FILMS from AFAR

This review was originally published with The Alliance of Women Film Journalists Calle Málaga  is a warm and surprising tale about aging, family and sense of place. Veteran Carmen Maura stars as an elderly Spanish woman, raised as part of an immigrant community in Tangier, Morocco, who steadfastly refuses to spend her sunset years doing anything other than living the life she desires. She is a quiet yet determined 70-something heroine. Tangier-born director Maryam Touzani, who co-wrote the script with regular collaborator (and husband) Nabil Ayouch, has constructed a nuanced and sensitive film that infuses its story, star and setting with layers of meaning.  It’s a cliché that people often treat older women as invisible. In  Calle Málaga , Maura’s María Angeles makes invisibility an asset. It allows her to covertly move back into her empty apartment after her daughter, Clara (Marta Etura), forces her to put it on the market and sell off her things. It permits her to skirt the law and mount a makeshift speakeasy, earning enough money to slowly buy her furniture back. It lets her embark on a passionate affair in the privacy of her own space. In her refusal to leave Tangier and move to Madrid with Clara, María Angeles shows she knows her place and values her heritage there. In Moroccan society, as Touzani gently suggests, that also means knowing how to maneuver within male-dominant public spaces. María Angeles has friendly relations with all the local shopkeepers, police officers and young men on street corners, who happily extend her tabs, run her errands or even turn a blind eye on her legal evasions. Here she’s not invisible, but the strings she pulls are. She nods knowingly at the matronly lady on an adjacent balcony and relies on female neighbors for help with her affairs; the women control what goes on inside. Like her best childhood friend, nun Josefa (María Alfonso Rosso), who lives in a cloistered convent and keeps a vow of silence, and who may end up having enjoyed the most freedom of all – in full control of her environment and even her own thoughts. But men aren’t the bad guys in  Calle Málaga . When antiques dealer Abslam (Ahmed Boulane) finds himself drawn by María Angeles’ quiet determination, the two embark on a tender affair. He dotes on her needs, physical and emotional, in a way that surprises her after a lifetime of a comfortable but passionless marriage. Touzani captures the pair naked, slowly swaying to music, each savoring the touch of the other’s body. If there’s an antagonist in this story, it’s daughter Clara, whose inability to manage her own life leads her to nearly deflate her mother’s full one. But Touzani crafts Clara as a character to be pitied, not feared, a sad contrast to María Angeles’ vitality and sense of self. Dressed in drab colors, her straight hair tugging down her makeup-less features, Clara is a middle-aged mom reeling from a nasty divorce, denying herself dessert and scrambling as life passes her by. Lacking her mother’s pluck, she weeps at her plight but is seemingly incapable of changing it.  Clara's dourness colors the film’s grayer first act. It’s not until she leaves town, and María Angeles breaks out of the stifling senior residency where Clara has placed her, that the film – which won the Audience Award in the Spotlight section at last fall’s Venice Film Festival and was selected to represent Morocco in the International Oscar race (and will open the Málaga Film Festival in March) – really finds its rhythm. Maura’s charming performance is at the core. Through it all, María Angeles keeps her nails painted an impeccable red, one of several touches of symbolic coloring Touzani and DP Virginie Surdej keep coming back to. They convey her unyielding passion in scarlet nails and lips, clothing and décor. The ruby flowers she nurtures on her balcony and sprinkles as a romantic gesture for Abslam suggest her ability to blossom where planted. And when she leaves roses on family members’ tombstones, including one she pieces back together after it’s shattered, we understand her determination to stand her ground. If the damask rose is Morocco’s national flower, Touzani’s María Angeles may be the unofficial mascot of the Spaniards who have made Tangier their permanent home.   Images courtesy of Strand Releasing

