By Roger Costa
A MISTAKE
Mostly known for her comedic skills, Elizabeth Banks gives a career-best performance in this stirring moral thriller about personal choices, medical practices and professional principles.
Written and directed by Christine Jeffs (“Sylvia”, “Sunshine Cleaning”) it follows the investigation and consequences of a fatal human error made by lead surgeon Liz Taylor (Banks) and her team. There, a young patient dies, and Liz will take responsibility for the action, facing the harsh reality and consequences of medical malpractice. As she is investigated, and pressured by her colleagues, her partner and the patient’s parents demanding answers, she is confronted by the upending situation and the standards of her professional role.
Anchored by Banks’ revelatory dramatic turn and accurately observed, this is an utterly efficient and poignant medical-drama.
(Quiver Distribution. Opens Friday, September 20 at Quad Cinema. Actress Elizabeth Banks in person for selected shows)
EUREKA
One of the most acclaimed films coming out of last year’s Cannes, Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso’s triptych western is a deliriously intriguing and mind bending cinematic experience. Weaving three distinguished stories, spanning times and spaces, Alonso composes a lyrical, often sensual, alluring and mysterious canvas on the Amerindian culture and how colonialism has had a significant and impactful violent role in it.
Gloriously shot, at first in B&W, and then enhanced in splendid colors, it opens with the always reliable and charismatic Viggo Mortensen as a cowboy searching for his abducted daughter in the first act set in America’s old west. Then, it forwards to present day-South Dakota where a Native American female officer struggles to maintain peace in her community. Finally, it wraps up at the Brazilian rainforest where romance and chaos meet up while Indigenous workers dig for gold.
A visually-arresting, melancholic and wondrously metaphorical look at history, violence and colonialism, Alonso confirms him as an authentic Latin American auteur.
(Film Movement. Opens Friday, September 20 at Metrograph)
IN THE SUMMERS
Get your heart ready for one of this year’s most sensitive and touching family dramas. Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s feature debut will easily win your affection with its delicate, relatable and immersive portrait of resilience, acceptance and forgiveness.
Through the story of a wrongdoing father trying to reconnect to his two daughters during the course of their childhood summers, Samudio crafts a highly emotional and humane drama unfolding as subtle exercises of poetry. Tapping on relevant issues, she demonstrates incredible control and assurance of the material, delivering beautiful imagery, meditative narrative and extracting honest performances and perfect chemistry from the cast- including a breakthrough turn by Grammy award winning Puerto Rican musician René Pérez Joglar, commonly known as “Residente”.
Winner of the coveted Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it also took honors with the Best Directing Award, Samudio takes us through a journey of reconnection, healing, overcoming addiction and trauma with firm hands, announcing herself as major new voice.
(Music Box Films. Opens Friday, September 20 at IFC Center. Director and cast members in person for selected shows)
THE WAIT
In this intense, ultra-violent genre-defying horror/neo-western set in the Andalusian countryside, a worker at a hunting estate faces corruption and moral dilemma when he accepts a bribe from a veteran hunter. When tragedy strikes their lives are marked by guilty, hate and a haunting sense of loss.
Stylish and mysterious, director F. Javier Gutiérrez (“Rings”) imprints horror and surrealist elements to the narrative, creating a terrifying, vigorous and thrilling puzzle. Armed with great techniques of visual and sound, the result is an enigmatic and disturbing saga of grief and revenge.
(Film Movement. Opens in Theaters on Friday, September 20. Available On Demand on October 4)
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