Reviews

Attachment is a modern-day thriller/horror film with no violence or blood, just fear of the supernatural lurking in the atmosphere. The story involves Jewish mysticism-what non-mystics would call superstitions to ward off demons and evil. The only way to talk about the film risks a spoiler, for the plot's clues are so subtly woven into the action as to be missed. Be forewarned: unless you keep an unswerving eye on the camera's focus and listen acutely to the dialogues' subtext, puzzlement may result. And the epilogue's playful twist only adds to audience uncertainty. At the same time, it is this very eeriness about the presence of invisible evil that disturbs us in a marvelous way.

The film moves briskly and features three female protagonists, two of them-Maja and Chana-antagonists for the love of the third, Leah. Chana is Leah's Jewish mother and Maya is Leah's non-Jewish lover. A fourth character, Lev, Chana's Orthodox brother-in-law and religious bookstore owner, is a scholar of the Kabbalah-Jewish mysticism that has, as Lev tells us, "the power to unlock the secrets of the universe and ward off evil." Chana also knows and practices the Kabbalah's esoteric rituals that include amulets, heaps of salt in the corners of rooms, candles lit at night, and soup concoctions made with chants to activate their magical powers-incantations like those of the witches in Macbeth, their cauldron bubbling with portentous vapors. We meet shopkeepers in London's Orthodox neighborhood, home to Leah, Chana, and Lev. These vendors also know the mystic traditions and secretly sell Chana the sacred ingredients she needs for the rituals she performs for Leah, her lovely and charismatic daughter.

The film begins with Leah, a graduate student, meeting Maja during a research trip to Denmark. The two fall in love and return to Leah's London flat, located above her mother Chana's flat. The plot then takes off with sinister and suspenseful sounds and inexplicable happenings. Lev shows Maja a book from his shop about "the other side." He turns the pages, pointing out supernatural beings who are evil, such as the Dybbuk, the tortured soul of a dead person who possesses a living person's body, causing that person derangement and death-unless the Dybbuk can be expelled. Secret rituals can attempt to exorcise a Dybbuk, Lev tells Maja, but they are life threatening to those who perform them, and "nowadays out of favor, deemed dangerous. The Talmud forbids black magic and sorcery."

Leah's increasingly strange condition and her mother's even stranger behavior, feeds the suspense and mystery of the movie. Catastrophe looms in the atmosphere. Uncertainty rivets each ticking minute: Who is good, who is evil? Is Chana a witch? Is Lev dangerous? What is going on that we do not yet understand? And can Maja-the only innocent one in this scary coterie-save her beloved from the invisible evil clutches moving in at an ever faster rate? Attachment offers viewers a fabulous, bated-breath film journey.

Sofie Grabol (Chana) deserves special note for her role as Leah's mother. She fully embodies Chana's deep psychic pain for the life of her daughter. Every detail of Chana's internal, turmoiled state brims in her facial expressions, her movements and speech. It is as if she herself is possessed by a terrible power slowly destroying her. Attachment eschews back story-we learn little about the characters before the film's present moment, and that is all we need to be in the grip of this thrilling tale.

"Maarriage Story," written and directed by Noah Baumbach, stirs a lot of thoughts for audiences. It gives a realistic depiction of a youngish couple with a child going through divorce. Adam Driver plays the husband Charlie, a rising-star, theater director in New York, and Scarlett Johansson plays his wife Nicole, a talented actress in his plays. Laura Dern plays Nicole's tough L.A. divorce lawyer. Released by Netflix, the movie is billed as a drama/comedy, but there is no comedy in this film's sad, realistic portrayal of two decent persons' drifting apart, with one of them deciding to leave. After the separation, horrendous acrimony slowly builds until a final, emotional blow-up shatters everyone-the couple and the audience.

Whose point of view tells this story? The man's or the woman's? Or, was the take-away for a man watching this film different from the take-away for a woman? Having thoroughly experienced the couple's feelings, I, a woman, left the theater wondering if a man had experienced the characters' heartbreak differently from me. I felt it must be so, for the film's point of view lacked clarity.

I called a friend, a male and a millennial psychologist, and indeed his take-away was wholly different from mine. While I identified and sympathized with Nicole's stunted potential in a marriage where she served her rising-star husband, who loved her and their family life, but had no true interest in her "being," who she was, as his passion and focus were totally on himself and his work and ambition. Everything else was rote for him and done according to the book of what was right and currently "enlightened," such as how to be a good father, a considerate household partner, and a good, fair, and beloved director to his troupe.

When, as happens in long marriages, Nicole lost interest in sex, Charlie found sex with the stage manager of his company. No, he didn't love her, he just needed that kind of intimacy and ego-gratification. He is god in his world. But the affair isn't why Nicole leaves. She leaves because at age 40ish, she realizes she isn't fulfilling her own life, her own gifts, her own passion, and she will never be able to if she stays with Charlie to serve his life and his success, which includes receiving a MacArthur grant for $600,000 to further advance his talent. Moreover, his new play is going to Broadway. His power and recognition are only going to keep growing while she stays as she is-his dependable wife, his actress in second place, his competent family partner, his solace and safety when home in the nest she provides.

As in all marriages that begin in the mid-twenties, the partners evolve with time and their risk of not evolving together is high. Charlie and Nicole clearly love and care about each other, but the marriage is over for Nicole if she wants to live, if she wants an authentic, fulfilling life. She returns to her mother's home in L.A. when a pilot TV series offers her a role. She takes their son Henry along. It's not certain the show will take-off, so the trip is presented as short-term to see what happens. Once there, however, life feels so good to Nicole-her true identity is able to emerge, not only as an actress free from the shadow of her husband's greatness, but also as a future director herself, which is her dream. Henry also loves living in L.A. with Nicole's active, extended family life that includes cousins. The only problem is, Charlie's life is in New York, so that his career and ambition become bombed by Nicole's decision to remain in L.A. when the pilot succeeds. But it's not just the pilot that makes her stay. It's her good feelings about herself, about having a meaningful life, her right just as much as his. In L.A., she's not Charlie's appendage anymore, which was fine in her twenties when she worshiped him and came under his wing, but it's not fine now in her maturity. She has her own developed talent, equal to his when freed from its cage.