This article was originally published by The Alliance of Women Film Journalists Non-English-language feature films received a   record number of nominations to the Oscars this year. The nominations show the Academy is "Becoming a Citizen of the World,”  The Hollywood Reporter  proclaimed on Jan. 22, citing the #OscarsSoWhite backlash from a decade ago that prompted the Academy to diversity its membership, including now a full 25% of voting members from abroad. But there’s another way to look at this. This year’s international diversification might also reveal that the Academy is cognizant of two simultaneous trends that are likely to shape its future. On the one hand, the Oscars have become increasingly less relevant to US audiences – their viewership is aging and relatively stagnant, which suggests their cultural significance for US audiences is sliding. On the other hand, international audiences and filmmakers still pay very close attention to the Oscars. The Academy seems to finally be waking up to the fact that the future of the Oscars may well depend on the international, not the domestic, market. Oscar Who ? The Oscars audience has been flagging for years. Although viewership has been growing slightly each year since hitting an all-time low of 10.4 million viewers in 2021, reports suggest that those 55 and over still make up the largest demographic loyal to the ceremony. Anecdotally, I surveyed a small group of my US college students, all enrolled in at least one film course, about the Oscars. The majority (60%) expressed interest in the awards, and 73% said an Oscar nomination or win would motivate them to watch a movie. But the other 40% said they don’t pay much attention to the Oscars (60% said the same of the International category), and less than half had watched the ceremony in full more than once in the last five years. The Oscars have tried to appeal to younger audiences by moving away from a solely linear-TV model, including a livestream on Hulu last year that was reportedly glitchy and added fewer overall viewers than hoped. This year, the Academy announced the Oscars will move from ABC to YouTube in 2029. The kinds of films nominated have also changed in the last 15 years, shifting from blockbuster films with mass appeal, like 1998 sensation Titanic (a time when the show was watched by almost three times as many people), to artsier, international and more message-driven films, like Best Picture winners The Artist (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2014) and Moonlight (2015). This was all before the Academy introduced new diversity and inclusion requirements for Best Picture nominees in the 2020’s but after an unfavorable 2012 LA Times investigation found the Academy membership of the time was 94% white and 77% male, with a median age of 62. Of course, that only reflected the realities of Hollywood: “the academy's demographics mirror the industry's,” the LA Times wrote. Sluggish ratings today might still have to do with that demographic disconnect (or perception thereof), or perhaps a rising “America First” conservatism in the US less interested in artsy or international films (some suggest this year’s big studio nominees, One Battle After Another and Sinners , are a response to that). The explosion of streaming post-COVID, and more fragmented viewing options in general, has surely contributed as well. “Viewership for the annual Oscars show has long served as a cultural barometer — a way for Hollywood to gauge its relevance amid shifting political winds, fracturing media habits and changing social values,” The New York Times summarized last March. Yet, as the same article pointed out, that viewership could also count “people watching overseas, people catching a recording a few days later,” not just “live viewing in the United States.” The “International” Ghetto The fact that so many international films earned nominations this year is a welcome and long overdue awakening. In its domestic PR role, the Academy has naval gazed year after year, nominating almost exclusively US productions in top categories and ignoring dozens of remarkable and deserving global films for anything beyond the International category, turning this into a kind of ghetto expected to accommodate any and all films made outside the US or not in English. But only one per country, of course. And let’s not get started on the ethnocentrism of the official category’s previous name, “Foreign-Language” from its inception in 1956 until its rebranding as “International” in 2019. Foreign to whom? It’s also noteworthy that Academy voters have long shown a preference for European films, which are far and away the most frequent nominees and winners of the category. There are other issues. Nationality is rarely clear-cut in international co-productions. When the Academy rules changed in 2006 to allow for films in non-national languages, France was shortlisted with films like Turkey-set  Mustang  (2015) and Iran-set  It Was Just An Accident  (this year), Iran-shot  The Seed of the Sacred Fig  (2025) represented Germany, and Germany-set  The Zone of Interest  won for the UK. Another eligibility restriction – that minimum 50 percent of dialogue be in a language other than English – has also caused issues. In 2019, the Academy refused the entry of Nigerian film "Lionheart" in the International category because it was filmed mostly in English, although English is the official language of Nigeria. Meanwhile, controversies regularly surface over individual countries’ management of their nominations and claims of government interference. In 2023, the Academy tinkered with the International nomination process, requiring each country’s selection committee to have at least 5 members, 50% of whom are “filmmakers, artists and craftspeople,” in order to minimize political interference. Even so, in 2024 , dozens of Greek filmmakers protested their country’s selection process, withdrawing their films from consideration and publicizing “serious doubts on the credibility and validity of the procedure.” Some have called on the Academy to create its own International Oscar selection committee. Netflix wants to do away with the minimum 7-day theatrical release requirement . Right now, around 1,000 Academy members volunteer to vote in the International category, agreeing to watch 15 pre-selected films each. The most voted of those make the first shortlist of 15, all of which must be watched by members voting on the final shortlist of the five official nominees. Oscars’ Sway Abroad Despite it all, more than 90 countries faithfully submit films each year for consideration in the International Oscar category, demonstrating the status the awards still have globally. The obvious expectation is that an Oscar, even just a nomination, will have a direct impact on distribution sales, audience interest and box office. Marketers take advantage of a nomination to publicize films that might otherwise elicit little notice, even in their home markets. After South Korea’s Parasite became the first non-English film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar (it also won Best Director, International Film and Original Screenplay) in 2020, it went on to earn more than $262 million at the worldwide box office, including $53.8 million domestically, making it the fifth top-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the domestic market. In fact, most of the films on that top grossers list received at least one Oscar nomination in their day. For a filmmaker from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and so on, an Oscar nomination can mean the difference between making a next film, or not. It can help ensure interest and a hope for financing in fragile industries around the world. It serves as a calling card to the international industry and Hollywood. Nominees are often positioned back home as representing their entire industry and even country at the Oscars. “There's no doubt that winning an Oscar for a foreign film is a huge, important thing in terms of career potential,” Danish director Susanne Bier, twice nominated and one-time winner of the International Oscar, told me in an interview for AWFJ in 2023. “It opens a door where you can actually meet people, which is the first step, and it’s important. Then your work has to kind of live up to that because there are no guarantees, but it does actually matter.” Oscar nominee Joachim Trier, whose Sentimental Value earned a whopping nine Oscar nominations this year, told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month: “Part of being a filmmaker is what I call paying promo tax. It’s a privilege. It means that you are being seen and people care. I don’t take it lightly. I come from Norway, a tiny country, the suburbs of Europe. We’re very grateful when anything we make travels.” Kleber Mendonca Filho, director of The Secret Agent , the Brazilian film with four nominations this year, explained the importance of the American awards season for the film’s trajectory back home: “The reaction in Brazil is huge. The film is still doing very well in cinemas. It’s gaining more screens now because of the Golden Globes and this week with the [Oscar] nominations, so it’s a great moment,” he told Deadline . In becoming more international in its membership, and in nominating international films in categories beyond the International ‘ghetto,’ the Academy is acknowledging that the Oscars today are arguably more closely followed and hold more significance for audiences abroad than they do back home. If delayed viewers are counted in future ratings, and if the ceremony begins inviting more presenters from abroad (and not just from the handful of films nominated), that international audience may well be the Oscar ceremony’s best bet for the future. Images, from top: This year's International Oscar (among other categories) nominees Sentimental Value (Neon), The Secret Agent (Neon), It Was Just An Accident (Neon), Sirat (Neon), The Voice of Hind Rajab (Willa), and Parasite director Bong Joon-ho in 2020 ( Oscars.org ).

