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    “ Although you don't attempt to show it, one has a point of view on things and it ends up emerging, whether you like it or not. Our films (with director/husband Rodrigo Plá) often turn on the limits of the public and the private, the individual confronting the state, and what happens when that individual is defenceless... The state of helplessness is one of the motors of what we write. Regarding why we often portray female characters, I think the question is really: Why don't other people portray them more?” ---Original screenplay-writer and co-director Laura Santullo, on her script for her husband’s earlier work  A Monster with a Thousand Heads (2015), a quotation equally applicable to  The Other Tom (2021), where finally she is not merely the scriptwriter for her husband’s six films but credited as the official co-director. R odrigo Plá (an Uruguayan) and Laura Santullo (a Mexican) are a rare husband-wife team making remarkable low-budget films, often with n...

  R oe v. Wade is a 2021 feature film that provides considerable insight from a pro-life point of view into a very important US Supreme Court judgement given in 1973 that the Constitution of the United States “protects a pregnant lady’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction” ( Wikipedia ). Nearly five decades after that landmark ruling, the decision continues to be fervently debated within USA, between the two main political parties of the country, between church groups and women’s rights groups, and between the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Right to Life Committee, to mention just a few. US Supreme Court Justices listening to arguments... and discussing the case among themselves outside the courtroom (actors Forsythe, Portnow and Davi) US Supreme Court Chief Justice (Jon Voight) in his chambers reflecting on the case Cathy Allyn’s and Nick Loeb’s film takes the right to life argument armed with lots of details ...

  T here are films that begin to mesmerize a viewer when you watch the initial sequence closely. This is often the case when you view a debut film that is also built on an original script written by its director. The quiet sophisticated strength of the opening sequence of Henry Butash’s debut film The Atlantic City Story will grab the attention of any mature, attentive viewer and the viewer is likely to be hooked until the film ends. This critic recalls the same feeling while viewing the opening sequence of the British director Sir Ridley Scott’s debut film The Duellists which went on to win the Cannes film festival Best Debut Film award in 1977, Scott’s sole honor at Cannes to date.   Similar to The Duellists, Henry Butash’s film, too, has an opening sequence where the spoken conversation is minimal, and even the lead actress Jessica Hecht playing a middle-aged married woman called Jane (an appropriate name for the character) hardly moves from a table where she is sitting ...

T he year 2019 saw four directors from four different countries make semi-autobiographical feature films: Spanish director Pedro Almodovar made Pain and Glory, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman made It Must Be Heaven , US director Abel Ferrara living and working in Italy made Tommaso and rookie British director Joanna Hogg made The Souvenir. Each of them found different groups of cineastes being enamored by their creative products using distinctly different approaches to filming the problems they as filmmakers face in real life. Some hide their thinly veiled identity by choosing a nom de plume such as Tommaso (played by Willem Dafoe) in Abel Ferrara’s film which will not fool any astute viewer. Tommaso is a fictional name of a filmmaker resembling Mr Ferrara, developing his own original screenplays for future directorial projects, and he too lives in Italy and is learning Italian and teaching acting to potential actors as he has chosen to live and work in that country. Tommaso is...

D irector Debra Granik is an independent filmmaker in USA who works outside the Hollywood studio system.   Leave No Trace is her third feature film as a director without support from the influential studio producers and mainstream distributors.   Ms Granik often works with US scriptwriter Anne Rosellini. Their collaboration has resulted in two notable independent feature films: Ms   Granik’s second feature film Winter’s Bone (2010) and Leave No Trace.   The duo picked   up two novels on individuals living on the fringes of society (one on the family of a drug addict, another of a traumatized war veteran), and transformed those into   the scripts of unusually magnetic feature films with very striking performances from carefully chosen actresses, propelling them from near obscurity to world attention. This happened with all three feature films directed by Ms Granik: Vera Farmiga in Down to the Bone (2004), Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone (based on a n...

“ Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously.   Hope and despair.   A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself .”     “How easily they talk about prayer, those who have never really prayed.”   ----- thoughts written in the diary of Rev Ernest Toller, via “voice over”,   in First Reformed, scripted by Paul Schrader A ny evaluation of the film First Reformed would be considerably enhanced by some knowledge about the American Trappist monk, theologian, social activist Thomas Merton (1915-68), who had interacted with Buddhist monks, and   studied Hinduism, Jainism, Sufism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and published his thoughts in his bestselling   autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain and other works. In the film First Reformed , the principal figure Rev Ernest Toller (Ethan Hawke) writes a diary (read by "voice over") on his thoughts just as Merton had put his ...

D ebut films of several directors worldwide have often been unforgettable, even when compared to their later works:   Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, Steven Spielberg’s Duel, Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Silence of the Sea, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Claude Chabrol’s Handsome Serge, Bertrand Tavernier’s The Watchmaker of St Paul ...the list goes on.   That stamp of unmistakable awesome standards of filmmaking is apparent in Ash Mayfair’s debut feature film The Third Wife. Within minutes of the film’s opening credits an observant viewer gets a clue of the quality of the film that follows—intelligent use of visual editing in presenting the title of the film and the aesthetic and delicate balance between silence and music on the soundtrack. The Third Wife is an original tale written by the film’s director. It is set in the 19 th century Vietnam involving a rich nobleman liv...