FILMS from AFAR

This review was originally published by The Alliance of Women Film Journalists. This complex psychological drama from Scandinavian filmmaker Joachim Trier has emerged as one the most prominent and award-winning films of the year. If you haven’t seen  Sentimental Value  before hearing all the hype, you may be surprised by its nuanced and unhurried take on very mature topics. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, swept the European Film Awards, topped critics lists and is now entering the Oscars with nine nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, International Film, Editing and acting nods for all four of its leads.  Much of the writing about this film has focused on the family relationships. The story follows depressed theater actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) and sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who have a tense relationship with their estranged father, the well-known, self-absorbed filmmaker Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard). When Gustav returns to Oslo after a long absence and asks Nora to star in his new movie, his first in 15 years, she flatly turns him down. He brings in American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead and creates a second version of the script in English, but it’s clear that the film – based on the real story of Gustav’s mother’s suicide and set in the family home where Nora and Agnes grew up – is a delicate family affair. The rapprochement of father and daughters, and the mutual support the sisters have long offered each other in light of their absentee parents, are certainly at the story’s heart. They, like Gustav, are still dealing with the effects of childhood trauma. Moreover, Gustav’s mother experienced acute physical trauma in her adult life as a tortured political prisoner, a grueling storyline that comes to light slowly but resolutely through the film’s occasional third-person narrator and the historical records and shocking photographs Agnes digs up.  But there’s more to the family’s struggles than just events in their lives; Trier is showing us how trauma and genetic predispositions play out across generations, symbolized in the objects, which may or may not have sentimental value, the sisters are left to sort through after their mother’s death. Nora’s inability to feel joy or accept intimacy, despite a resoundingly successful theater career and an attentive (but married) lover, can’t just be chalked up to her difficulties with her father – even though a montage of their and others’ faces dissolving into each other might seem to suggest otherwise. She’s as fragile as her mother’s heirloom vases. Sister Agnes shoulders the stress of worrying about Nora’s moods following a prior suicide attempt, and Nora is on the receiving end of Gustav’s regular drunken phone messages. The artistic personalities in the film – Gustav, Nora, Rachel – seem especially vulnerable, open as they are to exploring emotional states, something the three actors demonstrate skillfully and sometimes humorously. (Here, Trier manages to slip in some winking allusions to film industry shifts, from veterans feeling they’ve aged out of meaningful work to Netflix’s stinginess with theatrical releases.) Trier has tackled mental health themes before, most notably in 2011 literary adaptation  August, Oslo 31,  a devastating portrayal of a troubled man (played by Anders Danielsen Lie, also in  Sentimental Value ) on a very personal goodbye tour of his native city. It forms part of what’s known as Trier’s melancholic “Oslo Trilogy,” including  Reprise  and  The Worst Person in the World , all co-written with Eskil Vogt and starring repeat performers like Reinsve and Danielsen Lie. And Oslo makes the perfect setting for these themes, with its harsh white light casting shallow shadows. Much of the action revolves around the family home, which has a symbolic foundation-to-roof crack running through it and has been the site of little joy. The house is an evocative example of what’s known as Norway’s “dragon style” architecture, according to the Norwegian Film Commission, representing the craft tradition of both the Viking era and medieval wooden churches. When the house’s interior is redecorated on a soundstage for Gustav’s film, its newly stark modernity and clean lines suggest a possible clearing out of emotional cobwebs and cracks as well. Trier has a deft hand for leading viewers gently but seriously through challenging, layered stories without simple resolutions, and  Sentimental Value  is no different. Be prepared for a full 130 minutes of that emotional weight.  Images courtesy of Neon.

This Paul McCartney-focused documentary is an informative and entertaining look at the period between the break-up of the Beatles and the death of John Lennon. Man on the Run starts in a frenzy, with an expected montage of footage, photos, and music amplified with quick-paced collages and animations edited together. It's all very Yellow Submarine, but in a subtle touch, the style gets progressively more mellow over the course of the movie. This ties in nicely with the film's theme of McCartney having to "grow up'" following the Beatles' dissolution. There's certainly enough material out there about the Beatles, but the limited time frame here is curious and leaves the viewer wanting more. It's also an interesting choice to have no talking heads in the film, just voiceovers. They're not missed visually, but it does freeze the image of McCartney in time in his late 20s and early 30s—even while he's narrating much of the action now, in his 80s. This is a creative and engaging entry to the surplus of materials about the Beatles and their former members. Read the full review at Common Sense Media Images courtesy of Amazon Prime