This emotional documentary deftly combines foot-tapping concert footage with heartbreaking individual stories of living with—and searching for a cure for—a rare disease. It would be difficult not to be moved by the stories in Matter of Time of children and families living with a rare genetic condition that can shorten life spans and involve significant pain. We find out two of the profiled patients died before the film even premiered. Vedder is still himself on stage, cursing like a sailor, but he also chokes up and sings his heart out. Matter of Time deserves viewers' time. This review was originally published by Common Sense Media Images courtesy of Netflix

Her 34-year-old son was inaugurated as New York City’s first Muslim, South Asian, and African-born mayor on New Year’s Day, following an election that shocked the old guard and thrilled a new generation. In mom Mira Nair’s words, Zohran Mamdani “more than won the weekend” with his election. Leave it to a filmmaker to draw the box office analogy. Nair, aka Momdani , may be trending now because of her son, but the India-born filmmaker, 68, has been blazing trails for decades. “I’m going to be the mother of New York City,” she told reporters after her son’s swearing in. Mamdani embodies a lot of firsts, but Nair came first. Her films have long tackled complex social issues and captured universal themes in individual stories from around the globe, earning her dozens of glass-ceiling-breaking accolades, including an Oscar nomination. It’s not hard to divine Nair’s legacy in her progressive son—yet he is just one of her creations. His political messages echo themes seen consistently in her work over the last four decades, not to mention in the tides of her exceptional life, where she has modeled balancing work and motherhood, art and commerce, creativity and public service. Continue reading in PROVOKED magazine Photo credits: Mamdani by Dmitryshein ; Nair at the 2008 IIFW Masterclass Directors Meet by Bollywoodhungama.com .

