Lovely Brazilian story of a 60-something widow living alone in an old block of flats who defies developers who want to pull the block down for a new high-rise apartment building. While she would like to continue living in the flat where she brought up her children, opposite Boa Viagem beach in Recife, others want to disturb her almost hedonistic lifestyle of swims, listening to music and lazing in her hammock.
Apart from this basic story, we also get a look at attitudes to ageing in Brazil, local corruption, the class system, the difference between the almost hippy like generation of Clara and today’s generations and thoughts on family with family gatherings 
and the issues she has with her separated daughter.
Kleber Mendonca Filho has made a very good film here. Some may call it slow and the basic plotline insufficient but in very subtle ways he fleshes it out with observations of life today in his home-town Recife.
And of course we have the star, Sonia Braga.
A seemingly effortless and multi-layered performance from her. A woman with pride and dignity who has not had an easy life and who wants to remain up to date with today as well as retaining her love for things past.
Braga gives us a glorious display of acting from sensual sex scenes to angry revenge, all however within the constraint of wisdom and age. Humberto Carrao as the young develop and Maeve Jinkings 
as the daughter struggling to avoid mother’s shadow do well.
The film glides effortlessly albeit slowly with luminous photography from Pedro Sotelo and Fabricio Tadeu. A very satisfying work all round.
★★★★++
The local police chief (Oscar Martinez) starts to sniff around because he wants to have total control of his fiefdom
and he suspects something is up with Koblic. And so the film becomes a sort of cross between thriller and western with some romance thrown in (Koblic falls for Nancy who works at the local gas station 
and who has her own horror story to boot). I felt that the film is well-made, well-acted (Martinez does a great job in a nasty wig)
but that it lacks freshness and anything special. The denoument is very much in typical thriller style and all a bit predictable. Likewise the nightmare scenes when Koblic thinks of what he did in mid-air. Federico Jusid gives us a good brooding soundtrack and the recreation of a small town in the Pampas
from the period is convincing.
among the Danes and in contrast with that, the battle Maria, the commander’s wife has to keep the family together at home. 
These merge into a courtroom drama in the second half when Claus returns to Denmark with this troops to face a sort of hearing.
The issues and morality are well spelt out and it is intriguing to see how they will be solved. The acting is good from Pilou Asbaek and in particular Tuva Novotny as the wife adds plenty to the film.
And yet, there is something too controlled and too hygienic about the movie that deadened its effect for me. There is no doubt that Tobias Lindholm achieves a lot as the director and presents us with situations that we face today which are no-win in the way we have set up our laws and morals,
but I did not feel impassioned by what I saw. It is highly competent with very interesting issues but that was it.
He is also waking up to his own gayness and falls for Wilder,
an apparently straight boy who temps with him at a Home Depot branch over the summer.
There is one other feature of the film – he has a pet hamster called Buffy who talks to him, voiced by none other than Isabella Rossellini. 
There are several fantasy magic reality moments on this summer of transition but Stephen Dunn, director and writer of this gets away with it all. He is much helped by Connor Jessup in the lead role and by good photography and music (Todor Kobakov and Maya Posteposki). The whole film has a freshness and an unpredictability despite its treading of old rites of passage ground.
with his translator/guide who is a father of two and apparently happily married. 
Greenaway gives the film some beautiful scenes, colours, light and shade contrasts and backdrops that are typical of Mexico, cemeteries
and bell-towers to name two. Although the indulgences of Eisenstein and his ego can get a bit wearing and the story runs its course by the 2/3 mark,
the visuals are so attractive and the contrasts for the time (Rivera and Frida Kahlo are there versus Catholic conservatism) are fascinating. So, in a way, we can indulge Greenaway his little cinematographic tricks and his desire to shock because there are few other directors doing this with the aplomb and humour he shows. Elmer Back is a convincing Russian madman and Luis Alberti holds up his end as Palomino the Mexican guide. Hats off to Reinier van Brummelen for the camerawork.
he is landed with the guardianship of his 16 year old nephew, Patrick, a randy, sharp boy excellently played by Lucas Hedges,
but he also has to face up to his demons and why he left this town in the first place. Mostly via flashbacks,
rather than explanations, we discover why he has ended up being a depressed and anti-social being, prone to picking fights in bars and loathe to see any joy in life. The story is harrowing but teased out so that instead of being sunk by grimness it sort of gently tugs us down. And yet it is not all black. Patrick and Lee have a wry double act as they start adjusting to each other’s presence 
and many scenes involving the boy’s activities are fun. Most of the adults are damaged if not wrecks: Lee’s ex-wife Randi (the excellent Michelle Williams),
Patrick’s mother Gretchen Mol, but outdoing them all is Lee. Casey Affleck gives us a great performance of a gritty, empty man trying to find sense in life. 
A sad movie, with its imperfections but one that says so much about us as humans and how we struggle to make meaning of our lives. Lower key than Moonlight it has some things in common but it is also something like a Springsteen song but set in a cold bleak New England winter. Very good and without any firm closure, but that is life!
and dedicated his life to art, even at one point being strapped to a ship’s mast to get the view from it. It is a film about the changes of the time, the railroad, industry, the camera and how this fits onto the rather bucolic life of those days with the empty countrysides,
the ale houses, the constant illness and death. It is also the time of the rise of critics and Turner’s jousting with the jumped up Ruskin is one example.
Timothy Spall gives possibly his best performance ever as Turner, a man whose natural and animal instincts are to the fore but who has a nobility and a sense of right to go with his profound love of nature. His simple life is shared with his father (Paul Jesson),
similar in personality to his son, a housemaid who is taken for granted until the end, (Dorothy Atkinson, excellent)
and Mrs Booth, a widow that Turner setlles down with in the last part of his life.
Others come and go but this is it. In many ways it is a sad film with some lovely photography by Dick Pope and a haunting soundtrack by Gary Yershon. And in the slow pace, there is also a lesson for us today, missing the details that made Turner’s work so notorious.
In this wild West world, they claim they won the money at the casino. Then there is the set up of the plot. Two brothers, the surprisingly good Chris Pine as Toby
and his reckless brother played by Ben Foster (a good new find) are matched by Marcus, the retired policeman with Jeff Bridges
in one of his best roles for years supported by Gill Birmingham as his Hispanic sidekick.
Between each pair a sparking screenplay by Taylor Sheridan (of Sicario fame) keeps things from falling into the classic Western cliché.
Here, there is the expected but plenty of the unexpected too. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis compose a nice soundtrack and add in some country classics and Gilles Nuttgens without going so far as Sicario, paints some beautiful scenes in this flat and rather hot harsh countryside. It all blends together into a convincing and well presented story.
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