To Sleep with Anger has the kind of distinctly sentimental tone that’s often mishandled in weaker films. This level of earnestness is hard to pull off, as it seemingly forgoes subtlety only to reveal greater subtleties beneath. At times, it swings too hard, but the genuinely felt performances and sensitive direction help the trickier material find its way. It’s a good family drama with a real sense of weight, naming its broader social criticism as well as a larger human…
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Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó 2023
I didn’t intend for my reviews of all the nominated shorts this year to be about structure, but this one in particular felt oddly empty. It’s well crafted in the sense that it looks quite good, but there’s not much a shape to its content. We see a few nice moments, and then it ends.
There’s also something overly simplifying or even reductive about the depictions of these two old women, but the last few minutes at least give them…
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always 2020
“Is someone hurting you?”
Silence speaks volumes, but only to those who understand the language; the men who take up space in Autumn’s world don’t speak it. They judge and project meaning on her silence, but they don’t interpret it how her cousin, mother, and medical professionals do. No monolithic experience of womanhood exists, but there is common ground that women walk on as they move through life. Autumn throws out a familiar set of vague answers to the variety…
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