Farhadi tells the tale of an Iranian man’s effort, upon his release from prison, to rectify a previous wrong that conversely spirals into a web of painful consequences.
The NY Times’ A.O. Scott wrote, “(Farhadi) makes films with the discipline and insight of a first-rate novelist. A Hero is as anxious and swift as a thriller, with the density and observational acuity of a 19th-century three-decker.”
From Belgium, Playground is set in an elementary school where we witness a 7-year-old girl’s first steps into maturity, in her interactions with both peers and adults. The Times’ Manohla Dargis raved, “This is the first feature from writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing….If you don’t flash on your childhood with at least a few pangs while watching it, you are made of stronger stuff than I am.”
From Kosovo, Hive revisits with striking impact that nation’s tragic late-90s civil war, via a woman’s desperate search for her missing husband years after the conflict. Shortlisted for this year’s Best International Film Oscar category and Sundance winner of Audience, Directing and Grand Jury World Cinema prizes, this is simply one of the year’s best films, period.
And from the US indie scene, director Sean Baker (2017’s Florida Project) delivers Red Rocket, wherein a combustible young man’s return to his (and his ex-wife’s) hardscrabble Texas town invites various kinds of mayhem. Lead actor Simon Rex just copped this year Indie Spirit Award for his go-for-broke performance, and my friend and Deadline.com critic, Todd McCarthy, has written how the movie “feels hand-tooled, made from the ground up, enterprisingly cast and untampered with by executives and marketing types…as creatively pure as a novel by a kid just out of college. May it stay that way for Baker as long as he wants it to.”
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema