Buzz Blog

Oscar-Nominated Short Films – Documentary ***1/2
This year’s crop of short docs is one of the best in recent memory, in large part because even when they’re approaching hot-button topics, they do so without being strident. Kim A. Snyder’s Death by Numbers deals with the legacy of the 2018 Parkland, Florida high-school mass-shooting, but does so through the compelling words of survivor Samantha Fuentes. I Am Ready, Warden takes on one Texas death-penalty case—that of convicted murderer John Henry Ramirez—with a remarkably efficient approach to many of the parties involved in Ramirez’s life. Things get even better with Bill Morrison’s Incident, an account of a 2018 police-involved shooting in Chicago told entirely through security-camera and body-cam footage, allowing the way officers approach such an event to emerge without editorializing. The Only Girl in the Orchestra finds director Molly O’Brien chronicling the life and career of her aunt, double bassist Orin O’Brien—the first ever woman member of the New York Philharmonic—with a fascinating perspective on why Orin might value teamwork over individual fame. But the best of the bunch is fly-on-the-wall doc filmmaking at its best: Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s Instruments of a Beating Heart, which takes the simple subject of first-grade students at a Tokyo elementary school preparing for a music performance and turns it into a beautifully emotional portrait of what friendship and teaching look like at their best. Available Feb. 21 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

The Monkey ***
See feature review. Available Feb. 21 in theaters. (R)

No Other Land ***
It was perhaps inevitable that No Other Land would be celebrated for its mere existence, but that reality makes it harder to grasp both what makes it less than great as a movie, and what is actually most interesting about it. A filmmaking collective including Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian activist Basel Adra spent several years chronicling events in the Masafer Yatta community in the occupied West Bank, as Israeli government forces systematically dismantle the infrastructure and force Palestinian residents into caves. The events captured here are undeniably horrifying—including the shooting and subsequent paralysis of one resident—but the sheer sameness of the amateur footage tends to make much of the movie feel repetitive, and not particularly revelatory. There’s much stronger narrative material in the friendship between Abraham and Adra, which grows increasingly strained with every passing day of violence, despite Abraham’s apparent good intentions and becoming hated by his own people. Perhaps most fascinating of all is how it works as a character study of an activist, with Adra occasionally slipping into the despairing sense that nothing he does can make a difference. As terrible as it might be to watch bulldozers tear down a school, there’s something perhaps even bleaker in watching an accumulation of atrocities tear down someone’s sense of hope. Available Feb. 21 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Parthenope **1/2
There’s the critical/logline cliché of how “the city is like a character in the movie,” and then there are the literal lengths to which Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) takes it in this odd paean to his hometown of Naples. That’s because he names his protagonist Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta)—after the mythological siren and namesake of the settlement that eventually became Naples—and follows her through a life of questing for purpose, to an end of analogizing her to the city that only fellow Neapolitans might fully grasp. For a while, it seems like this is going to turn into something akin to Challengers, focusing on an awkward romantic triangle that includes Parthenope’s childhood friend (Dario Aita) and her own older brother (Daniele Rienzo), and that’s only part of the cringe-inducing sexuality on display here. But the character study expands and grows more diffuse, dropping in multiple odd characters to share life lessons (including Gary Oldman in a cameo as John Cheever). And while Dalla Porta finds some interesting notes to play as a woman who understands that she is the object of nearly everyone’s desire, her 70-year journey gets too messy in its intersections with the city’s own peculiarities for Parthenope and her choices—including between an acting career and academia—to come fully into focus. Sorrentino still has remarkable gifts for striking compositions, like framing Parthenope on a couch against an ocean backdrop, but more important than making a city a character is making a character a character. Available Feb. 21 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)

The Unbreakable Boy **
I suppose that, for the kind of movie it is, The Unbreakable Boy is perfectly fine; it’s simply a kind of movie that I literally never need to see again. It adapts a memoir by Scott LeRette (Zachary Levi), who has a whirlwind courtship with a woman named Teresa (Meghann Fahy) resulting in an unplanned child: Austin (Jacob Laval), who is autistic, in addition to inheriting osteogenesis imperfecta (“brittle bone disease”) from Teresa. Laval narrates as the 13-year-old Austin, offering some off-kilter perspectives and initially promising the sense that his worldview might center the narrative. But such is not the case: This is really all about Scott and his issues with staying distant in his relationships, his alcohol abuse, his general sense that his life plans were hijacked by Austin’s existence, etc. It’s frustrating slop, even when Teresa’s own frustrations are allowed a few minutes of screen time, because it turns this into yet another special-needs equivalent of a “magical Negro” story, where a marginalized character exists strictly to teach someone important life lessons. And Levi isn’t even able to provide a performance that makes Scott seem anything besides whiny and self-absorbed. The melodrama is bound to land with some viewers looking for a feel-good pick-me-up, but by the time Scott’s voice-over ends with the homily that “I needed [Austin] to fix me,” this has long since stopped being about the unbreakable boy. Available Feb. 21 in theaters. (PG)