My male friend's take-away was different. He saw Charlie as the victim of Nicole's manipulations. She left New York knowing her L.A. stint was going to be permanent. She tricked him, and now has the child legally in L.A. causing a custody suit. Her character was shallow while his was deep. Not only that, but Adam Driver was a far better actor than Scarlett Johansson. And Nora, the aggressive L.A. lawyer, was creepy, hideous-he shuddered just remembering her.

I want to pause here and say that Nora, portrayed as L.A.'s toughest, man-gouging divorce lawyer for women, also affected me as a female viewer. She's groomed pejoratively: slinky, skin-revealing clothes , long blond hair incongruous with her aging face, and a fake way of communicating with her new client, all saccharine in order to win her business. Why was Nora presented this way? Perhaps to mock L.A./Hollywood culture when it comes to divorce, for Charlie's L.A. male lawyer is even worse. These characters are driven by money and how much you can get from your future ex-spouse; no concern for damage done to children and the parents in such an antagonistic, bitter, and volatile tug of war. It's crass and tragic.

But there's more to consider. Everything that spouts from Nora's smart, fighter lips about the double standard is true. Who is listening to her? Perhaps some members of the female audience. I heard her and as a result, overlooked her unappealing traits because she spoke the truth about male-female relationships and how society condones men and condemns women in the same situation. My male friend couldn't tolerate her, and because of her money-grasping and exterior traits, he felt even more that Nicole was a conniving manipulator and Charlie a victim. Again, the film's point of view comes up. Was everything Nicole said to Charlie about her deepest feelings and why she was leaving, and Nora's pronouncements about the double standard, part of the script for the truth they told or part of the script to mock women in favor of Charlie the battered hero?

It would be interesting to set up a poll to compare the male and female responses to this movie-and I welcome hearing from you. The film ends nicely, because Nicole and Charlie are able to go back to their original, honest and caring roots and dump the lawyers in their divorce. And Charlie accepts the reality that Nicole is not coming back and figures out a way to make fruitful changes in his professional life in order to be near his son. But what is the film's point of view about that, about Charlie making changes to accommodate the divorce? My point of view is: good solution. My friend's point of view might be: she forced him to wreck his career, give up his New York life and passion. Nora the lawyer might say: This film perpetuates the way society has always viewed women as demons; it upholds the superior integrity and value of men. And the film? We don't leave the theater knowing the film's point of view, but my closest guess is: Charlie's beleaguered treatment deserves our support. Hopefully it's a wrong guess.

Director Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian drops you right into daily life in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa during the long Ethiopian Civil War. The year is 1989, and American audiences plunge into a completely new culture with the backdrop of a chaotic war, where teenage boys are "kidnapped" to supply the government's army.

The protagonist Mina (Betalehem Asmamawe), 16, is Jewish and lives with her grandmother (Weyenshiet Belachew) and her brother Rata (19), who has lost his arm in the war. A Christian woman and her son, Eli (Yohanes Muse), also live with the family. Mina grew up with Eli, and now, in adolescence, they are in love. The family goes to great lengths to hide Eli from the constant army raids to round up boys. When her chores are done, Mina steals away to meet Eli at their trysting spot, a giant fig tree.

A wheeling-dealing government official arranges papers and transportation for Jewish citizens to immigrate to Israel, and Mina's grandmother has been working with the woman to arrange the family's escape. Mina's mother is already in Israel. But Mina's distraught-how can they leave Eli and his mother behind?

The film captures "first love"-its childlike innocence awakening to sexual desire. These beautiful scenes between Mina and Eli, more than anything else in the movie, bring us into the family circle and the terrible ordeals the members endure. We experience what it really feels like to witness a son or your love being snatched by the enemy-being captive and abused to face what horrible fate?

Because we dive straight into the lives of Mina's family without any back story or exposition, we have to work fast to learn the characters' names, their customs, the war situation, and the plot. This full-immersion method of storytelling is the most effective way for an audience to experience a foreign world and crisis situation as if in it themselves.

In Fig Tree, women play a strong role. They absorb all the tragedies occurring around them; they keep life going for everyone else. They're the bulwark and the source of wisdom for children and men to depend on.

The movie's cinematography also tells the story (and won Israel's equivalent of an Oscar). Even though we're in a tense, scary, unpredictable war zone, the film is quiet, told more by the actors' faces and the scenery than through their dialogue. We become familiar with this setting and its culture; we become part of the community. Mina's family could be ours; we know the members that well, We easily identify with one character's anguished words, "I can't deal with all their evil anymore!"

Fig Tree is a beautiful, honest look at our world and the violence and cruelty that pervades it.

The story of basketball superstar Chamique Holdsclaw goes a long way toward helping to destigmatize mental illness. This riveting documentary about her life-Mind/Game (directed by Rick Goldsmith)-also examines how athletes, in particular, avoid getting help when they feel depressed, because part of being an athlete is not showing weakness or vulnerability. From age eleven, Chamique loved the movement and art of playing basketball. Though she didn't realize it at the time, the game also vented her pain, anger, and frustration caused mainly by her difficult family life-an alcoholic mother, a father with mental illness, and her own care for mother and younger siblings. At ten she went to live with her grandmother, who put love, encouragement, self-discipline, and stability into her life. "Take out your aggression on the court," her grandmother told her. Years later, after suffering the ups and downs of clinically diagnosed depression, Chamique realized that it was actually mania that partly fueled her college and WNBA stardom. The drive, the aggression, the feeling of omnipotence came from a mood high. Unfortunately, her bipolar diagnosis didn't come until a manic episode in 2012 resulted in violence and Chamique's arrest. In the end, the injured party-her former teammate and girlfriend-dropped the charges, spurring Chamique to make a lifetime commitment to both her well-being and her advocacy for greater and global mental health awareness. As she tells the camera honestly, with a touch of wistfulness in her eyes, that mania's edge has powerful allure. It makes her and others "want to feel life!" The meds that keep her stable, healthy, and productive take that thrilling high down a peg or two. But that's okay, for as a psychiatrist in the film tells us, the majority of people with mental illness who get help return to work and lead highly productive lives. In her advocacy work, Chamique points out important truths, such as in minority communities like hers-African American-mental health isn't an accepted topic and thus not helped enough. Chamique works with kids from minority enclaves, teaching them life skills and the acceptability, the value healthwise, in opening up, speaking out about personal issues. Chamique has journeyed from her magazine-cover celebrity of the early 2000s-often compared to Michael Jordan's-to her mental health advocacy work of today. Her honesty and openness to talk to the world about her experience, coupled with her appealing sincerity, make us listen and learn. Her story is one of the keys to transforming social attitudes.