In some ways, the title of this film is misleading—it sounds like we are looking at another Nat Geo nature documentary, but this is something very different. First of all, Elephant Ghosts seems more focused on the humans than the animals, which makes sense considering how elusive the elephants are. Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog narrates the tale, reminding himself not to "romanticize" the native bushmen but still finding them endlessly fascinating—the cradle of humanity, the ancestors of all humans, the site of the "awakening of the human soul." These are people who still hand-start fires and can mimic animal sounds in the wild but are also speedy on a cell phone. Herzog explains some of the traditions we see, but leaves a lot unexplored as well (and no female Africans speak in the film). But Herzog also infuses the film with his usual touch of magic, from the dreamy musings of protagonist Boyes to the transcendent African landscapes set to mystical intonations. He keeps his camera just a moment longer than you'd expect on the mapped faces of elderly tribesmen and a local leopard-print-clad king. He follows a dung beetle home and admits he's weirded out by (but can't seem to look away from) a poisonous spider with a vibrating backpack of baby spiders—also poisonous. He somehow captures an elephant from under water, double rainbows gracing the plains, and trackers falling into trances where they may be possessed by elephant spirits. Originally published 3/6 by Common Sense Media Images courtesy of Disney+/Hulu.

This 3.5-hour extravaganza, released simultaneously with a companion documentary series, might feel like self-aggrandizing overkill—but only to non-Swifties. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour – The Final Show captures Swift's joyous, clear-eyed, flirtatious, youthful energy and her connection with her fans, even from a stadium stage. She makes a point of telling them they're the ones who created the community feel of her historic tour, and the "glorious" feeling of singing together in a stadium (especially post-pandemic). As the camera pans around the packed Vancouver stadium (60,000 people!), we see audience members—mostly women, but some men, and lots of little girls—crying, screaming, laughing, singing, filming, and all around having a moment. Swift puts on a real show, and you get the sense her fans would be just as wowed if she were alone on the stage instead of surrounded by the multitude of screens and dancers. If you weren't one of the 10 million who could afford a ticket to the actual tour, the filmed version offers an enjoyable substitute. Read the full review on Common Sense Media. Images courtesy of Disney+

Like the magazine itself, this documentary will speak mainly to a core and loyal audience of sophisticated readers, and it provides insights and historical narratives they will appreciate. The New Yorker at 100 moves at a brisk pace and flips engagingly through decades. With chief editor Remnick as guide, the film puts faces to names on some of the highest profile reporters as well as the unknown fact-checkers, designers, and office manager-slash-archivist who maintain this institution's reputation for meticulous, thoughtful, culture-capturing work and keep its storied history alive. It shows how the magic is made. It's not clear why Julianne Moore was selected as narrator, and the star interviewees weren't entirely necessary, but that connection to celebrity is undoubtedly also part of the magazine's mystique. Read the full review on Common Sense Media Images courtesy of Netflix.

This lyrical meditation on life in a specific time and place relies on a subtle and expressive lead performance by Edgerton and majestic cinematography to craft a melancholy yet mystical tale. Train Dreams is reminiscent of an artful piece of historical fiction like Roma . There's no grand action to hook viewers, no predictable formula to follow. Instead, the film feels very much a literary adaptation, especially with its somewhat superfluous voice-over filling in narrative gaps. This sweeping epic captures not just one man's tough, tragic life, and not just the human exploitation and development of the still-wild Pacific Northwest, but rather the deep and unbreakable connection between the two. Read the full review on Common Sense Media Images courtesy of Netflix

In an age when any millionaire can go to space, women can vie for any career, and being gay shouldn't result in public ridicule or hate, Sally Ride's story reminds us of a different time. Sally tells that story, using those closest to her to fill in the pieces that Ride intentionally left blank on her own life tale. As one interviewee puts it, how sad that a person admired so broadly felt she had to hide such an important part of herself from the public eye. What is disclosed here provides interesting insights into Ride's personality as well as the rarified life experience of an astronaut. She is described as competitive, cocky, rough around the edges, and intensely private about her emotions—characteristics that, it's said, made her exceptional at work and difficult at home. She "lived on her own terms," even despite intense media scrutiny. Footage of press conferences singling her out among her colleagues for overtly sexist questions is downright embarrassing by today's standards. The film makes its point and is engaging and informative. What could potentially have been weeded out are gratuitous dramatizations of past events. Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Disney+.

