In 1999 M. Night Shyamalan shook the world with his movie The Sixth Sense. Nor did the studios expect the then-young director’s film to perform the way it did in theaters. Revenues exceeded 600 million dollars and, in the VHS, and DVD rental market, it was requested by more than 80 million people. The psychological horror-thriller drama thrust the director into the spotlight and enshrined him in almost immediate cult status.
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Finding the stories is the easy part. The difficult thing is to tell them in such a way that they become relevant. Michael Morris’s debut feature To Leslie (2022) does just the latter. The family drama of his story transcends by the way it is told and by the precision with which the narrative rhythm is carried out. When we approach the film, we can feel that what it is going to tell us is too familiar, that there is room to fall into the trite, but Morris’s hand is firm, and he relies on a magnificent cast to make his bet a winner.
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I remember as if it were yesterday the day that my friend Pablo Mustonen gave me that book. It was the first Christmas after Cineasta Radio was born and at a Christmas gathering he gave me “The 1,001 films you have to see before you die.” Obligatory reference would from that moment be Steven Schneider’s book. Days later, among its pages, I came across Marcel Pagnol’s The Baker’s Wife. Always revered, Pagnol is one of those authors who I could not find, much less could I get any of his films. The moment had come, and I could finally see the film and cross it off the long list that has become a kind of obsession.
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Time is an illusion.
Albert Einstein.
It was one day in 1938. David Kurtz began shooting everyday scenes with his camera in the town of Nasielsk in Poland. Just a memory to keep from a long-awaited vacation and a trivial reminiscence of his hometown is what Kurtz imagined. Impossible to envision that those minutes of film would be immortalized by that thing that Einstein defined as an illusion. It was time that was responsible for those celluloid rolls becoming the only testament of the Nasielsk inhabitants after the Holocaust. Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021) by Bianca Stigter combines the narration with a masterful editing to deliver a film of 1 hour and 9 minutes using only David Kurtz’s original recording as a visual resource, from which only three minutes could be rescued.
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September 11 of 2001 is one of those dates the world will never forget. Sadly, we remember the infamous 9/11 for all the wrong reasons. Maybe the only good thing that came out of the tragic events that unfolded that day is the resilience of the people affected directly and indirectly by the terrorist attacks that targeted various US landmarks. After all the dust was settled the movie industry was ready to look and depict this event on the big screen. With the live-action short film Free Fall (2021) the French director Emmanuel Tenenbaum focus on this subject from a different perspective.
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The Last Movie Guy 