THE WANNABE ***
Following her Oscar winning performance in “Boyhood”, Patricia Arquette continues to prove her talent with another remarkable personification as a drug-addicted battling her family and society in order to keep her love affair with a charming thief. A hit at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, writer-director Nick Sandow makes an homage to the ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ style, with this intriguing story about a couple of outlaws engaged in a robbery spree, while trying to gain attention and respect from the Gotti Family, the notorious gangster clan. Vincent Piazza is excellent as Thomas, a young man obsessed with the Crime lifestyle, allowing himself into decadence to experience the risky gangster business. He develops a strong bound with Rose, based on mutual encouragement that will turn into conflicts with everyone around them, family, authorities, neighbors and the most-wanted guys in New York. Based on true events, and set against important facts that stirred up controversy in America’s early 1990’s exposing Mafia’s mega-system of corruption in the area, director Sandow (who’s part of the TV hit “Orange is the New Black”) demonstrates competence and coherence with the material, without overdoing it or exploiting neither the issues of drugs or violence. It is a strangely dark love story about two criminals trying to make ends meet, and if fate cooperates, perhaps reach the billboards of fame.
DVD: THE DINNER
An observation on family and moral standards, “The Dinner” tells the complex story of a rage crime that complicates the lives of two wealthy families, involving their respective children. Italian director Ivano de Matteo analysis the devastating situation, raising questions such as how far parents will go to cover-up their children’s mistakes, and how can one stand strong for righteousness. The entire cast gives superb performances, showing respectable dramatic techniques, elevating the turbulence of emotions throughout the investigation. (A Film Movement Release)
ARABIAN NIGHTS VOL. 1 *****
One of this year’s most celebrated films, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’ first installation of the Arabian Nights trilogy is a love letter to his home country, his culture and his struggling people. The film opens with his observations on the working-class strikes around Portugal, as he listens to the men who lost their jobs. Suddenly he has a nervous breakdown and tries to escape, abandoning his project, but then captured by his crew, he’s forced to tell amazingly entertaining stories that mixes fantasy and reality. Gomes empties himself and becomes many characters, metaphorical, mystical, mysterious, and real people figures that will transcend his passion for the seventh art and for life itself, as well as his commitment to his people and nation. Throughout his narrative, he becomes a princess, a bunch of virgins, a wizard who helps some world leaders maintain a “hard-on”, a counselor agent investigating social injustice, political candidates persuading villagers, a burning love triangle between pre-teens and the amusing cockerel trapped in a cage awaiting his community’s decision whether to kill him or not. Fascinating, humorous and wisely sharp, Gomes created a marvelous dish for cinema lovers, a mosaic of the social, political and economical crisis infatuating Europe, and a meditation on human compassion. A Masterpiece! (Playing at Film Society of Lincoln Center)
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