FILMS from AFAR

A documentary like this one provides a much-needed dose of hope about the next generation's potential to change a volatile world, one person at a time. Global realities like social unrest in Venezuela, mass emigration from Nepal, poverty in Nairobi, and hurricanes in Puerto Rico have negatively impacted millions, but they've also inspired young people to try to respond to these crises, as Own the Room illustrates. The focus of the film, which was shot in 2019, is on the people more than the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards; in fact, we see only snippets of the actual competition pitches. The directors dedicate the first 40 minutes of film time to introducing the five subjects, interviewing friends, business partners, and family members, and filming their homes and local communities. It perhaps takes the resources of a National Geographic to send cameras out to these far-flung locales to follow people around for days. But it's worth every penny. The filmmakers knew there was more emotion and human interest in the personal stories than in the actual event. (As a side note, it may be humbling for English-speaking viewers to be reminded once again what an effort people around the world make to learn to speak English with precision and grace.) Nepal struggles with the social cost of family dislocations in what a local newspaper editor gloomily terms their "gross national sadness," making Santosh's preternaturally smiley nature all the more appealing. A full-circle moment sees him connecting with immigrant Nepalese hotel staffers in Macau. Many young Puerto Ricans left the island following Hurricane Maria, but others stayed to help rebuild. Daniela had to abandon Venezuela for the US to continue her studies, and she talks about the immigrant experience and facing down gender stereotypes in her industry. It's an emotional moment when she's reunited with her mom in Macau. Thanks to the equalizing power of the internet, Henry's mentor says, Africans can address widespread problems of poverty. Addressing stereotypes and racism is another thing, which we witness when Henry is unjustly detained at the Macau airport. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur can maybe get away with traveling in shorts and sandals, but a young man from Kenya apparently cannot. Without wanting to spoil too much, it's unexpected who doesn’t get picked for the final round in the competition. It's interesting to consider how the filmmakers selected the five people to profile out of the 51 competition finalists from around the world. All of them likely had equally interesting and inspirational stories. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

As much as you want to be repelled by the depraved characters and relentless violence of The Devil All the Time, this film manages to keep you curious. Maybe more impressively, it makes you care for some of the broken souls inhabiting its two map-speck towns. This is no easy feat. The well-known international cast pulls off playing evil while hinting at the weaknesses and trauma fueling their characters' actions, forcing you to grapple with comprehending characters even as they make appalling, morally questionable choices. At well over two hours long, the film could have done this even better by cutting out a couple of the less-developed stories -- for example, the corrupt sheriff's dealings with a mistress and local crime bosses. Director Antonio Campos seems fascinated by the darkest side of human nature, but he has set the film to a blend of period gospel, folk, country, and other music that keeps the mood from feeling as miserable as the stories warrant. Adapted from the novel (often labeled "hillbilly gothic") by Donald Ray Pollock, who narrates the film, Devil is set in the gloomy borderlands between West Virginia and Ohio between 1957 and 1965. This location and between-war period is characterized in the film by financial and spiritual poverty. Still, there are no easy moral lessons here, no heroes, and few characters or themes painted in black and white. It won't be for everyone, but given a chance, Devil could surprise more than a few initially reluctant viewers. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