After becoming one of the first countries in Europe to draft a law concerning the use of AI, Spanish filmmakers are experimenting, with caution: "We need to embrace it, but it cannot replace art." In March, Spain ’s government became one of the first countries in Europe to approve a draft law concerning AI, almost a year to the date after formal approval of the landmark European Artificial Intelligence Act provided a common legal framework for the development, commercialization and use of AI systems across Europe. AI is one of the most divisive issues in the entertainment industry today. A week after Spain’s draft law was unveiled, 400 Hollywood creatives signed a letter of concern about copyright protections for the arts and entertainment sector, pushing back against OpenAI and Google’s appeals to the U.S. government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted works.  Meanwhile, James Cameron recently suggested filmmakers could save 50 percent on big-budget films by using AI, to which Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos replied he hoped AI could also make them “10 percent better.”  In a smaller industry like Spain’s, these are powerful arguments. “Technological advances are a welcome and important boost for an industry accustomed to fighting against giants, like high production budgets and excessive bureaucracy,” says Beatriz Pérez de Vargas, director of AI Alter Ego, the Invisible Intelligence , a three-chapter docuseries on AI for public broadcaster RTVE, which also won awards for its use of AI. Daniel H. Torrado, director of The Great Reset , which he bills as Spain’s, if not Europe’s, first entirely AI-generated feature, agrees. “All creators have a ton of projects in the closet, because many of them either can’t find funding or there are production issues to get them off the ground,” he says. His apocalyptic tech thriller — about an AI borne from the mind of a rogue hacker that threatens to destroy the world — “would have had unaffordable costs and production times” without AI, he says. “AI allowed us to simulate complex decisions early on and experiment without the budgetary risk that often paralyzes many independent creators.”  But, Torrado adds, “human oversight was constant. Every artistic, narrative andemotional decision went through my hands. AI was a powerful tool, not a substitute for the creator.” That’s a theme among those experimenting with AI right now. “We need to embrace it, but it cannot replace art,” says film and commercials director Paco Torres, who gives AI training sessions to private companies and government organizations around the world. “We cannot lose artists, the white paper, the creation from nothing, the emotions, the human interactions, the imperfection … We need to fail, to not be perfect — this is important because it’s how we get emotion.” Read the full story in The Hollywood Reporter

The psychologist who popularized the concept of Emotinonal Intelligence talks about leadership styles. Originally published in SUCCESS+

When there’s a sudden, unexpected gap in leadership, business operations can go haywire. Having a detailed succession plan is the blueprint to keep everything running smoothly.   Imagine a scenario where the leader of your organization has stepped down without advance notice and nobody is ready to take their place. Or a similar situation: a company finds itself at a loss when an owner who kept his leadership expertise entirely to himself winds up in the hospital unexpectedly for several months. These are just two examples of why succession planning is essential for any size organization. And they’re both examples that Jevon Powell, an organizational psy- chologist and president, owner and senior consultant of Seattle-based firm Scontrino Powell, has seen over his nearly 30 years in the business. In the first scenario, Powell says, “the organization was caught kind of flat-footed. They had to go to a temporary or an interim president. Now they’re being more thoughtful about what their next president needs to look like.” In the second scenario, he says, the leader’s “organization almost collapsed in his absence because nobody could take over his job.” “Effective, consistent succession planning helps prevent significant gaps in leadership, so if somebody leaves unexpectedly, we know what to do,” Powell says. Succession planning is the process of identifying key positions in an organization and nurturing a talent pipeline to potentially fill those positions as the need arises. As the scenarios above indicate, succession planning helps companies avoid gaps in business operations, loss of institutional knowledge or unnecessarily bumpy leadership transitions. It engages employees and adds value to organizations. “There’s a lot of research that highlights the importance of succession planning,” Powell says. “There is less consistent research around exactly which tools are going to be the most useful or the most effective. But certainly... one of management’s prime responsibilities is to ensure that they have a succession plan in place.” So how does an organization go about doing that? Read the full story in SUCCESS+ magazine