Ferenc Török's 1945 takes place in a backward Hungarian village at the end of World War II, when liberating Russian soldiers are present. Based on Gábor T. Szántó's short story "Homecoming" and filmed in black and white with striking authentically, 1945 focuses on human morality and behavior. Two categories of people are juxtaposed to strengthen this study: the poor, undereducated rural community led by their abhorrent town clerk István, and two silent Jewish strangers who arrive by train to the town. The Jewish father and son, clad formally in black, hire a cart at the train station to transport their two sealed trunks to an unspecified destination. They choose to walk behind the cart, and the camera comes back to them often, reiterating their silent, dignified trek along the dirt road that leads to town. In contrast, the villagers who await them are already in a panic—which Jews are they and what have they come for? Knowing nothing about the strangers—other than the stationmaster's fast-spreading rumor that their trunks contain perfume—the villagers jump to the conclusion that their own futures are at stake. They obsess about their fate because of their individual and collective guilt about what happened to their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust. Their guilt dictates that only their role in the Jews' deportation can explain the visitors' arrival.

The townfolks' commotion and generally nasty relationships to each other contrast to the silent walkers, with the cinematography of the two worlds also in contrast: the empty natural landscape versus the village hubbub where everybody knows everybody else's business, including everyone's wartime betrayals and illegal possession of Jewish property. The film takes as its subject how human guilt cannot be suppressed, but rather with the slightest provocation erupts defensively, often with more lies, and causes destruction of various sorts. Some of the guilty parties have remorse, others not, but either way, their guilt ignites havoc and dire consequences.

The quiet pilgrims on foot see and hear nothing of this village chaos as they pass through the town en route to their destination. Their straight carriage conveys dignity and honor, in contrast to their counterparts staring at them through windows, or racing about to burn evidence of their treachery or to hide wrongly inherited valuables. The returning Jews have no need to communicate to the villagers, other than to hire a cart for their trunks. The villagers are invisible to them; they don't exist as moral beings. Even István's offered handshake is proof of their hypocrisy.

Finally, the villagers' panic comes to breaking point, and led by István they go to the Jews who have reached their destination and humbly ask what they have come for. The villagers' guilt and their fate must have answers.

What they then learn, whether or not the truth sinks into their unenlightened heads, is that the father and son have come for something far deeper than the material possessions the villagers are so distraught about. The villagers didn't care about the Jews in the early 1940s and they don't care now—their anxiety is about their own safety and comfort—at the expense of children and families, their own neighbors and friends, whom they helped to murder. At heart a parable—though the lesson is lost on the villagers, which is a lesson in itself—1945 treats audiences to fine cinematography by Elemér Ragályi and villager roles well-acted by Péter Rudolf as István, Dóra Sztarenki Kisrózsi as his wife, and József Szarvas as Mr. Kustár. Iván Angelus and Marcell Nagy play the Sámuels, father and son.

In Between, directed by Maysaloun Hamoud, continues the dialogue about the equality of women. The movie begins with an older woman waxing a young female leg and sharing advice: "Don't raise your voice, men don't like women who raise their voices. Remember to always say a kind word, and cook him good food. Don't forget to put on perfume and to keep your body smooth so that he desires you."

Music then explodes and we're at a wild, co-ed, bachelorette party in Tel Aviv with drinking, drugs, and dancing—the central characters' regular singles backdrop. Beautiful Laila (Mouna Hawa) with long curly locks and a cigarette always in hand, appears bored with this dating scene. Back home the next day, she and her housemate Salma (Sana Jammelieh ) meet an unexpected visitor, Noar (Shaden Kanboura), who's come to stay with them until she can find her own apartment. Noar explains that her cousin Rafif—Laila and Salma's absent roommate— said it would be all right. These few opening scenes set the stage for a look at the experience of young Palestinian-Israeli women in today's urbane Tel Aviv. Laila's a non-religious feminist lawyer, Salma's a fringe DJ from a Christian family, and Noar's a senior at the university and wears full Islamic garb.

Through each of the women's stories related to their love lives, the film explores male domination, male attitudes toward women, and male abuses when their authority is crossed. Although the film focuses on experiences in today's diverse Palestinian-Israeli culture, the treatment of Laila, Salma, and Noar is universal. The take-away, as the three women process the denouements of their relationships, is sad, to both them and to us: Men (or most), from lovers to fathers, just don't get it, they can't see it, so they can't change. As if cemented into their behavioral genes, the men in the film (with parallels in other cultures) believe they are right about their entitlement to dominate—to tell women how to dress modestly, to not smoke, to stay at home with the kids—or to abuse them if the women resist. Women in the audience of this important movie freeze at moments when Laila, Salma, or Noar stand up for themselves to their men. We freeze fearing a physical blow, a bashing silencer instead of meaningful conversation. How do men in the audience feel during these tense, cowering moments? Undoubtedly the same. Then why can't recognition of the problem on the screen translate to real-life consciousness about equality?

We witness one atrocious punishment against Noar by her fiancé Wissam (and compliments to Henry Andrawas for playing such a horrid role). The camera and audio focus intently on Wissam's zipper going back up after he's committed his brute crime of authority, and this focus makes the audience think how a man's "instrument of lovemaking" also serves as a violent weapon. The three women helping each other through their relationship traumas give the audience another universal: women support, comfort, and work for each other and always have, and this community based on gender solidarity is the basis for their strength—their stamina, wisdom, friendship, and bedrock role in all societies. These qualities, so deep in women, contrast to the male strength of body and physical force. Thus the movie honors women but cannot say there will ever be changes in their relationships with men.