There's a moment in the compelling Spanish drama "Seven Years" ("7 Años") where a character, backed into a corner by colleagues he'd once called family, ponders the health risks blasted across his pack of cigarettes and suggests that perhaps friends, too, should come with warning labels. Harsh as it sounds, the rebuke makes sense in the context of this movie. If, as Hobbes advised, human life devoid of the rule of law would be nasty, brutish and short, this film provides the fictional conditions wherein that nature might flourish. Challenging in subject matter but modest in production scope and with clear international appeal, "Seven Years" was a promising choice to mark Netflix's first original movie produced and filmed in Spain. It premiered worldwide Oct. 28 in 190 countries on Netflix, a massive release for a small European movie, offering hope that the streaming service could provide an important new outlet for independent filmmakers in Spain and elsewhere struggling to find financing and exhibition platforms for their films. The Predicament Four equal partners in a stylish software firm in Madrid find they are under investigation for embezzling funds from their own company. Now they have hours to agree on which of them will take the fall for the others, spend seven years in prison and save the company. The predicament is set up swiftly, and a mediator is brought in to help the foursome negotiate a solution. But first, we see the characters gather on their rooftop terrace for a last smoke, four heavy shadows looking out across the twinkling city lights and an impenetrable night sky. It's a bittersweet final moment of freedom, the visual equivalent of a heavy sigh. And it’s the last breath of fresh air, suggestively smoke-infused, that they – or we, the viewers – will have before the action of the film returns to the calculatedly claustrophobic one-room setting of the firm's loft-style offices. The Ethics of Survival Marcel is the slick CEO with the French-Canadian wife and the privileged background. Carlos is the handsome, potentially vacuous playboy who keeps the clients happy. Their sharp accountant, Vero, is the sole female partner who runs a hotel business on the side. Luis, the insomniac programmer with substance problems, appears the weakest of the four and a natural fall guy. But not all is as it seems. More complicated layers to the partners' true characters, their relationships and their views of each other are gradually exposed. Under question is much more than just who is willing to sacrifice his freedom for the benefit of the others, but the ethics of making such a decision for oneself or for another. They psycho-analyze each other in an attempt to judge how each would handle the repercussions of this decision. Each argues why the others should be chosen first. One by one, loyalties crumble under the weight of their fight to survive. Alliances and bribes, grudges and secrets, accusations, class divisions and amorous deceits all bubble to the surface. Finally, it comes down to a vote. But how can you judge a person's right to live his or her life? What are the criteria that make one human life more valuable than another, not just in the context of their usefulness to a company but in their value to their families, to society at large and even to themselves? "Seven Years" can ask but it can't answer these questions. In doing so, it forces us to ask ourselves the same questions. It makes a statement about the greed of today's society, where nothing is ever enough, and it offers a revealing indictment of a country where citizens have lost faith in their institutions and feel justified working around the law. And it’s told, intentionally or not, from a distinctly male perspective. A Bit of Respect Written by newcomer Jose Cabeza, "Seven Years" marks a return to style for director Roger Gual, who made the understated 2002 comedy "Smoking Room" about a company man trying to convince his mostly male co-workers to create a space in the office for smokers. Both films rely heavily on dialogue rather than varied settings or action to carry the narratives. Both have a decidedly realistic look and feel, though "Seven Years," by necessity of the story, has a more self-consciously sophisticated style. And both films offer showcases for some of the Spanish-speaking world's most talented actors (in "Seven Years," two of the four lead actors are Colombian). Underscoring the significance of the participation of Netflix, which now boasts more than 86m subscribers worldwide, Gual told Spanish newspaper "El País" that his first movie didn’t make it outside Spain. "For those of us in the movie industry, the fact that a film can hit 190 countries at once calls for a bit of respect.” This review originally ran in The Daily Record.

Actress Jordana Spiro's impressive first feature as a director offers a thoughtful and unhurried portrayal of a young woman at a critical crossroads in her life. Night Comes On deftly guides us into a dark world where kids struggle to get by despite mistreatment or neglect by adults. Spiro drops in scenes of normalcy seen through 18-year-old Angel's eyes, of what life could be like for a girl her age, and keeps coming back to the recurring sound of waves crashing, evoking a sole positive memory for Angel. Spiro also plays with camera angles in key scenes and slow motion sequences as a transition device. These techniques threaten to call too much attention to themselves, but ultimately they work to support the development of Angel's character. Lead actress Fishback (who also stars in Netflix's Project Power) gives a convincing and sensitive performance as a teenager teetering between childhood and adulthood, between giving in to the negative forces holding her back or starting to piece her life together. When she smiles for possibly the first time in the movie and lets her hair down during a climactic scene, we realize just how tightly wound up and scarred her Angel is. We breathe a sigh of relief along with her, short-lived as it turns out. That's good storytelling, buoyed by perceptive acting. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