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+

Published January 2026

Buoyed by a nuanced and captivating performance from Brazilian star Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent is a mystery that twists and simmers its way to its only possible, reality-based, heartrending closure. The film took home top awards from last May’s Cannes Film Festival and has rightfully landed on year-end “best of” lists. Now it’s a major season awards contender, making the shortlist for the International Oscar and landing three top Golden Globe nominations (for drama, foreign language and – a first for a Brazilian man – dramatic actor). The story centers on Armando, a widowed former university professor turned political refugee using the pseudonym Marcelo as he hides out in 1977 Brazil. When a pair of hitmen are hired to take Armando out, he’s told to flee the country, but he won’t go without his young son, Fernando. He tells his story on a recorded audiotape (with some explanatory scenes fleshed out in flashback). Decades later, the tape is reviewed by a young university researcher who saves a copy and takes it to Armando’s son, now grown (also played by Moura). Even as details of Armando’s story are only slowly revealed, which could cause confusion for some viewers (or even turn some off from the purposefully meandering, nearly three-hour movie), Moura’s blend of sensitivity and strength – and the production team’s spellbinding capture of period details – infuse the mystery with a deeper significance that holds the viewer’s attention. In ways, Armando stands in for an entire nation facing a brutal, 21-year military dictatorship – and still living life in the meanwhile (as in a scene where the hitmen pursue their target through the busy streets of Carnival celebrations). He’s on the run, fearful for his life, still hopeful for his future, impossibly brave in the face of imminent threats – and ultimately doomed. In ways, he’s also the male counterpart to Fernanda Torres’ role last year as Eunice Paiva, a woman investigating the forced disappearance of her politician husband, based on real historical figures, in Walter Salles’ 1970s-set I’m Still Here . (It’s surely not lost on the Agent team that Torres became the first Brazilian actress to win an acting Golden Globe last year, and the film took home the International Oscar). Perhaps it’s telling that Agent is the second Brazilian film in as many years to tackle this ugly historical record. Could the current political climate be inspiring a cautionary revival of historical memory? While different, both films rely on simmering central performances, minute period details and a subtle rendering of the fear people lived with under the brutal regime. The violence is palpable in both films, but in Agent , it’s made more explicit in some very bloody scenes. And the regime, or the threat Armando faces, is likened to a predator shark via a substory involving a human leg found in the belly of a tiger shark and later imagined in an absurdly comical way to be terrorizing the city. The national obsession with the story of the shark and the leg is paralleled in the film’s storyline by the 1977 release of the film Jaws . This is just one of writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s nods to the cultural role of cinema of that era, and just one of the elements of the film’s masterful period production detail, also including the music, a saturated color palette and the use of widescreen and split screen. The still used as the poster in the US, showing Moura in period wardrobe framed by a large mustard-colored oval phone booth with a red pay phone, perfectly captures that studied 70s look. Review originally published by AWFJ.org Images courtesy of Neon

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.

When I first saw  The Breakfast Club  at my local theater in 1985, I sat through two back-to-back screenings. My companion didn’t want to be seen in the lobby crying after the first show. That was the effect this film had on many of us Gen X-ers. Looking back now, it’s clear why—honest movies about teen life were rare back then. But today, I’m also a little embarrassed by  how  we were seen. When my teenage daughter first watched  The Breakfast Club  and predecessor  Sixteen Candles , she was shocked at what we had accepted as “normal” when we were her age. Ch-Ch-Changes Molly Ringwald, co-star of both iconic films, dropped a bomb in 2018 when she described those beloved artifacts as “racist, misogynistic, and, at times, homophobic.” Ringwald’s reassessment raised a question we’re still wrestling with—how to honor the cultural touchstones of our youth without ignoring what they got wrong. Forty years later, the film feels like a time capsule of everything we’ve outgrown—and everything we still haven’t. On the occasion of  The Breakfast Club  turning 40 this year, I took one of my best friends from high school to see it again in theaters. We were reminded of what we’d forgotten about those days, what this movie pioneered, and what its shortcomings reveal about a culture desperately due for change. One welcome difference: We were old enough to sip wine while watching this time. Continue article here ---> https://provokedmagazine.com/the-breakfast-club-turns-40-a-little-worse-for-the-wear/ Image courtesy of Universal Pictures