“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.
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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.
Schneider vs. Bax is a masterful black comedy
In Schneider vs. Bax, the tension is always high, but there’s less of van Warmerdam’s characteristic black humour.
Barbet Schroeder’s Amnesia reckons with Germany’s holocaust guilt
Barbet Schroeder’s Amnesia is the latest in a series of recent films about whether Germany has reckoned with its past from World War II. Set in the early 1990s at another pivotal point in German history, the film looks back into the past through its protagonist Martha (Marthe Keller) and her interactions with other Germans. Rather […]