Tense and well-acted, this thriller weaves a captivating story of fatally flawed characters getting lost in their own bad decisions. Echo Valley lags a little bit in the third act but comes to a satisfying twist ending. Moore carries the film with a nuanced performance as the manipulatable mom, lonely, still grieving her wife's death, and yearning for any connection with the daughter she once knew. Sweeney is also powerful in a disturbing role that wavers between loving daughter, fearful tears, stoned detachment, and violent outbursts. This film is as much about the toll addiction takes on relationships as it is the plot points of the action, and both will replay in your mind well after the film ends. Read the full review at Common Sense Media Images courtesy of AppleTV+

Honest, affecting, tender, and inspirational, this documentary is a wholly unique piece of work. Perhaps it shouldn't, but it does still feel unexpected to see a male rocker open up so freely about his emotions, as Bono does quite dramatically in Bono: Stories of Surrender . He calls it "navel-gazing," but the revelations and reenactments carry real value—not just in getting to know the innermost thoughts and feelings of this public figure, but also in normalizing the public sharing and exploration of a man's sentiments. The theatrically stark black-and-white staging of the stories and songs, including some gorgeous a cappella belting, adds to the drama. Bono describes his father's standard life question whenever they would meet at the pub: Anything strange or startling? The answer is yes—this documentary. Read the full review at Common Sense Media Images courtesy of AppleTV+

Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy do their best to keep this implausible action film (and equally improbable romance) from sinking into absurdity, and they sort of succeed. The stars of AppleTV+'s  The Gorge  take their roles seriously, despite some wild shifts in tone between romance and horror. (When their flirting is interrupted by crazy-looking creatures attacking them, they snap right back to their dalliance as if without further thought. What?!) They also carry off the action sequences with aplomb. Their efforts compensate for an ambitious script that isn't totally sure of the tone it's going for, and a farfetched storyline forced to explain itself too simplistically through a found video. Sigourney Weaver is also disappointingly underused. Read the full review at Common Sense Media Images courtesy of AppleTV+

When film industry magazine Screen International broke a story at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday about a group of middle-aged women who were turned away from a film screening for wearing flats rather than heels, the web-fueled backlash was resounding. Some were calling it “Flatgate.” It brought back a lot of memories for me as I used to cover the Cannes festival every year as a correspondent for Screen. In flats. What’s interesting is that this year’s 68th edition of Cannes, running May 13 to May 24, was shaping up to be remembered as “the year of the woman.” It may still be remembered as such, just not in the way organizers might have hoped. Cannes made a statement by opening this year with a French film, “Standing Tall” (“La Tete Haute”), by director Emanuelle Bercot, only the second woman ever to receive the honor. The choice appeared to have been a response to past years’ criticism of a lack of female directors at the festival. And it struck a clear chord: the lack of opportunities and stories for women in the film industry has been a theme across the festival this year, from press conferences, interviews and industry announcements to a notable number of female-focused films and casts.​​ And now, the poor ladies in the rhinestone flats. ​​ Under the red carpet​​ It seems there’s always something to divert the attention away from the actual films at Cannes. Earlier this spring, Festival Director Thierry Fremaux made headlines when he announced plans to crack down on people taking selfies on the red carpet, a practice he bigheartedly labelled “extremely ridiculous and grotesque.”​​ It’s a sentiment that encapsulates Cannes’ not always comfortable fusion of the commercial and the creative, industry and art, high and low culture, market and festival. Cannes is glamorous, there’s no doubt about it. There are bashes on the beach, interviews in limousines and parties at hilltop estates. There are receptions on yachts and cocktails on hotel patios. There are multi-course meals, bucketloads of wine and that sapphire Mediterranean eternally twinkling on the horizon. And of course, there is constant talk of movies. For journalists covering the event, there are also mandatory crack-of-dawn editorial meetings, merciless daily deadlines, bandaged feet from perpetual pavement pounding, and a lack of sleep that can shorten the fuse of even the gentlest reporter. This is (apologies, former colleagues) the indisputably less glamorous side of Cannes. Where flat shoes reign supreme. Underneath the Palais theater, where the official film screenings take place, downstairs from the packed press conference halls, deep below the much-photographed red carpet, lies a basement labyrinth of makeshift cubicles plastered with movie posters and teeming with sweaty sales agents, bleary-eyed buyers and amped-up journalists searching for a story. Because, as “Flatgate” and “Selfiegate” make clear, the story out of Cannes isn’t only what’s happening in the theaters. This column originally ran in The Daily Record .

