Avi Lewis’ documentary This Changes Everything looks at the narrative for civilization that allowed climate change to happen. Without preaching, the film takes a look at grassroots movements that are helping to mitigate climate change.
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Nasty Baby is a half-baked bougie satire
The film gleefully sends up bourgeois attitudes as ridiculous before suggesting they’re harmful. Yet we’re not meant to dislike the characters causing harm. It’s an interesting premise that hasn’t been fully fleshed out. Likewise, Silva’s choice to shoot the film handheld, in all its clumsiness, prevents the film from ever being a beautiful work of art. It’s an aesthetic designed to be cheap and adaptable to an improvised script, but it doesn’t allow for much formal rigour. It lulls us into a kind of complacency, setting up a story of middle-class liberalism, before subverting the genre’s expectations.
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words at MVFF 38
“Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words” is a loving tribute to the late, great Swedish actress told almost entirely from her perspective. Bergman brought her 16mm camera with her everywhere, and the years of footage she accumulated form the majority of the film’s images. Similarly, director Stig Björkman uses Bergman’s recorded interviews and letters to friends, read by Alicia Vikander, to narrate the film. Starting with Bergman’s childhood, most of which was spent with her father as her mother died when Bergman was still young, and ending with her final film project, Björkman gives a straightforward account of Bergman’s life, in chronological order.
Photograph 51: In praise of difficult women
“Photograph 51” suggests that sexism kept Franklin conservative, reluctant to be right because as a woman, she could never, ever be wrong. Ziegler’s text depicts a woman who had all the evidence but didn’t put the pieces together because she was afraid to prematurely commit herself.
Experimenter‘s experiments don’t succeed
Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter pulls from theatrical conventions — creating two-dimensional backdrops and breaking the fourth wall — to depict a landmark psychological experiment: In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) conducted experiments on obedience in an effort to understand the obedience and conformity of the Nazis in the Holocaust.
San Jose Stage’s RFK brings Bobby Kennedy to life
San Jose Stage’s RFK, a one-man play about Robert Kennedy (David Arrow), combines a captivating lead performance with evocative projections to elevate a historically rich but dramatically flat script.