Precious (15)
(Lee Daniels, 2009, Us)
Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey. 110 mins.
It sounds like a relentlessly depressing pile-up of miseries: the tale of a 1980s Harlem teenager who's poor, lonely, overweight, undereducated, abused by both parents, and pregnant for the second time by her father. And it gets worse after that. But, mercifully, this doesn't play by European social realist rules, throwing in flourishes of fantasy and even comedy, and offering glimmers of hope, real and imagined, to lighten its heroine's unenviable burden. It's still a harrowing watch, powerfully performed and earnestly authentic, but even as it wallows in the gutter, it's looking for the stars.
The Princess And The Frog (U)
(Ron Clements, John Musker, 2009, Us)
Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos. 97 mins.
Another Disney Princess™ for the merchandising range, sorry, cinematic tradition, and the first African-American one. True to latter-day Disney form, she's capable and motivated – until she's turned into a frog,...
(Lee Daniels, 2009, Us)
Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey. 110 mins.
It sounds like a relentlessly depressing pile-up of miseries: the tale of a 1980s Harlem teenager who's poor, lonely, overweight, undereducated, abused by both parents, and pregnant for the second time by her father. And it gets worse after that. But, mercifully, this doesn't play by European social realist rules, throwing in flourishes of fantasy and even comedy, and offering glimmers of hope, real and imagined, to lighten its heroine's unenviable burden. It's still a harrowing watch, powerfully performed and earnestly authentic, but even as it wallows in the gutter, it's looking for the stars.
The Princess And The Frog (U)
(Ron Clements, John Musker, 2009, Us)
Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos. 97 mins.
Another Disney Princess™ for the merchandising range, sorry, cinematic tradition, and the first African-American one. True to latter-day Disney form, she's capable and motivated – until she's turned into a frog,...
- 1/30/2010
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
A sweetly delightful Portuguese comedy. By Peter Bradshaw
Little by little, this entrancingly gentle and subtle comic film by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes stole my heart. It is a freewheeling, endlessly sweet-natured docu-fiction crossover piece, featuring a director called Gomes, a somewhat sleepy-eyed auteur who affects a tomato-red bomber jacket and preposterous white cap. The film follows a self-created, evolutionary path; it just goes with its own flow, summoning up memories of French film-makers such as Eric Rohmer and documentarists Nicolas Philibert and Raymond Depardon, and in its deliberate drift from fiction into fact, there is perhaps an echo of Pedro Costa.
It begins with the quasi-fictional Gomes and his crew constructing a teeteringly elaborate pattern of dominoes on the floor of a garage, apparently ready for a credit sequence: to Gomes's dismay, his producers blunder in, demanding an explanation for the lack of progress, knocking one domino and catastrophically...
Little by little, this entrancingly gentle and subtle comic film by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes stole my heart. It is a freewheeling, endlessly sweet-natured docu-fiction crossover piece, featuring a director called Gomes, a somewhat sleepy-eyed auteur who affects a tomato-red bomber jacket and preposterous white cap. The film follows a self-created, evolutionary path; it just goes with its own flow, summoning up memories of French film-makers such as Eric Rohmer and documentarists Nicolas Philibert and Raymond Depardon, and in its deliberate drift from fiction into fact, there is perhaps an echo of Pedro Costa.
It begins with the quasi-fictional Gomes and his crew constructing a teeteringly elaborate pattern of dominoes on the floor of a garage, apparently ready for a credit sequence: to Gomes's dismay, his producers blunder in, demanding an explanation for the lack of progress, knocking one domino and catastrophically...
- 1/28/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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