Today’s lesson: Patience in the kitchen is not just a virtue, it’s a necessity. More on this below. Spoiler alert: I'm not always the most patient person. In activities I enjoy or that matter a lot to me, I have all the time in the world. In other areas of life, I move fast so I can move on. And now that I've written that, I realize this may be the balance that's keeping me sane. Either way, being impatient in the kitchen means I'm naturally attracted to faster, fewer-ingredient recipes. So, when I stumbled upon this 20-minute, 6-step ditty in the New York Times Cooking app, I thought it looked right up my galley. Anything with “sheet-pan” in the title promises simplicity. Right? From Fresh to Frozen If the internet is to be believed, the Italian "scampi" refers to small, shrimp-like creatures in the lobster family (also known as Dublin Bay prawns, Norway lobsters or langoustines). So the name "shrimp scampi" actually makes no sense? The concept likely originated as "shrimp prepared scampi-style" as Italian chefs tried to adapt a dish in America without the proper seafood ingredients found back home. I can relate. I love seafood of almost all kinds, and I’m pretty adventurous about it (though there are a few species I won’t touch, like razor clams, which taste like sweatsocks). But I learned to love seafood living abroad. Growing up in the States, I didn't eat a lot of variety of fish. A typical oxymoron heard in these parts is that people don’t want fish that tastes “too fishy.” In Spain, I was exposed to the delights of conservas , or canned fish. My favorite is calamares en su tinta , squid pieces in their own inky sauce. The fishier the better! Seafood became a staple of my diet, stocked fresh in markets and widely served on menus. From hake to seabass to cod to octopus, I learned to love it all. Which is why I am sometimes hyper-critical of the seafood sections in my local stores today. These sad affairs often feature limp white filets slouched atop yellowing ice. Even the peppy lemon wedges can’t liven up this situation. Okay, maybe I'm overstating for effect, but it's true that most of the seafood I eat on a regular basis now comes from the frozen section. That's how I found myself with an opened 2-pound bag of raw shrimp in my freezer. Knowing I needed to feed some hungry mouths later that eve, I popped what was left of the bag into the fridge to defrost, and I started scrolling Cooking’s database. Planning & Patience One thing I’ve seen more mild-mannered home chefs do that I’ve never, not once done myself is to get all the ingredients measured and ready before they even start cooking. I am beginning to see how this can be useful. In my kitchen, things have been known to bubble over or burn while I’m frantically skimming instructions or chopping and measuring next ingredients. I think the challenge entertains me, but the truth is I'm not always fast enough. On this recipe, I got everything out of the fridge, measured the wine and washed and peeled the shrimp – all before starting. Yeah, me! I did not cut the butter, chop the herbs or get the needed saucepan ready. Whoopsie. This turned out to be especially foolhardy because, had I slowed down and read the recipe again more closely, I would have realized that I only had 6 to 12 minutes to do all this while the lemons flirted with disaster under the broiler’s flames. Step by Step Thankfully, I managed not to burn the lemons, though I’m not sure the wine reduced by half, as the recipe called for. I’ve found in my life that a little extra wine never hurts, so I went with it. As an aside, why is broiling so exciting? Here’s where my impatience could have sabotaged my scampi – again. When my butter melted, I poured it over my cold shrimp, rather than mixing the shrimp into the butter in its warm pan, as the recipe advised (though not clearly enough for us beginners, IMHO). The result, of course, was congealed butter. Determined, I pivoted and used a utensil to spread the butter, now a paste mixed with my thinly-sliced garlic, over the shrimp, which I carefully layered on top of my decoratively charred lemons. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked shrimp in the oven before. But why not? They plumped up surprisingly fast and turned a gorgeous pink. Making a Meal One thing I haven’t mentioned is that among the items I did not measure before beginning this recipe was the actual quantity of shrimp I had left in my 2-pound bag. The recipe called for a pound, and the bag looked about half full, so I went with it. (Yes, I'm seeing the pattern.) I also hadn’t thought too much about the fact that one pound of shrimp and a few lemon slices, no matter how exquisitely broiled, weren’t going to feed all the people in my house (on this day, me plus two teens and several of their friends). I decided to turn my pan-sheet scampi into a pasta dish. Pasta fills tummies and everyone likes it. Feeling smart. Now, most pasta shrimp scampi recipes online call for a long noodle, like spaghetti. Okay, not most – apparently all, according to a quick Google search (mocking me with its uniformity). You guessed it: I didn’t have spaghetti on hand, which I discovered during the roughly 5 minutes the shrimp were in the oven. So, I substituted mini-penne. It might have been unconventional. It might not have fit in on Google. But I believe it tasted just as good! Reactions The kids agreed. Gabi and Teresa both gave it a thumbs up, and their friends approved. One dared eat a lemon slice. Another sprinkled nutritional yeast on top, though I’m not sure how the NYT would feel about that. Being a little impatient caused some preventable stress and meant more dishes to clean than necessary, but it didn’t ruin this quick, elegant, tasty and relatively simple recipe. I learned from the process that preparation in the kitchen – doing your reading, thinking, chopping and measuring in advance – isn’t just showing off. Does that mean I’ll always do it moving forward? Probably not. But I’ll go with it. How about you? What favorite quick-n-easy recipes do you have up your chef’s apron? Do you have a shrimp scampi recipe worth sharing? Also: Do you get everything ready before you start cooking? Has improvising ever worked well for you? Lastly, is cooking going to make me a more patient person?