Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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A United Kingdom (2016)

This biopic does a pretty good job of condensing into a serviceable two-hour history lesson the main details of not just one but two lives during an embarrassing period of British history: the life of Seretse Khama, the first democratically-elected President of Botswana who led the country to independence from British colonisation in 1965, and the life of his English wife who defied the sensibilities of her family and her country by marrying Khama and moving to and having a baby in Bechuanaland.

★★★☆☆

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Mary Shelley (2017)

Haifaa al-Mansour's story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is like two hours of Laugh In's Joke Wall - a highlight reel from the Shelleys' lives punctuated by door - with Clara, Mary's sister, most often the one to throw open the door to come in and Mary's husband, Percy, most often the one to grab his coat and hat and head out, slamming the door behind him, and when the door is next thrown open, there's no telling which of the extreme ends of the human emotional spectrum these characters will be on - will they have lurched forward in time to the next most dramatic episode of the Shelleys' lives or will they still be responding to the last? - making the movie feel like a 19th Century Clueless - petulant, door, immature, door, self-pitying, door, sassy, door, morose, door - but right at the end, in reply to a publisher's question about her age, Elle Fanning's Mary Shelley, at last an author, answers, "Eighteen," and suddenly the glib nature of it all, the sore lack of monstrous creation, makes some small sense.

★★☆☆☆

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I Am Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger is a captivating presence on screen but this documentary is not so captivating for while it recalls the actor's charisma-in-spades and offers some hitherto lesser known details regarding his youth and his early and all-too-easy transition into Hollywood superstardom and his celebrity lifestyle, the movie is a eulogy, not a documentary, made for fans by Ledger's family and friends, with issues like drug addiction, the problems of fast and easy celebrity, young fatherhood, and possible mental illness, all mentioned but widely skirted around.

★★☆☆☆

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