Screening Room: ‘7 Days in Entebbe’

On March 14, 2018 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

The latest movie from Brazilian director Jose Padilha (Elite Squad, Narcos) is a thriller based on the famous 1976 airliner hijacking that ended up with a standoff in Uganda.

7 Days in Entebbe opens this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

The headline story feels tailor-made for Padilha’s brand of documentary-based world-crisis cinema. In 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked. The quartet of kidnappers were two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a pair of German radical allies. Wilfried (Daniel Brühl, stolid and underwhelming as ever) is a publisher of “revolutionary texts” and terror neophyte. He is happy to shove a gun in the faces of the crew he forces to fly to Uganda but gets moral jitters once the reality sinks in. His partner Brigitte (Rosamund Pike, similarly unremarkable) is a more eager tool of the cause, furious over the recent prison suicide of Ulrike Meinhof, of Baader-Meinhof infamy…

Now Playing: ‘Night Moves’

On June 12, 2014June 11, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg, and Peter Sarsgaard in 'Night Moves' (Cinedigm) — Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg, and Peter Sarsgaard in ‘Night Moves’ (Cinedigm)

A trio of environmental conspirators try to blow up a Pacific Northwest dam in Kelly Reichardt’s superbly quiet but tension-laced new film, Night Moves, which is playing now in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

The green activists plotting to blow up a dam in Kelly Reichardt’s sublimely nervy new film don’t talk about why they’re doing it. By the time the film catches up with them, the trio has already set their minds on a plan of action. They talk shop here and there, one grousing about all the golf courses being built in a dry climate, another about how the oceans will be dead from pollution by 2048. But there’s no deeper investigation into the why of what they’re about to do or whether they should do it. They just know that the dam, that hulking concrete symbol of humanity domineering nature, must come down. “It wants to come down,” one says dreamily. The introspection comes afterward, with a vengeance…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘Omar’

On February 20, 2014February 20, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-Foreign, WorldLeave a comment

Training to kill in 'Omar' — ‘Omar’: Terrorists or freedom fighters?

In the Oscar-nominated thriller Omar, a young Palestinian man in the West Bank is faced with two challenges: First, how to convince his friend that he’d be a good bet to marry the friend’s little sister? Second, and more importantly, how does he escape the law after helping to murder an Israeli soldier?

Omar opens this week. My review is at Film Racket:

For such a razor-sharp thriller, the West Bank-set Omar smuggles a dense packet of ambiguity into its compact running time. This shouldn’t be a rarity, given how many stories there are about the conflict between occupiers and occupied, the dueling taxonomy of “freedom fighters” and “terrorists.” But too often these clashes are related in absolutes, where one narrative is bought into more than another. Hany Abu-Assad’s skillful story wrestles with those grey moralities without spoon-feeding one or the other to the audience. It’s a story about people, not ideologies, but it knows how inextricably the former intertwine with the latter…