The acclaimed film, set in Mexico in the 1970s, was subtitled from Mexican Spanish into Castilian Spanish. Fans of Alfonso Cuaron's Roma are up in arms over the decision of distributors in Spain to subtitle the Mexican drama from Spanish into, well, Spanish. Roma, which won the top prize at last year's Venice Film Festival and just picked up Golden Globes for best director and foreign-language film, is almost entirely in Mexican-accented Spanish. But for its release in Spain, both in theaters and on Netflix in the territory, the pic has been subtitled into Castilian Spanish, the version of the language most commonly spoken there. Many, including the director himself, question the necessity, or the rationale, behind the linguistic adaption. “I find it very offensive for the Spanish public that Roma has been subtitled into Castilian Spanish,” Cuaron on Tuesday told Spanish news agency Efe. "I think it's very, very ridiculous." Cuaron compared it to subtitling Spanish films in Mexico: “I don’t need subtitles into Mexican to understand [Spanish director Pedro] Almodovar.” On Wednesday, Spain’s El Pais newspaper quoted Cuaron from an email stating: “It’s parochial, ignorant and offensive to Spaniards themselves… One of the things I most enjoy is the color and texture of other accents.” The subtitling controversy has been slowly brewing on Twitter for the last few weeks since the film premiered Dec. 5 on five screens in Spain and Dec. 14 on Netflix, which offers subtitles in “European Spanish." Read the full story in The Hollywood Reporter. Netflix removed the Castilian subtitles following the controversy. Follow-up story here.

The documentary shorts category rarely grabs headlines at awards show, but the night before Spain's equivalent of the Oscars, the Goyas, everyone is talking about an 18-minute film about life in the Gaza Strip. Gaza has become the center of a controversy after a planned screening of the film in Madrid on Friday was canceled, with critics accusing the film of anti-Semitism and the filmmakers making claims of threats and censorship. The pro-Palestine activist group BDS, which provided promotional support for the pic, organized the screening. BDS, whose initials stand for "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions," has called for the global community to cut cultural ties with Israel in protest of the country's treatment of Palestinians in Israel and the the occupied territories. BDS has been in industry news in recent months over its support for different cultural boycotts of Israel, including the annual pan-European song competition Eurovision, slated to take place in Tel Aviv in May... Elias Cohen, Secretary General of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, on Friday said that he had not heard about the film Gaza until he saw information about the Madrid screening put out by BDS, an organization he said “seeks to delegitimize Israel and Israelis.” Cohen placed the pic in the context of what he called an established “anti-Israel sentiment” in the Spanish film industry. “The organizers [of the Goyas], the actors, the producers, the directors have a long anti-Israel curriculum,” he said. “They have denounced Israel over and over again. They have promoted and starred in videos denouncing Israel.” Read the full story in The Hollywood Reporter.

Fans of the mix of melodrama and period style of certain Spanish series popularized by Netflix would instantly recognize the telephone switchboard of Cable Girls, the Art Deco entry of the fashion showroom on Velvet or the elegant interiors of Grand Hotel. Ramon Campos, executive producer at Bambu Producciones, the Madrid-based outfit behind all of these series, says a single image or artistic style can serve as the reference point for the look of an entire series. For Grand Hotel, it was the paintings of Joaquin Sorolla. On Velvet, the main hall of the Chrysler Building in New York. Cable Girls was Modernism. For High Seas, the new eight-episode 1940s-era murder mystery set aboard a transatlantic ship traveling from Europe to South America, which Bambu is producing for a spring release on Netflix, it was the “Streamline” style of the Art Deco era, heavy on curved lines and rounded edges. High Seas is the most expensive set design of any Bambu production to date and the biggest and most complex Netflix has undertaken in Spain. “It’s very important that when the viewer start a series, even if it's the same or similar genre as other series, they feel there’s something completely different in the aesthetic that is never going to take them back to the same world,” says Campos, the co-creator of the series with Gema R. Neira. Campos is sitting on the bench of a long table in the fictional ship’s third class dining hall, surrounded by plates of chorizo and crusty bread perfectly arranged to look like the remnants of a modest yet festive meal, giving The Hollywood Reporter a behind-the scenes look at the multifaceted set. Months of research and documentation went into the creation of the High Seas aesthetic and design — the most for any Bambu series to date, Campos says. Set decorator Regina Acuña worked hand in hand with production designer Carlos Bodelon to recreate the look and feel of ships from the era. They were especially inspired by two Art Deco luxury liners from the 1930s, the SS Normandie and the Queen Mary, Acuña says. Read the full story in The Hollywood Reporter.