Don't miss this film! The humor and the performances that execute this saga are razor-sharp, imaginative, and nothing short of hilarious. Based on a book by Itay Meirson, The 90-Minute War begins with a serious broadcast by journalist Michael Greenspan: "The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Territories will finally resolve the longest running conflict in modern history through a soccer match. The game will decide who gets to stay in the Holy Land and who has to go off looking for a new homeland."

Not one cinematic opportunity is lost as the two sides make their way toward the match. The football chairmen—played by Moshe Igvy for Israel and Norman Issa for Palestine—stab, jab, and poke each other over every issue in their peoples' historic disagreements. Igvy and Issa shared the Best Actor award at Haifa's 2016 Film Festival and without doubt will bring some audiences back to revel in their performances again. Even though their roles steal the show, other memorable "types" support them.

The film is told as a documentary of the historic game, and many of the hilarious moments result from the filmmaking itself—what the characters say to the unseen camera and interviewer. A polished, chiseled FIFA leader helps negotiate the terms of the game, including who will referee, as both sides reject every nominee—Germany is out of the question for obvious reasons and England as well. For the laid-back, cigar-smoking Israeli chairman, even Sweden and Norway are out of the question: "They're always against us." Both chairmen rely on antacids as they sit across from each other during these difficult meetings.

The game will be held in Portugal as the people there don't know anything about the Middle East conflict. Leiria's stadium manager Mr. Gomes studies an atlas to find Gaza as tells his wife: "We're the perfect place for the Camp David of soccer." "What?" she answers, mystified. Gomes helps resolve the referee stalemate by suggesting his cousin Carlito, "who's never even heard of the place," and both sides agree to the choice.

Many problems emerge: Israel's coach is a famous German goalie, Mr. Müller, which leads to anxiety at Israeli headquarters: "Can we really have a German leading our team in a match that decides the future of the Jewish people?" Several times, Israeli checkpoint soldiers harass the Palestinian team's bus en route to practice destinations. Another obstacle comes up when one of Israel's best players, Iyad Zuamut—an Israeli of Palestinian descent—can't decide which side he should play on. This leads to FIFA setting new nationality rules for the game—players must live in the country they play for, for at least two weeks of the year.

Besides the documentary's camera igniting moments of hilarity, Michael Greenspan returns at regular intervals to report on the teams' progress. His deadpan delivery at politically loaded locations contains propaganda from both sides. Standing in a Palestinian tunnel with everyday smuggling going on behind him, he tells us how these tunnels bring fuel, medicine, American cigarettes, plasma screens, and fast food to the Palestinians. And on this particular day, they're bringing Germany's soccer star Ahmad Hany to play for the Palestinians. We witness Hany's arrival through the dark, low-ceilinged channel.

Not only superlative characters and fast-paced humor define the quality of this movie. Amazing music and cinematography, by Ran Shem-Tov and Daniel Kedem, respectively, burst upon the screen and through the sound system between every scene, revving up the atmosphere in the manner of sports and politics, but in a subtly satirical way.

As the day of the game approaches and both chairmen realize the tremendous burden they carry for their people, a perfect moment occurs. The neutral Portuguese stadium manager, Gomes, invites both chairmen for a drink on the eve of the game. Unexpectedly the adversaries share a lovely, personal time together at the bar, passing around pictures of their children and grandchildren. Afterward, the filmmakers interview each chairman in his hotel bedroom. The Israeli chief admits how much he enjoyed the evening—"It's always like that," he says wistfully, "one on one we get along fine." When it's his turn, the Palestinian chief says: "I'm really sad. There should have been another solution." After all the laughter we've enjoyed over the two sides' conflict, these last touching moments give the movie a meaning beyond simple mockumentary.

Early in the film, the camera shoots a sports bar near the Leiria stadium, capturing the drinkers' raunchy conversation about the upcoming game. The camera returns to this low-life bar after the game is over—as an epilogue. The characters' shouting disgust for the game show us the irrelevance of which side won—a particularly incisive conclusion to the longest running conflict in modern history.

Music in an historically contested region that means "home" to numerous ancient ethnicities defines Jumana Manna's documentary, A Magical Substance Flows into Me. The film's overarching structure follows the work of Robert Lachmann, a German-Jewish ethnomusicologist who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s and made archival recordings of local music—Kurdish, Moroccan, Samaritan, Bedouin, and more. A voice-over narrator reads from Lachmann's journal about his research, with archival images accompanying the descriptions. Lachmann tells us how he's new to the country but hopes to share its Arab music through his love for it and his knowledge of its history. He's found that the locals are dissatisfied with their musical traditions and seek something new, but he believes they should be encouraged in their pure, unspoiled sound. He also comments that these communities live together but as separate cultures, and thus Jerusalem is best suited for the archive he intends to build. As part of his work, he creates Oriental Music for the Palestine Broadcasting Service, believing such a program "can provide a neutral background that's needed to enable both parties to collaborate." For the program, Lachmann invited the various communities to perform and we hear clips of their songs. Manna films some of the communities for a current portrayal of the music. These intercutting scenes take place in the musicians' kitchens, living rooms, or terraces, emphasizing the music's homey roots, its local focus. The musicians of today talk about their culture and in some cases the region's ethnic complexities. They then perform a song.

The documentary's shortcoming is its omission of adequate guidance for the viewer. Most of the time we don't know for sure who we're listening to, in order to clearly understand the speaker's particular ethnic background and contribution. Identifying subtitles would greatly improve the film's coherence, but this information appears at the very end of the movie in the form of end credits—too late for the audience to match up with the speakers. It may have been Manna's intent to omit such identification as a way to make a statement about the historic blending of the region, but for the film's strength, the lack causes the viewer to continually grope for context.

