Dina Paulson-McEwen

A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove) is a humanist piece of new Sweden cinema originally released in 2015, reminiscent of last year’s excellent work, Rams, from nearby Iceland. Both films carefully explore emotion after tragedy and offer knockout protagonist and supporting character performances. While the storyline here is not new—a group of young souls soften the heart of a persnickety ...[Read More]

Alice (Rachel Weisz) is in China cut open by a magician, in an ER room telling a patient to breathe, in Tanzania researching insects, and in a parked car spying on a suburban house. Complete Unknown begins by showing what it is to live as someone who, at the very least, is running from their past and has not developed an adult capacity to deal, and at the most, is inhabiting a semi-psychotic state...[Read More]

Morris from America is about xenophobia and stereotypes, bullying, living as expatriates and mourning the death of a wife and mother, but mostly it is about the tenacity carried out with a striking tenderness by Curtis (Craig Robinson), a newly single dad taking care of his teenage boy, Morris (Markees Christmas) in Heidelberg, Germany, where they are, as he puts it to his son, “the only two broth...[Read More]

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is an uplifting, gruff New Zealander film about family love. Ricky (Julian Dennison) comes from foster care to the home of Hec (Sam Neill) and his wife, Bella (Rima Te Wiata). Hec and Ricky stay away from each other initially, largely due to how similar they are. Both prefer nature and solitude to city life and small talk, and so they vet each other cautiously. Ricky trie...[Read More]

Tickled is a very smart documentary investigating our collective failures at the macro level. The legal system, the school system and our community ecosystem have “leakages.” Our failure has been forgetting we are linked and responsible for each other’s well-being, as the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders teach. We haven’t tried hard enough nor succeeded enough, and we know this because indiv...[Read More]

Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), a Sri Lankan refugee working as a housekeeper in France, explains to Brahim (Vincent Rottiers), the drug kingpin of their neighborhood, that in her culture a smile indicates understanding, expressing pain and happiness equally. The French, she says, think she is making fun of others or confused. The ability to communicate well with people close to you and the outsi...[Read More]

At the beginning of Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, Ed Meyers (a lackluster Giovanni Ribisi), a thirty-something journalist with the Miami Globe in 1959, claims that Ernest “Papa” Hemingway (Adrian Sparks), saved his life. He says the author helped him become a writer and provided him with hope during an orphaned childhood. After Ed was fired for misspelling “maybe,” he stayed up nights during his probat...[Read More]

“Music is the stuff of dreams,” declares a psychic medium in the heart-struck 2015 French film, Marguerite. Parisian opera singer Marguerite (Catherine Frot) lives in a dream world as a venerated soprano, and we are acutely aware of our participation as voyeurs; our vision, by contrast, is startlingly awake, or in other words, realist. I nearly longed to feel the inside of her madly constructed an...[Read More]

Touched with Fire asks whether love between two thirty-something adults with bipolar disorder can be successful, loosely wondering about the intersection of sensuality, realism, and mental illness. It seems interested to extract a rubric explaining the connection between people with mental illness who are creatives. The film meanders through this exploration rather than makes up its mind as a crea...[Read More]