FILMS from AFAR

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. 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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.

This is a poignant, beautifully filmed tale elevated by an excellent cast and a real-life history that has affirmative messages for teenagers and the Black community as a whole. Concrete Cowboy is not without its sadder moments, though, including a line Elba delivers about being "born with a boot on my neck." He and his son, like Paris and Smush and others, all share a mixed sense of oppression and fear that has led them to make destructive life choices. But who is a person supposed to grow up to be when he's told all his life to watch his back on the streets, Harp asks? The film visualizes this sense by filming frequently at night, using light intentionally to frame characters or highlight specific attributes. Music is also used to reflect the experiences of different generations of Black Americans, with harmonica, traditional song, jazz musicians, and rap music employed evocatively. London-born Elba pulls off playing a Philadelphia cowboy, and while the riders are certainly portrayed as noble, wise, and righteous, the movie doesn't fall into the trap of depicting any of them as perfect. It's the women -- Nessie and Esha -- who provide the pearls of wisdom, like "Hard things come before good things," and "Horses aren't the only thing needing breaking around here." Harp, a chain-smoker with hard edges and a checkered past, has trouble creating emotional intimacy with his son, and Elba's performance is as much about what he conveys without speaking as his delivered lines. McLaughlin is going to be the real surprise out of this film, though. The gawky kid from Stranger Things is transformed here into a young man trying to appear streetwise, and McLaughlin, who's in nearly every scene, captures Cole's combination of tough and tender. His character has one foot in two different worlds, the stables and the streets, woven together throughout the film, not always 100% smoothly. McLaughlin ably embodies the teen processing these contrasting experiences, trying to decide his own way, his own conception of manhood and a good life. End credits include interviews with some real-life Fletcher Street Riders, including some who play themselves in the film. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

Even without the Hitchcock original demanding unfavorable comparison, this adaptation comes across as a not-entirely-successful venture. Rebecca will still draw plenty of audiences, and there may be those who prefer this longer, prettier version with its newish bookends (the extended courtship on the Riviera and a finale in Cairo following a trial). The entire venture has good bones thanks to the original 1938 novel, previous screen adaptations for reference, and beautifully-crafted period settings and costumes meant to additionally evoke classical Hollywood style. But the remaining elements simply don't pull together well enough to summon the story's natural suspense or even a deep interest in the characters. Scott Thomas is the most compelling in her tight-lipped take on the scheming Mrs. Danvers, but Hammer feels surprisingly stiff. In trying to paint Maxim as emotionally distant, the character instead comes across as lacking profundity. James is believable as the ingénue at the film's start, but less so as the take-charge wife at the end. Parts of her developing psychological breakdown are handled especially clumsily, like one heavy-handed fusion of images of James collapsing, red-lit party-goers chanting "Rebecca," a body floating in the water, and fireworks exploding. Forgoing some of the moodiness and dark tones of the original and extending the narration to just over two hours have ultimately undermined the power of this story. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

It's impossible not to find something touching, funny, profound, sad, or inspiring of deeper thought in a film like this one. Yet precisely because there's so much packed in here, Life in a Day 2020 may best be watched -- and digested -- in segments. At about the one hour mark, the film dives into a montage of clips of wild animals, vast nature-scapes, industrial pollution, global climate change, and live food factories. It's such an important message, but after 60 minutes of humanity on display, the sustained emotion feels almost overwhelming. The same could be said of a section dedicated to Black Lives Matter protests in the US, which begins emotionally with a Black man driving by a house with Confederate flags and hinting that he keeps a gun around for self protection, and a Black woman who tearfully recalls that two of her brothers were killed in police custody. This film is a labor of love, and it's a major effort of collection, curation, and editing. The organizers received 324,000 videos that they whittled down to 87 minutes. They've broadly organized them into like material spread out over the course of a single day, from sun up to sun down. It's also book-ended by babies being born and elderly people reflecting on lives well lived. Surprisingly, it's not entirely focused on COVID, but the pandemic is omnipresent, including in a man who has made the spiders in his home his family, a segment on essential workers of all kinds, and people who have lost loved ones. There's much to be learned about each other, most importantly that there's more that unites us than separates us as humans on this planet. "What I fear the most is that my life will pass unnoticed," a young man from Northern Siberia says, echoing a common human sentiment, and perhaps encapsulating the ultimate value of a project like this one: To notice, to reflect, and to care about ourselves and each other. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

There's plenty of physical action here from Jason Momoa and young costar Isabela Merced, but their thinly-developed characters and an even slighter plot line undermine this film's reach. The concept of exploring the complicated American landscape of national politics, global pharmaceutical companies, and overpriced health care in Sweet Girl had a lot of potential. But the unraveling mystery is much more focused on the chase and violent fight scenes, which get replayed in a twist at the end, rather than the ideas. This means the resolution of the conspiracy that motivated the main characters' revenge journey comes as a let-down. In its place, the father-daughter relationship between Momoa and Merced offers some sweet and truthful moments of love, loyalty, and responsibility. A powerful scene shows Momoa flailing down hospital corridors looking for a private place to unleash howling sobs after his wife dies. It would've been great to know more about their characters and their backstory than just the pivotal moment that launched them into this scenario. They live in a run-down Pittsburgh apartment, subsist on junk food, and spend most of their free time at a boxing club. It's a compelling backdrop, but what else could we know about them? Who else do they have in their lives? What were their dreams and plans before Amanda died? Fleshing out these key characters would've made both them and their journey more interesting and plausible. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

In this lightweight third entry to the series, privileged teens spend their last summer before (Ivy League) college grappling with relationships and growing up. The Kissing Booth 3 will provide some closure for fans of the previous films, especially in its "Six years later" epilogue. But there's not much by way of deeper character development, and the story's central conflict -- which college (and therefore brother) Elle will choose -- doesn't really provide much conflict at all. Nor do storylines about the boys' parents selling their beach house, Chloe's parents getting a divorce, Marco still holding a flame for Elle, or high school relationships coming to an end. Molly Ringwald is sadly underused in this sequel, and disparate accents (including Australian Elordi's poking through as American Noah) are left unexplained. A montage of the teens' fulfillment of a bucket list of activities feels improbable, as does the extreme wealth on display. Likewise, in a scene where Elle, already feeling down, drops a bunch of trash when a bag tears, Lee tries to cheer her up by explaining that according to his mother, there are only two things worth spending "a little extra" on -- trash bags and bacon. The anecdote's lack of deeper meaning is reflective of the film as a whole. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.