Tag: international brightlight film festival

By Owen Gleiberman According To The variety A couple of months ago, I had a movie experience that truly shook me up. It was early December, and I was in the middle of my end-of-the-year marathon, catching up with the big prestigious awards-season films I’d missed. One of them was “I’m Still Here,” Walter Salles’ acclaimed true-life drama, set in Brazil in 1970, about a family whose exuberant and loving existence falls off a cliff when the father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), is taken in for police questioning by the country’s military dictatorship. His wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), is told that it’s a routine interrogation, and that he’ll be back within a matter of hours. But that doesn’t happen. The hours stretch into days, then weeks, and then months. He is never heard fro...

By Siddhant Adlakha According To The variety The second feature from Kang Mi-ja — and her first after a gap of 17 years — “Spring Night” is a tender, compact relationship drama about ships passing in the night, buoyed by a pair of stellar performances working in completely different modes. Adapted from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel, its tale of an alcoholic woman and an arthritic man meeting in middle age has a fairytale-like quality, and an oblique telling that skips through time in both unique and familiar ways. While this temporal hopscotch helps it re-create intriguing sensations, it prevents the film from completely connecting, despite the occasionally shattering moments its actors createThe way Kang introduces her characters has a definitive quality bordering on prescriptive, but...

By Peter Debruge According To The variety Flying high in one of the world’s most male-dominated film industries, Chinese writer-director Vivian Qu follows up her acclaimed 2017 drama “Angels Wear White” with the almost-good “Girls on Wires.” Focused on the uneasy reunion between two estranged cousins who team up to beat the cycle of drug abuse and debt that’s been dragging their family down for decades, this is ambitious, moral-minded cinema for a mainstream Chinese audience, and as such, it seems only fair to forgive the kind of hammy acting and manipulative melodrama Americans accept from Clint Eastwood and Tyler Perry movies. There’s something charmingly old-fashioned in the way Qu tries to move viewers, using flashbacks to memories between cutie-pie kiddos Fang Di and T...