Nevertheless, Magical Substance's effort to capture the roots of Arab music, its many community expressions and the world of its descendants, opens doors to another region so distant from our own and brings us closer.

Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro's Hermia & Helena continues his direction of contemporary stories linked to Shakespeare's heroines, in this case the love-crossed women from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Loosely, the filmmaker's protagonists, Camila and Carmen, share love objects the way Shakespeare's Hermia and Helena do—Camila loves Lukas, Carmen's old boyfriend, and Carmen has her eye on Leo, Camila's old lover. Riffing further on Shakespeare's love for "switches," Camila and Carmen swap apartments—Camila takes over Carmen's New York City pad to pursue the same arts fellowship that Carmen has just left; and Carmen takes over Camila's pad in Buenos Aires. In a sense they swap lives, but with different end results, for Camila, whose fellowship project is translating A Midsummer Night's Dream into Spanish, has clear objectives and purpose, while Carmen feels she's wallowing in the same place as the year before.

The movie's achievement is its rendering of contemporary life, not only in its portrayal of young adults coping with carving a satisfying future for themselves, but also in its filmmaking techniques, or creativity. Hermia & Helena will likely get few stars from viewers who judge according to convention, but its contrivances, artifice, and experimental intrusions add the exact dimension of young artists at work today.

Agustina Muñoz as Camila is worth the entire ninety minutes in the theater. Her face, all of its thoughts and expressions, and her voice, so firm and self-assured, mesmerize but also deliver a wonderfully powerful female character. (Thank you, Mr. Piñeiro.) The passivity and guarded personality of Lukas (Keith Poulson)—Camila's character foil—also portray reality in two ways: the lack of opportunities for trained artists in a glutted and information-age professional world, and the fear many young adults—not just men—have of risking a serious relationship. In contrast to Lukas, Camila has no fears and goes after what she wants. She's in New York not really for the arts residency but in order to find an old love—Gregg (Dustin Guy Defa)—and also to meet her American father Horace (Dan Sallitt), who never took any responsibility for her mother's accidental pregnancy, nor ever considered looking for his Argentine offspring. Because of her intelligent, direct approach, Camila gets the answers she's come for. Her father's past disinterest and dissociation inevitably cause her grief, but her rational understanding of people and life allows her to accept him, at least formally. Here, there seems to be an important omission in the subtitles. Camila's in bed under the covers at her father's house after their painful conversation. We hear her voice leaving a message for her half-sister Mariane in Buenos Aires who has just given birth to a first son. Between restrained sobs, Camila congratulates Mariane and says, "Camilo," we assume the boy's name. But the subtitles say, "Beautiful" and omit the "Camilo." Thus, a deep love-tribute to Camila is lost, and it's an important one for it juxtaposes Camila's sisterly love against the nonexistent paternal love of her past, and probably her future.

The interspersed contrivances that contemporize the movie for better or worse, depending on the viewer, include periodic rag music for transitions; flashbacks to Buenos Aires marking each month Camila has been in New York; the subplot of Daniele (another Shakespearean swap, this one of friends); Gregg's short film (a film within a film alla Pyramus and Thisbee of A Midsummer Night's Dream); handwritten chapter titles, not unlike acts; and a few dream sequences showing Camila's unconscious at work on her translation (possibly paralleling the fairies' forest). But all of these devices work in their mishmash way toward a resolution for the principal characters that completes the movie—with a door shutting and opening, shutting and opening (just like life). Both Camila and Lukas agree to set out and dare change—an unknown future—rather than stagnate in the same place. Piñeiro's filmmaking mirrors the characters' trajectory and steps in its own uninhibited and creative direction.

For passionate film lovers, Foreign Body goes beyond the indie norm, despite its familiar plot and character elements, which include an immigration story (Tunisia to France, illegally), a cultural-clash drama (Islam's moral code versus France's), and an edgy love story that crosses traditional sexual boundaries. These structural elements recede for the film's greater essence: quiet psychological portrayals that are deeply human and convey a message about the eternal gender divide.

The three principal characters, who eventually have an erotic moment together, are Samia (Sarra Hannachi), just arrived in Lyon following an illegal boat crossing from Tunisia; Imed (Salim Kechiouche), already in Lyon seven years illegally; and Madame Lelia Berteau (Hiam Abbass), an upper-class French widow of similar Arab origins.

The long, quiet passages of the movie reveal Samia and Lelia's characters, in the beginning with their wariness of each other—can the illegal young woman be trusted? Will the French widow inform the police? The tension of trust continues almost to the end of the movie; Samia's secret past in Tunisia—the scars on her back, her watchful, survivor's eyes—make her slightly suspicious, also to the audience. What are her true motives? The slow revelations about Mme. Berteau's own immigrant past and rise in class because of her marriage to a wealthy Frenchman happen in pregnant atmospheres controlled by Abbass's intelligent face.

Besides the women's secrets from each other and their unveiling over time, we also witness their mutual support as women in a chauvinistic world; and true to life, their female solidarity coexists with wariness, suspicion, and jealousy of each other. Imed is the man between them, desirable to both for erotic, not intellectual, attributes—another subject for the audience to ponder. Handsome Imed can be kind, respectful, and generous to both women, but the minute one of them steps outside the expected female role, he punishes them. This historic male authority over women in every culture strengthens women's bonds, and in Samia and Lelia's case, it influences their turning to each other for personal and erotic closeness. Samia, with scars on her back, fears shadowy men in Lyon's narrow byways when she walks home alone. Even if she is actually safe, she feels preyed upon. Another universal for women: the physical danger of men.

Samia's character offers more to reflect on. Her young, female sensuality and heat for sex is accurate and a rare portrayal. She's called a whore for it, and we, as a traditionally socialized audience, watching her sensually dance at a bar, lifting her clothes to reveal her skin and allure the men surrounding her, think: She's shouldn't do that, she's bad to do that. But actually, Samia's sensations and actions are authentically female. Foreign Body makes us aware of how we judge women as whores for their natural sexuality, but condone men for theirs.