Click here for reviews of the following nature documentaries available for home streaming: Disney's Elephant Disney's Dolphin Reef A Reindeer's Journey on Amazon Prime

At a trade show in Barcelona last month, major Hollywood studios paraded footage of their upcoming films for 2019-2020 in front of a packed audience of European theater owners and programmers. Attendees were treated to exclusive trailers and clips for “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Gemini Man,” “Bond 25,” “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” “Playmobil: The Movie” and more. The medley of animated films, superhero spin-offs and live-action franchise installments – which journalists are restricted from describing in detail or reviewing – said a lot about how Hollywood thinks it’s going to get you off your couch and into theaters. They’re promising unique “big screen” experiences with familiar characters, explosive action and the latest technological advancements that will blow your socks off at the movie theater (and that you can’t get at home). Hollywood is feeling the heat. Studios are producing fewer but bigger films and facing increased competition from online streaming platforms. Ticket sales at US theaters went down abruptly at the start of 2019, and one of every three tickets sold went to just one studio: Disney. Meanwhile, Netflix reported a record 9.6 million new subscribers in the first quarter of 2019, bringing it close to 150 million globally, and is producing more and more original films and series. Competitor streaming services, including Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV Plus and NBCUniversal, are all launching in the next year. The Losers The losers in the race to save theaters are smaller, character-driven and foreign-language films with no experiential reason why they can’t be enjoyed equally on a big or small screen. Take the recent example of Lulu Wang's family dramedy "The Farewell," which has received rave reviews and has actually sold more tickets per screen in the US than "Avengers: Endgame." The problem is that "Farewell" has so far premiered on just four screens compared with "Endgame's" 4,662. No foreign-language film has broken past $12 million at the US box office in the last decade outside of Bollywood films and the partly US-set Mexican comedy "Instructions not Included." They're getting edged out of theaters year after year by the same names – Avengers, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Toy Story, etc. Six of last year’s 10 top grossing films were superhero movies. People are talking about “franchise fatigue” and “sequilitis" as several sequels haven't met expectations this summer, like “Dark Phoenix,” “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and “Men in Black: International.” The Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy blasted summer 2019 as a “landmark low in major studio creativity.” The Guardian's Guy Lodge rebuked Disney as "the principal architect of an ever more uniform and homogeneous popular cinema." If the studios continue down this predictable, risk-averse path, they may actually drive viewers away from theaters. The Winners The small screen has the potential to be the savior of the kinds of films that audiences with "franchise fatigue" crave, including discoveries like “The Farewell” and also foreign-language movies. Streaming has a few key advantages. First, it's much more accessible, in terms of convenience as well as cost. We know this well in one-theater towns like Ellensburg. Disney Plus is launching in November at $6.99 a month, while average movie ticket prices in the US are now over $9 a pop. In a New York Times survey of Hollywood insiders about the future of movies, director Ava DuVernay compared the number of people who saw “13th,” her Netflix documentary on mass incarceration, with the number – four times smaller – who went to theaters to see her film “Selma,” about the 60s-era, Dr. King-led civil rights marches. “If I’m telling these stories to reach a mass audience, then really, nothing else matters,” she said. In other words, size (of screen) doesn’t always matter. Younger generations already seem comfortable watching pretty much anything on a smaller screen. Second, as other Times interviewees noted, Netflix is bringing back some genres that Hollywood had largely given up on, like romantic comedies ("Always Be My Maybe") and documentaries (Beyonce's "Homecoming"), and opening up opportunities for filmmakers of color and female directors traditionally under-employed in Hollywood. Third, the online option to watch content dubbed into English, especially useful when the screen is too small to comfortably read subtitles, could contribute to a significant change in American audiences’ attitudes toward foreign-language films and series. Netflix has already cultivated a global audience for foreign-language shows thanks to popular series like Spain’s “Money Heist,” Germany’s “Dark” and Brazil’s “3%.” The much-publicized success of the Oscar-winning foreign-language Netflix film “Roma” may help inspire more Americans to give non-English/non-US films a watch. And cases like these naturally excite international filmmakers and showrunners, who see the potential to reach an elusive global audience – whatever the size of their screens. As the streaming landscape expands, the potential audience for independent, international products will only grow, offering an antidote to "sequilitis." A version of this article ran in The Daily Record. Click the image below to find online.

