A Ghost Story (2017)

All we see of their relationship is that he shares a pair of headphones with her once and, in bed, adopts a sleeping position that suggests love - not facing away from each other on opposite sides of the bed - so it hardly seems warranted that when he dies in a car crash he returns as a bedsheeted ghost and experiences, in a dreamy, dialogue-free extended indie videoclip, a mawkish Tree of Life history of the land upon which his and his partner's house stands; he watches tenants and buildings come and go over time until it starts to seem like we are watching his love affair with real estate, not with the woman played by Rooney Mara, whose relationship with Casey Affleck's ghost ends up feeling like a mere blip.

★★☆☆☆

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Trash (2014)

The source material, a book by Andy Mulligan, apparently also awkwardly straddled the divide between young adult fiction and violent crime drama and that is the problem here in this movie adaptation about street kids in Rio de Janiero doing kids' stuff (code-breaking, sneaking past adults and playing Donkey Kong) while also dodging bullets, falling victim to police brutality and running afoul of criminals who torture and kill - adults will yawn through the childish adventure while wanting to shield their younger kids from the violence and language.

★★★☆☆

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Lion (2016)

A man who was adopted as a child lies on a couch in Tasmania and scours Google Earth for the home in rural India where he was brought up, in this deeply personal and deeply moving movie treatment of Saroo Brierley's 25 years' lost, a threadbare mouse-click of a story greatly benefitted by National Geographic-style photography, a score that swells at all the right emotional moments and the wonderful performance of Sunny Pawar.

★★★★☆

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