Amari has made a multi-layered feminist movie, showing the complexities within women, men, and society regarding gender. The strongest take-away is the female bond that has created a social and psychological bulwark for women, one that this movie shows us has greater strength, greater collective power than the heavier weight of men. Imed represents his kind: helpful, respectful, and generous to the weaker sex, as long as she obeys his rules. The scales stand before us, with women the higher order.

One of the best things about seeing the latest Almodóvar movie is being immersed in a world that is not America. The scenery, the characters, the daily life and overall traditions are from the director's Spanish realm. After several decades of his movies, we anticipate what he's going to present us next, for it will be something that holds our attention and makes us laugh or think. Above all, it will be the latest unveiling of an artist's work.

Music plays a dominant role in Julieta, composed by Alberto Iglesias, a familiar collaborator of Almodóvar. The tone and atmosphere of the music as the movie opens set the stage for the coming content, and it's dark, almost haunting, and subtly ominous. Its predominant characteristic expresses the dead feeling of depression. It always stays just below the line where life percolates, and over the course of the story at key moments rises just enough to deliver suspense but still remains under that non-living line. Without the music's role in the story arc, the tale's simplicity and the camera's slow study of Julieta's state of mind might have resulted in a dull film, for as Orson Welles once said: "Films should be able to tell you a story quicker than any other medium." But Julieta succeeds in its objective of studying a woman's loss, and loss is not something easily captured in words. The visual portrayal of loss has more power, and Emma Suárez, who plays the middle-aged Julieta, holds us still in our witnessing of her static grief, which is depression.

Julieta is loosely based on three short stories by the Canadian Nobel Prize–winner Alice Munro. The stories have been moved to a Spanish milieu and processed through the imagination of Spain's greatest filmmaker. The opening music shares the screen with sensual red folds of fabric that then wrap a contemporary sculpture of a terracotta man with an over-sized pipe for a penis. An important blue envelope is thrown into the trash. We come to understand that Julieta is moving, packing and throwing out, cutting ties to her past. Her boyfriend, an art critic Lorenzo, arrives and their brief conversation tells us they are a happy couple moving to Portugal. In the next scene, Julieta encounters Bea, her daughter Antía's closest childhood friend, and learns that Antía lives in Como. We witness Julieta's stunned and ravaged face as she grasps onto this news of her daughter, and from that moment on, the movie delves into the past and how Julieta lost contact with Antía. She ends her plans to move to Portugal with Lorenzo. She rents an available apartment in the same building where she and Antía once lived on the off chance that Antía will try to reach her after thirteen years. She sits down, opens a large notebook, and begins writing to Antía the story of what happened to them. This narrative becomes the story of the movie, with Adriana Ugarte playing the younger, bombshell Julieta.

Colors mark the movie, deep saturated colors that deliver mystery and mood, or flamboyant colors like young Julieta's shock of bleached hair and her bright facial make-up and clothing. We're treated to idyllic seaside views of her lover Xoan's home—he's a hunky Galician fisherman played by Daniel Grao. The terra-cotta figure with pipe penis seems to symbolize him, for the hottest passion imaginable strikes these two characters at the beginning of Julieta's memoir to Antía, and results in Antía's conception and the future of the family. Just the way the music is almost ominous, almost sinister, Xoan's housekeeper Maria (Inma Cuesta) fills us with uneasiness—is she good or bad? Her face when dealing with Julieta is cold and inscrutable, possibly plotting evil, but later with the teenage Antía, she shows her warmth and affection. This kind of suspense in character and music keeps us waiting for something to happen, and though something does, a tragedy, a loss, it's not violent or visually traumatic. It's depression.

The movie successfully explores depression caused by tragedy and loss. Perhaps the ambivalence an audience might feel when the movie ends has to do with not really feeling close to Julieta or Antía, despite comprehending their interior worlds through their facial and physical communication. We remain on the objective, viewing side of a situation, our minds involved but not our hearts, as if the work is a study. It's an incongruity in the movie that Xoan's home and Julieta's Madrid apartments are upper middle class in furnishings and possessions. She comes from a teacher's background and Xoan is a fisherman, but their lifestyle, and her outfits, couldn't be more bourgeois. Those furnishings for the characters stand out and remove the viewer from the willing suspension of disbelief. For Almodóvar fans, Julieta will be worth seeing as the latest from an artist's oeuvre, but it won't be as powerful as Bad Education (about Catholic-priest sex abuse) or Talk to Her (about friendship and love), or even, for those who can take it, the macabre thriller The Skin I Live In.

