![]() ![]() Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter star as the dowagers in question, two women from markedly different circumstances who are brought together by a secret about what happened in the aftermath of a ball in 1815. Finale airs May 17.įrom Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes comes another round of sparring dowagers and succession angst-this time set in the early 1800s, within the confines of London society. But it’s also, in its own right, a riveting tale of betrayal-and an insightful portrait of an artist whose career was snuffed out before it started.ĭebuted April 12 on Epix. It’s the closest we’ll get to seeing Tan’s original movie the documentary is overstuffed with clips of that recovered footage. Shirkers is valuable for doing much at once. A view in which the stylistics we associate with the likes of Wes Anderson and early Jane Campion are re-routed through the hijinks of Tan and her friends, who in some ways got there first. And what emerges-what Shirkers skillfully, painfully recounts-is an alternate view of film history. It’s only when Georges dies years after the fact that Tan gets her hands back on that footage. And then that film disappeared: stolen and kept away for over two decades by the group’s American mentor, Georges Cardona. When she was but a teenager, Tan and a group of friends-all of them young Singaporeans steeped as much in what they could nab of Western pop culture as they were in their own culture-became their country’s first independent filmmakers with a quirky little film called Shirkers. Sandi Tan’s wonderful 2018 documentary recounts the making of a movie-and a 25-year-long saga of betrayal. ![]() A film for people who like to feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. In ways you don’t quite realize as you watch, Rohrwacher skillfully knits a canvass of tones and ideas that’s always larger and more mysterious than at first appears. It’s also beset with a series of strange occurrences-including a shocking twist midway through that made me yelp aloud in the theater the first time I saw the movie. This is a film that threads together a kidnapping plot cooked up by the effete son of the “queen” of the tobacco estate, sudden death, and a fast-forward through time, to say nothing of intriguing ideas about modern Italy. ![]() That’s especially true of the guileless young man Lazzaro ( Adriano Tardiolo), who has the makings of a saint. Something about the period and the people seems out of step. There’s a dash of something like magic in Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s beguiling but wonderful third film, which is set on an isolated tobacco farm which, for reasons better left unrevealed, isn’t quite what it seems. Above all, there are questions-and Tariq’s deft approaches to answering them. There’s an urgency, a poignancy, a politics to everything here. Tariq’s movie is full of stylistic choices (such as having these men don superhero masks to protect their identities) that never come off as mere style. These young men are full of complex feelings and painful memories-including memories of growing up Muslim, after 9/11, in Sugar Land. What this means for the Muslim friends he leaves behind becomes the difficult, engaging question of Tariq’s film, in which Mark’s friends, all of whom feel culpable in his conversion, and all of whom are shocked by the path he has taken, debate the terms of this story as they recount it. Bassam Tariq’s exceptional short documentary-another of my favorite films of 2019-chronicles what happens when Mark, a young black man from Sugar Land, Texas, converts to Islam at the encouragement of his Muslim American peers and, after a series of escalating posts online, decides to join ISIS. ![]()
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