If you've been eager to see Spurlock step foot in a McDonald's again, this is your chance. This film won't disappoint fans of Spurlock's first documentary, and his decade-plus of professional evolution between the two movies shows on screen. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! is both entertaining and revealing, balancing the documentarian's exposé of the food industry's dishonest practices with a storyteller's gift for making emotional connections. The film keeps a brisk pace from beginning to end, with only a slight lull as Spurlock detours into a series of interviews concerning a lawsuit against the Tyson corporation. Still, he clearly knows when to speed things up, as with lively animated sequences, or slow them down, like an extended scene of chicks hatching to music from The Nutcracker. Some of the food chains, corporations, and organizations that Spurlock visits won't be too happy with how they're portrayed here; Spurlock borrows from Michael Moore in his occasionally confrontational style. But he does a great job of eliciting potentially shocking information from people without overreacting in the moment. Spurlock fits in as well with Alabama chicken farmers as he does with urban ad executives, and he exploits his own celebrity in publicizing his new venture. The film reveals how easily Americans have been duped by the false "healthy halo" that food companies painstakingly craft through misleading words ("natural," "artisanal"), incomplete information ("free range," "hormone free"), and engineered experiences (manipulative decor, advertising). Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

This is a suspenseful and sometimes eloquent film with inspired casting that paints '60s-era anti-war activists as flawed heroes up against a corrupt bureaucracy. You'd expect nothing less from the creator of that beacon of principled progressive politics, The West Wing. Writer-director Aaron Sorkin's focus on the trial rather than the bloody riots of 1968, which we don't glimpse until more than 45 minutes into The Trial of the Chicago 7, allows the actors to shine with Sorkin standards like fast-paced intellectual sparring and moving displays of courage and righteousness. Baron Cohen, Redmayne, and Rylance were particularly inspired choices in an entirely male-centric cast (and story). They embody their characters' demeanors and accents as well as their passion and intelligence. The world could use more Hoffmans and Haydens, as they're depicted by Sorkin: whip-smart, committed social critics with, in Hoffman's case, a razor-sharp wit and no fear of authority. In one of the film's best lines, Hoffman sneers at the prosecutor's questioning: "Give me a moment, would you, friend? I've never been on trial for my thoughts before." Some historical knowledge is helpful but not essential, and also not a spoiler here. A 7-minute introduction confuses as much as it contextualizes, giving too much information too fast. The film's relevance to contemporary social upheaval could not be clearer, particularly in the subtexts of racial injustice and excessive use of police force. It's hard to imagine this wasn't fully intentional. At one point, for example, the camera closes in on a protestor's sign reading "Lock them up!" A later scene closes to voiceover chants that "the whole world is watching." Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

This film follows a long tradition of space movies that combine psychological drama with action. Really, how could traveling to Mars be any different? Stowaway puts its astronauts in a dire situation that requires self sacrifice and quick scientific problem-solving to survive, not unlike other recent titles like The Martian, Gravity, or Midnight Sky. And like these other films, the credibility of the story rests on the actors. This is especially true when you've got just one setting and four characters (even the voice of the company contact communicated with back on earth is muffled, meaning the conversations are viewed as one-sided dialogues). The actors here do a fine job, but Collette stands out as the conflicted commander. The rocket, situations, and solutions will sound scientifically valid enough to the lay person, though it's never fully explained how Michael came to be locked inside the spaceship's walls or how he could survive a rocket launch there. I n any case, the psychological drama is much more interesting here than the action scenes, and the build-up is more engrossing than the resolution. Even on the space walks, the physicality of the challenge or the external threats are less intriguing than the characters' reactions -- will they have the emotional stamina to succeed? The characters stare out at the earth, receding further and further away from their spinning ship, a visual reminder of their dilemma, their solitude, and the uniqueness of their circumstance. Stowaway itself may not be so unique, but it's an engaging, attractive, and well-acted drama. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.