Twenty-year-old Atilla (Émile Schneider), living with his Canadian parents who adopted him as a child from Turkey, must come to terms with his life, past, present, and future. A horrific memory haunts him—the reason for his transplantation from Turkey to Montréal, from one set of parents to another. His state of young-adult despondency has less to do with "being adopted" than with what his four-year-old eyes witnessed in his original family. Besides being a story about Atilla's acceptance of his life—and life the way it is for many, many people—There Where Atilla Passes also portrays with enormous success the pained love of a father (Roy Dupuis) for his adopted son. The director Onur Karaman has let his characters faces reveal their interior struggles. The film has so few words it would be possible to watch it without the volume on and still fully comprehend the story—until the climatic ending, that is, when Atilla's memory fills in the last gap of his childhood trauma. That moment goes swiftly with a too-distant camera shot, so that we miss the vital detail of a knife in a hand. To a lesser degree the film tackles immigration, something that has been going on since the start of civilization. In this case, Atilla is quite assimilated with his Canadian parents and even resembles his adopted dad, Michel. But his heritage is with him, and as he moves through his workday at a Turkish restaurant, he slowly becomes close to the new Turkish cook, Ahmet (Cansel Elçin), the movie's sage who helps Atilla find his path in life. Ahmet, too, has a horrific family memory and in mounting scenes imparts wisdom to his younger fellow-countryman: "One day you're alive and the next you're gone. Once you get used to this idea you can find peace of mind. You grieve and move on. But it takes time, like brewing perfect tea." Later in the movie, over the tea they often share, Ahmet tells Atilla, "Life is like a short-lived bus trip. You make friends but everyone has their own itinerary. The only thing you share is that bus. Get it? It means appreciate solitude, it's the only thing that belongs to you." At the end of the movie, we watch short clips of each character's "own itinerary" and solitude: Michel with his deep love and loss; Julie (Julie Deslauriers), Atilla's pregnant mother, waiting for a baby daughter to arrive; Ahmet in the restaurant kitchen, whistling a cheerful song and laughing at life's absurdity, his personal tactic for survival; and Atilla with his girlfriend Asya (Dilan Gwyn) at the airport, embarking on his own life. Again, love, loss, loneliness, and one's own solitary experience infuse the movie from start to finish, and we understand all of that with our vision and our senses, not from the occasional philosophy coming from Ahmet. We see that a psychiatrist can't bring words from Atilla to heal his past. If healing is to happen, it comes from within the individual and it never whitewashes memory: grief is always there, but it can be managed. The movie's shifting from scene to scene, cutting to the various characters and their habitual actions—the partying Turks led by Selçuk where Atilla meets Asya, Grandpa in his nursing home, Atilla constantly alone outside smoking and thinking—can feel formulaic, too much like a click, click, click before arriving at an important scene between father and son—for the father and son relationship is the heart (bleeding heart) of the story. On the other hand, at the end of the movie, some of these more peripheral-character clips add a layer of symbols and messages to the film, such as Grandpa getting closer to dying with his memory zoning out, while Atilla embarks on his own life with memory alive but managed apprehensively. The arc of flying birds with purpose, direction, and freedom that Atilla watches at the beginning of the movie comes back at the end for his solitary dad to watch. Atilla's hobby was making model airplanes and his dad holds one of these as he watches the birds soar away. Atilla has just flown to Turkey (and "flown the coop"). Holding one of his models is like holding onto him while allowing his flight, his own life and destination. Overall, the movie is about love—love that binds a family, painfully, but then that's what love is—painful. Yet its presence is the only solace to the individual's solitude and lonely walk through his or her own life. Atilla will be back some day, the family will reunite, but perhaps with oceans and continents separating them most of the time. We do not know, nor do they. But we accept.

Dragons are from legends, from myths, from superstition, and in Mani Haghighi's new film the title sets the stage for the story we will try to follow as challenged art-film enthusiasts. The plot—a concoction of genres—requires utter attention to the dialogue, which comes to us in speedy subtitles that flash unfamiliar names like Babak Hafizi, Behnam Shokouhi, Keyvan Haddad, Saeed Jahangiri, and Shahrzad Besharat. The names flash as either first or last names depending on the scene, so it's difficult to remember who is who. The plot unravels via the dialogue, some of it reportage in a fake documentary style, with the director Haghighi being interviewed about how he discovered the story and made the movie. The film's opening credits poke fun at the currently popular trend of "Based on a true story." Those who thrive on mind-bender plots like Inception will be thrilled to take on this movie.

Qualities in Dragon mirror qualities in other Iranian films of a mythical character, White Meadows (Rasoulof 2009) coming to mind, though in Dragon the contemporary world integrates thoroughly with the primitive, superstitious, cult-following villagers on the island of Qeshm, where political exiles are sent. The three protagonists from Tehran—Babak, Keyvan, and Behnam—who investigate the island's haunted cemetery prone to geologically impossible earthquakes, dress in Western garb in contrast to the turbaned, scarfed, robed villagers. Charaki, the island's government agent originally from Tehran, dresses like Babak in a tie and Homburg hat. But he's lived so long among the villagers that he keeps their secrets from the regime. Suits and Homburgs on the island's barren landscape of tawny, cavernous mountains clash with the primitive environment, but they also symbolize the vast chasm between the modern world and the island's tribal rituals, superstition, and magic.

The movie's predominant plot conundrum needles the mind to work out its puzzle, which is more difficult for non-Iranian audiences because of nods to cultural traditions and the Farsi language translated in fleeting subtitles. In fact, the plot is simple, but it's ingeniously woven into politics, hallucinations, flashbacks and flash forwards, changing genres, and an overarching atmosphere of a fantasy quest. And that legend or fairy tale quality—mixed with eerie horror motifs and evil characters (Charaki and Almas)—creates suspense. The haunted cemetery in the nowhere land of ghostly mountains, dominated by a fantastical shipwreck littered with vestiges of former dwellers, transports us to the imaginary realm where bizarre phenomena occur.

The modern world intrudes to solve a crime: a young political prisoner (Samei) hanging from the rafters of the shipwreck only days before his release. Charaki tells Babak, sent by the intelligence agency to investigate, that it was a suicide, but Babak can see from the neck wounds that it was a murder. He tells Charaki he'll spend the night in the shipwreck to read the dead prisoner's books and scrawled gibberish on the walls. He also insists that the body be buried in the cemetery just outside the ship, despite Charaki's warning that any body buried there causes an earthquake. The place is considered haunted and villagers won't go near it. No one has been buried there for one hundred years. Babak asserts he isn't afraid and orders the body to buried. As the night descends over the deserted eerie shipwreck, Babak settles on his cot to read and moments later an earthquake shatters the walls above his head.

Babak returns to Tehran to enlist the help of two experts—geologist Benham and sound engineer Keyvan—to solve the earthquake mystery. These two specialists first want assurance that Babak is not working for the intelligence agency. Here, with the subtitles telling the whole story in a shifting, patchwork way, audiences may lose the thread of who Babak, and his boss Saeed Jahanjiri, really are, for on the surface they appear as agents of the secret police. But dialogue and documentary reportage tell us they are actually members of a counterintelligence group known as Hozvaresh, led by Jahanjiri.

The plot further entangles itself through its documentary genre. The film's director, Mani Haghighi, tells his interviewer how he first found out about the cemetery story through the contents of a metal box that showed up in his grandfather's closet. We then watch black-and- white footage from his grandfather Ebrahim Golestan's movie, Brick and the Mirror, which shows Keyvan working as sound engineer. Haghighi tells us that Keyvan disappeared during the shoot in 1964. It is the myriad plot detours like this—executed through shifting voices under interrogation, documentary interviews, live action, and mystery tapes turning up—that the simplicity of the plot becomes obscured. At the same time, it is all these clever accouterments and genre layering that make the movie compelling.

No dragon ever arrives—the one supposedly living under the cemetery and causing the quakes. But a camel appears twice and symbolizes Babak's hallucinogenic clairvoyance related to the disappearance of the murdered prisoner's lover, Halimeh. In both cases, Babak's encounter with the vision of a camel (who represents Halimeh's mother) leads to the rescue of Halimeh's infant daughter Valileh, who then appears twenty years later in the documentary part of the movie, adding a fresh piece of evidence to the story—the last puzzle piece. At the end of the movie, when music clashes and clangs loudly like the primitive village colliding with modern Tehran, we hear the baying of a camel mixed in. His voice was part of bringing truth to the fore.

The Dragon's plot can only be understood through words, but the film's visual aura, its fantastical, spooky setting and atmosphere keep us mesmerized: the Arabian Nights interior of the shipwreck—lit by a thousand candles—the crackling campfires in the cemetery at night, the tribal rituals with a skinned goat, the ghost-story music permeated with evil, and the supernatural noises and occurrences that mix with hallucinogenic experiences. Although films should be understood through their visual content, and Dragon cannot be understood without its language, the movie is a grand visual work of masterly filmmaking.

Terrence Malik's Tree of Life was thought provoking. A lot was about "mother"—idealized. Most was about grief and a family (the O'Briens) coping with the death of one of the kids—the youngest nineteen year old. Cause of death was not stated. Sadness permeated the movie. It was told in a dreamy, fluid way, like dance choreography, for the shots themselves reflected stream of consciousness, and in that fluid stream, the naturally disjointed images and thoughts of the mind. This parallelism between mind and imagery was captured through shots of tumbling water, soaring trees, landscapes, shards of family memories, and then, spirituality—this last in the form of an amorphous, diaphanous light glowing perpetually through organic tissue of an orange color that changed in hues as the skins and folds of organic mass moved, as if undulating in water or the womb. The immovable glow at the core represented God, or so I interpreted it. God for the narrator, the God we talk to within ourselves. Could the spirituality component of the movie remain as strong if the Creation story had been edited out?—the universe, the Big Bang, the start of Planet Earth, first organisms, water creatures, dinosaurs, man, the family? The answer is yes. Using just the white light within the organic mass to symbolize one's personal God was an effective liet motif. For this viewer, including the rest of the spiritual material was not a huge flaw of the movie, particularly given the parents' religious adherence. But it seemed an unnecessary addition, stand-alone material that didn't impact the main content, and thus was superfluous. Brad Pitt's performance as Mr. O'Brien was excellent. Jessica Chastain's "mother" was too idealized and ethereal to be convincing as a flesh and blood human, but the actress amply fulfilled the role written for her. The film made us think on many levels. For one, how laughter fills life at first and then gets sucked away because of troubled relationships. And the message of: all families are more or less the same. Generally, mothers are idealized angels and fathers (even when "great") are tyrants. The innate meanness in many kids was shown through the protagonist Jack (Hunter McCracken) and neighborhood boys and their pranks. And yet, at the same time, an uncommon degree of sympathy, empathy was present in the O'Brien family characters, torturing them. An American childhood fifty years ago, in a pre-computer age, integrated with nature, and toys and games depended on imagination. Juxtaposed to this early freedom in nature with constant reference to trees reaching into the sky is Jack's later career amid high-end architecture—gleaming surfaces, soaring structures with sharp geometry, not a tree in sight. Notwithstanding the loss of physical nature, the tree of life remains firmly rooted within each of us, for it embodies family, our origins, and the origins of human existence in the universe. Film, a visual media, depends on sound for its full effect. Here, the muffled, whispered, murmured voices worked brilliantly, for that is how we dream and even remember. This is Jack's story about being his father's eldest son, so his despairing voice-over questions existence the most. His parents' voice-overs also come in with their perspective on things. Spiritually infused, choral-like music by Alexandre Desplat augments the film's overarching theme of family grief. It contributed to the haunting quality of the film, how individuals are always haunted by their pasts—why our natural laughter slowly becomes somber, even depressed. Towards the end the music was heavy-handed and risked creating sentimentality. As the audience, we were always objective, never pulled into the story and experiencing it firsthand, partly because it wasn't a story but more of a meditation, or multi-tiered reflection choreographed in film art. We watched and considered ideas and themes as we went along. The limited dialogue gave space for that medium. It was a visual treatise on family grief, a cinematic treatment of human emotional states bottled up inside that finally find an art-outlet. The end of the movie symbolized this outcome, for late middle-aged Jack (who has ruminated this film-treatise over the course of one day, perhaps the anniversary of this youngest brother's death) speaks to his father over the phone in one scene, and we catch only fragments of the words—Yes, I think of him every day—an admittance that opens the door for atonement, redemption, and inner peace, or at least a kind of acceptance. Older Jack (played by Sean Penn) imagines all the characters from his nature-infused childhood—family, boyhood friends—and love is shared among all on the landscape of an infinite beach or desert. In this last scene his father, in particular, has been freed to express his unfettered love. The strict rules that have governed his life dissolve. All is forgiven. The mother's message earlier on that life is only bearable if there is love, is demonstrated in this scene, this grand finale of love and forgiveness. It may have been that older Jack's mother was already dead by the time the movie takes place, for we see her in a shrouded, floral-decorated funeral bed several times. Earlier on, she and her husband light a blue candle after the death of their son, and on the day that the film takes place, with older Jack remembering the past, including his mother's funeral bed, the blue candle reappears several times, and his father phones him, eliciting the response: Yes, I think of him every day. These images and murmurings suggest the death-anniversary, and in the end what becomes Jack's day of reckoning, setting things right in the complex family relationships and history. This is not a mainstream film, it's a thinking film handled with artistic beauty and pathos. It may fall short of being a masterpiece, but its rank is high, its power long-lasting.